Chasing the high

Will crystal meth hit New England next?

Drug Watch by Jason Gay

For some reason, New England has never gotten seriously hooked on meth. Other areas of the country, from Southern California to the back nines of the Midwest, have been knee-deep for the better part of a decade in methamphetamine, an injectable, snortable, or smokable stimulant that is known, depending on its form, as "crystal meth," "speed," "crank," "glass," or "ice." Yet New England has been largely unscathed, a six-state refuge from a drug that has ravaged the inner city, farm country, and middle-class suburbia with equal abandon.

The honeymoon may be over, however. The past year has witnessed a flurry of methamphetamine-related arrests in New England, including the seizure of a home this spring in Westport, Massachusetts, that authorities believe was used as a laboratory to synthesize the drug. Recent reports of the drug -- which is associated with raves and nightclubs -- extend as far as rural Maine, where police say they are swamped by a burgeoning meth market. In 1995, Maine police made one meth-related arrest and seized one gram of the drug; last year, they arrested 22 people and seized 242 grams.

These numbers are still relatively small, but to drug-abuse authorities in New England, the news is grim. If this region is on the verge of a meth explosion similar to what other parts of the country have experienced, then it's likely that big trouble awaits. Methamphetamine has been around for decades, but newer, more potent forms have positively crippled communities throughout California and the Southwest. In those regions, most of the supply is funneled in from Mexico, but meth is also manufactured domestically, especially in the countryside; residents in poor, rural regions are taking the lead in meth production because the drug's telltale smell is hard to disguise in populous areas. There was even a recent bust of a Philadelphia meth and cocaine ring that extended west into Lancaster County; among those arrested were two Amish men.

As New England tries to head off its methamphetamine threat, it will have to pay close attention to the successes and failures of authorities in other states. And it's this premise -- sharing information on the illicit drug scene around the country to improve the national response -- that brought more than 30 specialists to Boston last week for the 44th meeting of the Community Epidemiology Work Group (CEWG), a consortium of researchers sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The information supplied at the CEWG conference often comes from the front lines of the illicit drug world. Much of it is assembled ethnographically -- researchers use focus groups to examine drug use in their communities, as opposed to relying on cold data from law-enforcement or public-health agencies. Later, that information is compiled and relayed to public officials elsewhere.

"The common ground is that we talk dispassionately about what drug users do," says Tom Clark, a specialist with Boston's Health and Addictions Research, Inc., a nonprofit substance-abuse study group that helped organize the conference. "And then we let the policymakers [draw] their own conclusions about how best to use this information."

Clark and the other CEWG participants gathered in a top-floor ballroom at the Omni Parker House for most of last week to hear their colleagues' reports on drug-abuse developments in their respective states or countries (20 US cities were represented, along with communities in Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Europe). Many of these reports simply confirmed trends of the past few years: heroin abuse has surged as the drug's purity has increased; crack cocaine has leveled off; marijuana use remains high among teenagers and young adults.

But there was also new information, especially from New England. On Thursday, the CEWG researchers traveled to Boston University Medical Center, where they heard a series of lectures from other specialists; one of the more urgent presentations came from Patricia Case, a researcher at the Harvard Medical School's Department of Social Medicine. In her lecture, titled "Emerging Drug Use in New England," Case charted the rise of "club drugs" such as gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB; ketamine ("Special K"); and methamphetamine.

Case acknowledged that her report, like many studies of emerging illicit drugs, was not definitive; it relied heavily on first-

person interviews, police reports, and newspaper stories. But the picture Case painted was startling. GHB, a liquid compound that produces a euphoric high comparable to Ecstasy, is banned in Massachusetts, but its use is thriving here. Because its ingredients can legally be packaged and sold together, a consumer can easily synthesize the drug at home; Case reported that sales of GHB kits are booming on the World-Wide Web, where little information is given about standard dosages or potential side effects. "This is the ultimate Internet drug," Case said.

