Meth goes mobile, creating roadside hazards

Methamphetamine production is causing a new public safety hazard: roadside trash. In Elkhart, Ind., as snow that covered highway shoulders has melted, police have found at least a dozen "trash labs," the remnants of new car-housed meth laboratories, Susan Saulny of The New York Times reports. Local officials say throwing the trash labs out the car window after use is the new, fashionable way of disposing of meth production evidence. (Kalamazoo County, Mich., officials dispose of a trash lab; Kalamazoo Gazette photo by Jill McLake Baker)

"Each trash lab becomes a crime scene and is proof, officials said, that a new and ever more popular way of making meth does not demand a lot of space or a lot of pseudoephedrine, an essential ingredient," Saulny writes. "The new method is a quick, mobile, one-pot recipe that requires only a few pills, a two-liter bottle and some common household chemicals." Indiana state police report meth lab seizures went up 27 percent between 2008 and 2009 as the new "shake-and-bake" method became more popular. The trend isn't isolated to Indiana, Saulny writes. Tennessee reports 65 percent of seizures are of the shake-and-bake variety, and Oklahoma officials seized 743 meth labs last year, up from 148 four years ago.

Officials in Alabama, Kentucky, Michigan, Tennessee and other states say they are encountering the roadside leftovers with more frequency. "You pick it up, and it could explode," Paul G. Matyas, the undersheriff in Kalamazoo County, Mich., told Saulny. "Acid could spill and burn you. At one of the sites about a week ago, we found a dead deer, and I know exactly what happened." While Drug Enforcement Administration statistics show an increase in the number of meth labs found nationally of nearly 15 percent between 2007 and 2008, Saulny reports the trash labs often don't contain enough illegal product to get federal or state prosecutors involved. (Read more)