KATRINA EVANS and her family bought their dream home in Fort Collins, Colorado, on 28 March 2003. It had bedrooms for each of the three daughters, land for a second garage in which Katrina’s husband Brian could indulge his passion for classic cars, and a basement in which she would run her business of providing day care for young children. “It was exactly what we’d been looking for,” Katrina says. And at $265,000, it seemed like a good deal.
The mysterious health problems began soon afterwards. The eldest daughter, Brookelyn, started to have frequent nosebleeds. Her sister MaKayla’s asthma flared up. And as the months passed Katrina noticed that the children she was looking after kept getting respiratory illnesses.
Then came the bombshell. On 8 April 2004, Katrina got a call from a reporter who had discovered that her home had housed an illicit lab to produce the drug methamphetamine. Katrina did some research. Local health officials had few answers, but what she read about the chemistry involved in the drug’s manufacture only added to her alarm.
Advertisement
Her thoughts flashed back to when Brian had removed a section of PVC piping from the basement, and suffered a nasty rash after some blue-green sludge spilled onto his arm. Within a week of the reporter’s call, Katrina shut down her business. By June, the family had moved out, facing ruin. They were told it would cost $130,000 to make the property fit for habitation. Brian, who was already suffering from anxiety, could take no more. “It destroyed our marriage,” Katrina says.
“It would cost $130,000 to make the property fit for habitation”
After the nightmare of bankruptcy, divorce and further worries about her family’s health – in 2006, MaKayla was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had to have the gland removed – Katrina has begun rebuilding her life. But tens of thousands of American families may be living in buildings once used as methamphetamine labs – most of them oblivious to the fact. Some who have learned of their home’s history similarly attribute mysterious ailments to the toxic legacy of illicit drug manufacture, but like Katrina Evans they are finding that there is precious little firm knowledge about what risks they are running. Only now is a new federal law authorising more research into the problem, and promising to fill in some gaps.
Since the mid-1990s, an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse has been fanning out across the US. Also known as “crystal”, “meth”, “ice” or “crank”, methamphetamine causes intense euphoria and a heightened sexual appetite when smoked. Heavy users are soon hooked, and their appearance can age by decades in just a few years. Australia and eastern Europe have also been blighted by the drug. The British police count themselves lucky that the ready availability of cheap cocaine has so far limited demand, but even so .
One reason methamphetamine has taken such a hold is the ease with which it can be manufactured. Chemically, it is a close relative of the decongestants ephedrine and pseudoephedrine commonly found in cold remedies, the only difference being that it has a hydrogen atom where the legitimate pharmaceuticals have a hydroxyl group – an oxygen atom with a hydrogen atom attached. The chemistry needed to remove this group is fairly basic, and requires only some readily obtainable chemicals and a few items of household equipment.
The most popular “Red P” method takes phosphorus from the strike plates of matchbooks and mixes it in solution with iodine to create a powerful acid that performs the necessary reaction. The leading alternative, sometimes called the “Nazi” method, gets the same result using anhydrous ammonia, a farm fertiliser, and lithium stripped from batteries.
While unsophisticated, both methods of “cooking” meth are fraught with danger (see Diagram). The best picture so far of the hazards involved comes from , a specialist in industrial chemical hazards at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colorado. In 2002, he was approached by police in Colorado who were worried about the risks faced by officers busting meth labs. “We’d be right behind them with our sampling gear,” Martyny says. Yet even following in the drug cops’ footsteps, Martyny did not encounter the worst-case scenario of a meth lab in full operation.
It was time to team up with chemists from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and run some experimental meth cooks to get a better idea of what hazards they throw up. Finding a suitable location was tough, but Martyny knew that fire departments use condemned buildings for real-world training exercises, and eventually gained permission to make use of a few of them before they were burned down.
As the DEA chemists got to work, Martyny’s team took air samples that revealed exposures to toxic chemicals exceeding those deemed to be “immediately dangerous to life or health”, or IDLH. For example, the IDLH concentration for hydrogen chloride gas is 50 parts per million. “We’ve seen levels as high as 150 ppm,” says Martyny. During Red P cooks, the researchers also recorded hazardous levels of phosphine and airborne iodine. And for cooks using the Nazi method, levels of ammonia in the air exceeded the IDLH figure of 300 ppm. These chemicals are respiratory irritants, and can kill if inhaled in large enough quantities.
These results help explain some of the health problems documented in . Between 2000 and 2004, 947 people are on record as having experienced health problems after exposures at meth labs in the 16 participating US states, with respiratory irritation and headache being the most common symptoms. Nine of these people died, and 36 per cent of those with symptoms required hospital treatment.
Notably, 531 of those who became ill were police officers. “I was hearing all these anecdotal reports of severe respiratory effects,” says Jefferey Burgess, a specialist in occupational health at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who has shown that cops whose duties involve entering meth labs can suffer long-lasting problems. He studied 40 agents with the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement who had served as drug lab investigators for at least a year. On a standard measure of lung function – the volume of air exhaled in the first second after a deep breath – they were declining about as much, year-on-year, as you’d expect in a regular smoker, even though only 28 per cent of them smoked ().
