EDMONTON – The success of a drug prevention campaign launched in Alberta in 2002 has made rural areas a more likely location for crystal meth labs.
RCMP staff-sgt. Ian Sanderson said police have not found a home-based lab in Alberta since February 2005 after several major busts in towns and cities. However, there are still reports of clandestine dump sites in rural areas where the byproducts of the illicit drug are found. It’s usually average citizens who run across the risky remains.
Sanderson told a July 6 workshop at the Rural Matters conference in Edmonton that the anti crystal methamphetamine coalition is now educating weed inspectors, agricultural fieldmen, garbage and water treatment staff and Rural Crime Watch volunteers. He said they need to know about the dangers lurking in the toxic chemicals found in meth labs and dump sites and that they should call 911 or the provincial environment department to clean them up.
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The garbage usually includes barbecue fuel bottles or propane tanks, often with blueing of the brass valves from the corrosive effects of the solvents used in making the drug. Also in the dump will be glassware, plastic tubing, cold medication packaging and possibly a yellowish brown stain on the ground where the waste product was dumped.
Sanderson said rural labs found by the RCMP were mobile in the backs of trucks or set up in isolated farm outbuildings. He said there is less vigilance in rural areas and it is easier to dump the waste undetected.
Sanderson told the workshop that increased watchfulness will help reduce the drug bust numbers, which have been stable for the past four years after a big decrease in 2004. The prevention program is a story of hope in which communities and police worked on the issue.
Crystal meth was introduced in California in 1990 and moved north up the coast into British Columbia. Sanderson said the RCMP traced the entry of crystal meth into Alberta to one individual connected with a motorcycle gang who moved into Alberta’s Hinton-Edson area in 1994. He began “cooking” the drug.
By 1999, half of the drugs that police seized along the western part of the Yellowhead Highway, other than marijuana, was meth. LSD use dropped in favour of the new drug because the gangs pushing meth found it more profitable. By 2001, meth arrests began in Camrose and by 2002 it was in Bonnyville, Alta., and in the highly populated area between Calgary and Edmonton.
“This is the year the communities stood up and said, ‘we have a problem. Let’s deal with it.’ “
Sanderson said meth addicts become paranoid and violent. They do not sleep or eat during their 12 to 16 hour high, which is considerably longer than the 30-minute high from cocaine.
To feed their addiction they often turn to making the drug, a relatively easy process using cold medication, solvents such as acetone and ether, acids such as anhydrous ammonia and metals such as iodine or red phosphorus. These building block chemicals are corrosive and explosive and have poisonous fumes.
Several house fires have been traced to meth labs, and Sanderson said one in seven home-based labs discovered in Canada are found by firefighters.
Sixty-four Alberta communities joined the anti-drug coalition. They worked with the RCMP to develop a strategy that included public awareness and media stories about the dangers of this new drug. Parent support groups were created, lobbying began for more government funding for addiction treatment, and a team comprising a former drug addict and a police officer visited schools to inform students of the drug’s problems.
Governments restricted access to the building block chemicals and laid child abuse charges when children were found in the same home as a meth lab.
The word got out and Sanderson said young people are now avoiding crystal meth. Unfortunately, they are replacing it with ecstasy, most of which is contaminated with meth.
An indication of the early success of Alberta’s prevention program was found in a comparison with Denver, Colorado.
In 2002, the Denver area had a population of 345,000, about 10 percent of Alberta’s population, yet Denver police had 900 lab responses compared to 25 in Alberta that year, Sanderson said.
Diana McQueen is now an MLA but in 1999 she was a councillor for the town of Drayton Valley, Alta., which developed the first community plan to tackle meth abuse.
The town received federal funding for three years to run its public awareness campaign. Although critics claimed publicizing the drug problem might ruin the area’s reputation, McQueen said the town felt differently.
“We felt doing nothing was not responsible. Our kids came first,” she said.
“We made sure the whole province was talking about this drug, not just Drayton Valley.”
Sanderson said Saskatchewan and Manitoba copied Alberta’s campaign and have been able to control the meth problem. However, B.C. and the United States have problems because community awareness has not been raised enough.