Special K, too, is breaking out in this region, Case reported. A tranquilizer used to sedate animals, it can be snorted or injected, and its use is exploding in the club scene, especially among Caucasian gay men. Case told of watching people snort "bumps" of Special K off their fists right on the dance floor. "[Ketamine] is a widely used drug in every gay bar I've been to in New England," she said. But because its user population is so specific, Case said, Special K has largely escaped law-enforcement attention.

The same cannot be said of methamphetamine, which is quickly becoming part of local law-enforcement vernacular. For years, Case said, experts heard three constant refrains regarding meth in this area: first, there wasn't any; second, whatever meth did show up in New England came from California; and third, what had happened in California and elsewhere wasn't going to happen here. Not only was New England too detached from the Mexican suppliers and stateside motorcycle gangs who provided much of the West Coast's meth, the theory went, but most of the area wasn't rural enough to protect local meth labs.

But in 1998, as recent arrests and overdoses can attest, meth is alive and well and being created and distributed in New England. Case told the CEWG audience she was particularly concerned by the leap in meth-related arrests in northern Maine, beyond Bangor and toward the Canadian border. Given that methamphetamine is traditionally created in rural areas, the drug's growth in this region isn't surprising, she said -- meth "farmers" seek out wide-open spaces with comparatively light law enforcement.

Case suspects a meth-running corridor between northern Maine and southern New England cities like Medford, Massachusetts -- another place where methamphetamine is increasingly showing up on the law-enforcement radar. "The relationship between Massachusetts and Maine is strong," Case said.

Certainly, this is little more than a piecemeal outline of the New England methamphetamine problem. But CEWG reports from other locations show that meth is highly addictive and can quickly overtake a region. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, for example, methamphetamine treatment admissions doubled between 1996 and 1997, and of all the people under 25 admitted for drug treatment in the past year, 46.5 percent reported meth addiction. Any information that drug-abuse specialists and law-enforcement officials in affected regions like Minneapolis-St. Paul can provide may help other areas prepare for an outbreak, or perhaps even prevent one from occurring.

What's different about the information that the CEWG disseminates is its focus on the behavioral aspects of illicit drug use. Instead of simply citing statistics from police logs, CEWG researchers discuss how people are using drugs, and why they are using them.

This approach was on display when George Arlos, a specialist affiliated with Safe Place, an outreach center headquartered near Roxbury's Dudley Square, presented his research on Bostonians who inject crack cocaine. Arlos explained how Safe Place convened a focus group of 11 men and women who had begun injecting crack in recent years. At first, it would seem strange that anyone would go to the trouble of shooting up crack -- after all, the whole idea of the drug is to achieve a quick, cheap, potent cocaine high. The people in Arlos's focus group, however, had begun using needles for two reasons: injecting crack provides a distinctive rush compared to smoking it, and once the drug is liquefied it can be combined with heroin into a powerful "speedball," an injectable narcotic cocktail. Given the relative scarcity of powdered cocaine in the Dudley area, Arlos said, loyal speedballers were turning to crack as an alternative.

Though his information was alarming, Arlos's presentation style was undramatic and clinical -- he seemed more like an anthropologist than like an advocate of any particular prevention initiative. Indeed, he described the process for injecting crack the way Julia Child might recite a recipe. Such detached observation of drug use might seem treasonous to anti-drug activists or law-enforcement officials, but it's the CEWG's stock in trade, says Tom Clark. Though the conference's participants generally agree that illicit drug use should be reduced, Clark says there is a wide range of opinion among CEWG researchers over how to attain that reduction, and the group tries to stay apolitical. "You might miss something that's going on if you let your anti-drug bias cloud your view," he says.

Right now, methamphetamine and other club drugs are clearly in the CEWG's view of New England. And officials here need all the scouting reports they can get. "Our main job is to report trends," Clark says. "But it's certainly the hope that [this information] would be used for advance warnings."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.