Drug cops who have entered active meth labs without breathing apparatus clearly have reason to worry. Of even greater concern, however, is the welfare of children brought up in homes where meth has been cooked. Abuse and neglect are not unusual in the disintegrating family environment that surrounds heavy meth users. Doctors affiliated with the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children are also worried about the toxic hazards faced by children raised in meth labs. Not only are their developing lungs likely to be damaged by airborne contaminants, but a study led by Martyny – in which one team member, wearing protective clothing, crawled around in a building used to cook meth – has shown that infants are likely to get drug residues all over their hands. So far, however, efforts to conduct follow-up studies into the health of children have mostly been stymied by local authorities who have taken them into care. “Agencies are reluctant to sign consent forms,” says Penny Grant, a paediatrician at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York.
Fortunately, in the US, the number of active meth labs has declined recently after most states and the federal government limited the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. Today, production of meth has mostly shifted to large “superlabs” in Mexico.
But what about the thousands of Americans who live in homes formerly used as meth labs? How worried should they be about the chemical residues left behind? Environmental health specialists admit they just don’t know. While some of the toxic products of meth manufacture, such as phosphine gas, are short-lived, other chemicals may hang around. Most persistent are residues of the drug itself, which remain on surfaces at detectable levels for years.
“What about the thousands of Americans who live in homes formerly used as meth labs?”
Martyny’s team did start to investigate the lasting chemical hazards, returning to one building the day after DEA chemists cooked two batches of meth using the Red P method. Although levels were much lower than during a cook itself, there were detectable airborne concentrations of hydrogen chloride and iodine. Residues of the drug itself were found on surfaces throughout the building, and were re-suspended into the air by anyone walking past and vacuuming – reaching concentrations around a third as high as during the cook.
Martyny’s efforts to continue investigating chemical contamination have been frustrated by a lack of funds, and concerns about moral and financial liability if they contaminate a site that people can later gain access to. “It’s tough to contaminate a house and guard it for a long period of time,” he points out. “If you start getting people in there, that’s a real problem.” Ideally, he would like to contaminate a house in a secure location with a cook of meth and then leave it to see what happens to the contamination over the course of a year. He says the study would cost around $1 million.
The necessary funds might soon become available. The Methamphetamine Remediation Research Act, which was signed into law in December 2007, requires the US Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the residues left behind by meth manufacture, and how best to clean them up. Lawmakers still have to approve the suggested budget of $5 million over the next two years, but a long-term study of chemical residues is expected to be a top priority.
Harder to address is whether health problems such as those experienced by the Evans family and the other children Katrina cared for really are linked to exposure to the toxic by-products of meth manufacture. Certainly, the respiratory symptoms are consistent with the lung damage found among drug cops. But it’s impossible to make a firm link from anecdotal reports. And there’s no way of knowing whether MaKayla would have developed cancer if she had never lived in the family’s contaminated home.
Burgess now has a student gathering reports from poison centres to see if patterns emerge in cases among residents of former meth labs. Even better would be a large epidemiological study following a representative sample of families living in former meth labs, but that may be impossible to do. Most known former meth labs have been subjected to some form of clean-up, and the biggest worry concerns people who are unwittingly living in one of the much larger number of labs that have never been uncovered by the police. “We find one lab in 10,” estimates Lori Moriarty, a former undercover cop who is now executive director of the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children in Boulder, Colorado.
For now, discovering more about the chemicals that are left behind after the meth cooks depart should at least confirm whether existing clean-up procedures are adequate. Most US states have adopted standards based on reducing residues of methamphetamine to the lowest feasible level. Typically, and wiping down surfaces with a 6 per cent solution of sodium hypochlorite bleach. In severely contaminated homes, walls may be stripped down to their wooden studs and refurbished with fresh drywall and plaster.
This almost certainly gets concentrations of the drug itself below those likely to threaten human health, says Chuck Salocks, who is studying the issue for the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. But we won’t know what the other hazards are until more studies are completed. “Meth labs are little hazardous waste sites,” says Salocks.
Given that it will take years to get a better handle on the risks involved, what can people do to make sure they are not moving into a former meth lab? The experts’ advice is to check the DEA’s online and listings of former meth labs held by local police and health authorities. Unfortunately, those records are not complete, and will only document the minority of labs that have been discovered by the authorities. So prospective buyers should talk to neighbours to find out more about the previous occupants, look for suspicious signs such as corrosion of kitchen fittings, strange smells and unusual stains. If you have suspicions, you can even that can detect methamphetamine residues in samples wiped from surfaces.
With hindsight, Katrina Evans can see that there were some subtle warning signs. A stove that had once sat in the basement had been removed, and yellow stains were emerging through the fresh paint applied to the adjacent wall. The lesson is clear: buyers beware.
Drugs and Alcohol – Learn more in our comprehensive special report.
