The Meth Makers

By R.V. Scheide, Sacramento News & Review. Posted July 29, 2002.

“I hate to be where we’re going tonight," Moore says.

The big four-wheel drive chases its shadow across the Sacramento Valley floor, carrying Moore, Rocky and Ed east, toward the foothills. Moore has been to a lot of bad places, prison being the worst, and he isn’t keen on returning. That’s why he’s not exactly enthusiastic about going to the crank lab tonight. If the cops show up, it’ll be his third strike, and that means 25-to-life in most Northern California counties.

“I hate it, too," Rocky mutters from behind the wheel. “I’m sick and tired of it." Rocky is a clandestine chemist. He may have failed high-school science, but during the past two decades, he’s mastered the process of making crystal methamphetamine. Cooking crank has provided a steady income -- if you don’t count those years he’s spent in prison on drug-related offenses -- but lately, he’s been wishing he’d mastered something else, preferably something not so illegal and insanely dangerous.

Ed, wedged between Rocky and Moore, expresses no such misgivings about tonight’s appointed task. Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t been to prison yet. Or maybe he’s spun from the crystal they’ve been smoking all day. The sun is molten orange on the horizon as the truck begins the twisting ascent into the foothills. Two sheriff’s cars whiz by heading down the hill, away from the lab.

As far as Rocky, Ed and Moore (not their real names) are concerned, the cops are heading in the right direction. Tonight, like moonshiners back in the day, they will head into the hills under the cover of darkness, where in a dimly lit makeshift laboratory at the end of a winding dirt road, they will cook up a fresh batch of pure crystal methamphetamine.

It’s dark by the time they reach the lab, located deep in the woods in a dilapidated shack at the end of a winding dirt road. Here, in the hovel’s tiny cramped kitchen, Rocky will work his own special form of alchemy. They step out of the truck into the inky blackness. Constellations wheel slowly overhead on a cold, moonless night. A dog barks in the distance.

“Man, I hate being here,” Moore says.

A thousand things can go wrong in a crank lab; getting busted by the cops is just one of them, and maybe not the worst, unless you’re a two-time loser like Moore. Think of the clandestine manufacture of methamphetamine as a series of relatively complex high-school chemistry class lab experiments performed one after the other, except that if you make one little mistake during any stage of the process, there goes your grade -- and maybe the neighborhood. Most of the chemicals used to make crank are lethal in any number of ways if mishandled; the manufacturing process is fairly complex, lending itself to mishandling. Consider the two men currently on trial for murder in Ukiah after the crank lab they were allegedly operating got out of control, starting a forest fire that resulted in the deaths of two firefighting pilots last year.

Rocky spent most of the week scrambling to find the necessary chemical compounds for tonight’s cook-off: pseudoephedrine, red phosphorus, iodine crystals, methanol, acetone, toluene, sodium hydroxide, muriatic acid. The meth heyday of the 1970s and early 1980s, when many of these chemicals could be purchased without arousing suspicion, is long gone.

Government regulations got you down? Try buying enough pseudoephedrine to make an ounce of premium grade crank. That’s approximately 1,000 60 mg pills, but purchases of the popular over-the-counter decongestant are limited to three 48-count boxes per person per day at most drug stores in Northern California; some stores require customers to sign for a single box. So Rocky had to send half a dozen members of his extended family -- friends and relatives with ties that are more chemical than genetic -- on a mission to hit numerous drug stores in Northern California in order to get enough pseudoephedrine.

And that was the easy part. He had to employ considerable subterfuge bringing all of the other ingredients together. Iodine and acetone can still be bought at most drug stores, but don’t even think about asking him where he got the toluene or the red phosphorus, particularly the red phosphorus. It’s still available from most chemical-supply houses, but as far as the authorities are concerned, there are basically three uses for it: making matches, fertilizer or methamphetamine. A signature on a red phosphorus purchase order is an automatic red flag for the authorities. The trick is to know someone who has a legitimate need for the chemical and obtain an ounce or two from them. In lieu of that, shaving the heads off 1,000 wooden matches will yield a tidy pile of red phosphorus, assuming the right brand of matches are used and the heads are ground up fine enough. After two days of frantic searching, Rocky was able to find a small amount of red phosphorus, enough to make an ounce of meth.

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