Meth cooks take pride in creating 'devil's drug'
Saturday, August 12 2006, 06:17 PM EDT
Contributed by: Tim Botos & Shane Hoover
METH PRODUCTION
With the gentle touch of Wolfgang Puck, the zeal of Emeril and the bravado of Julia Child, chefs every day whip up batches of a drug that can be snorted, smoked, injected, even eaten.
On the streets, it's called crank, ice, pink.
The
official name is methamphetamine, meth for short. In Stark County,
Ohio, the chefs are people such as 43-year-old Douglas Stevens of
Hartville, a lifelong addict to one drug or another; Aaron Firm, a 2005
high school graduate and admitted partier; and Thomas Sihock, a man
whom Alliance, Ohio, police dub the "godfather of meth."
Sihock's former girlfriend, Christine Citarella, is a divorced mother of four serving three years in prison for selling the drug to police informants.
His meth, she said, was a cut above. It was caviar, filet mignon and Dom Perignon all rolled into one. Sihock, she said, cooked by feel. He wasn't shackled by measuring cups and spoons.
"It was never exactly the same," she said. She admitted bingeing on meth while under house arrest for a DUI, because there was little else to do.
THE USERS ARE THE SELLERS
HOW IS METHAMPHETAMINE USED?
Meth presents unique problems for law enforcement. "You throw out some of the basic rules of narcotics investigations," said Capt. Scott Griffith, who heads Alliance's special investigations unit.
Unlike with many other drugs such as crack or heroin, meth-sellers also are meth-users. A lab to make meth is so small it can fit into the trunk of a car. And perhaps what's most troubling - ingredients to make meth are found in typical households.
"People hear the term meth lab, and it conjures up the 1931 Frankenstein movie ... with arcing electrodes," said Summit County Sheriff's Capt. Hylton Baker, who runs that county's drug enforcement task force. "It is nothing like that at all."
Instead, you're likely to see a 2-liter bottle with a rubber hose attached to it. Maybe an electric hotplate. A handful of Mason jars and a funnel. And ingredients such as rubbing alcohol, brake cleaner, camping fuel, salt, lye, iodine and coffee filters. The key component in any recipe is pseudoephedrine or ephedrine, contained in over-the-counter cold medicines such as Sudafed. Refined during a cook, it's what gives meth its zip.
Makers use two traditional methods known as either red phosphorus or anhydrous ammonia. The base of a red phosphorous recipe relies on matchbooks or road flares. The base of an anhydrous recipe relies on anhydrous ammonia, a corn fertilizer.
"Everything to make it can be bought at Wal-Mart, except for the iodine crystals," Stevens said. He bought those at a farm supply store.
'THE DEVIL'S DRUG'
Stevens learned to make meth with red phosphorus. It's by far the most popular choice among cooks in Summit and much of Stark County. Only cooks in Alliance seem to favor the anhydrous recipes, perhaps because tanks of the fertilizer can be stolen from farms surrounding the city.
Stevens started using meth four years ago while hanging out in Akron. About a year later, he learned how to cook it himself. "It's really quite complicated to do it and do it right."
"If you punch up the Internet, it's got a thousand recipes," he said. "Really, it just takes practice."
After six months and 16 cooks, Stevens said he finally mastered the process. Getting ingredients was easy - just pick up a couple of boxes of cold medicine at a handful of stores. One cooking session could produce 10 to 15 grams of meth, enough for three or four days when split among people who assisted him.
"Just enough for ourselves," he said. "We wasn't into it for the money."
Stevens' attraction to meth was the efficiency of the high.
"I've ... been a drug addict all my life," Stevens said. "I'd go from one thing to another. ... I walked away from a crack cocaine addiction and started doing meth."
A hit of cocaine lasted 20 minutes and left him looking for more, Stevens said. A dose of meth could keep him high for 12 hours, a "super drug" that overpowered his desire for any other.
"It would make you think you could do everything better, faster," Stevens said.
Stevens smoked meth, snorted and drank it in the form of "tea." He owned his own carpentry business, but he didn't want to go to work or do anything else except use meth, he said.
"I've been up for nine, 10 days at a time doing crystal meth," Stevens said. "It's the devil's drug."
'LIFE IS A BLUR'
At 19, Aaron Firm said he's happy the Stark Metro Narcotics Unit caught up with him in August. Since going through treatment and serving time, he said he's beginning to put on some of the 80-plus pounds he lost while using meth.
"Life's a blur when you're on meth," he said from the Stark County Jail.
Last summer, authorities searched the North Depot Street home Firm shared with his father in Louisville. A couple of weeks later, they showed up at Firehouse Grille, where Firm washed dishes, to arrest him. Firm said he began using meth during his senior year at high school. He smoked marijuana and drank on weekends for several years. Older friends, he said, offered him meth.
He tried it.
He was hooked.
"It was like 'wow,' " he said of his first experience. The high was beyond belief. He said he once went 10 or 11 days without so much as a nap. He stayed awake at night drawing pictures, wasting time, taking more meth. Like many users, Firm realized he could save money and get an endless supply if he made his own. Meth can sell for $50 to $150 a gram. Crystal meth, an ultra-pure form not believed to be produced locally, costs twice as much. A gram is good for as many as a dozen hits.
Firm learned to cook, he said, from a friend's wife in Akron. To this day, the recipe is engraved in his brain. From jail, he can take you through a cook step by step. Using his hands to demonstrate and illustrate each part, he describes the 12-hour process from beginning to end.
"You have a lot of friends when you're on meth," he said.
Not real friends, mind you. Meth users and cooks are roving bands of gypsies. They are a tight-knit circle. Everyone knows everyone else. None of Firm's meth friends has visited him in jail.
Meth cooks are proud of their craft, said Baker, head of the Summit County drug unit. Summit has earned a label as the unofficial meth capital of Ohio, due to hundreds of lab busts by the unit in the past four years. Most cooks, he said, divulge recipes during questioning.
Firm said it was easy to cook, because his father, a truck driver, was gone for weeks at a time. The house, he said, was a private kitchen for him and his friends.
'JUST THE METH GAME'
Growing up in the Warren area, Christine Citarella partied through her teens and 20s. Now 30, she'll finish a three-year prison sentence this fall, when she's released from the Northeast Pre-Release Center in Cleveland. A mother of four boys ages 7 to 12, she plans to stay away from her old crowd for fear of being drawn back in.
Cocaine is "weak," compared to meth, she said. Arrested and convicted only for selling meth from a home in Alliance, Citarella said she also cooked it, learning by watching her supplier, Tom Sihock.
"At first, it was just the meth game," Citarella said. Then, she found herself using more and more.
"I'd go to the grocery store and put the lithium batteries on the conveyor belt right next to the diapers and formula," she said. Some meth recipes call for lithium, tediously stripped by hand from the guts of batteries.
Firm said groups of users weren't afraid to drive to buy ingredients they needed. "The Wal-Marts up here would be all sold out," he said. So, it was nothing for the group to spend a day traveling hundreds of miles, to drug and hardware stores, replenishing their supplies.
Jim Monigold of the Stark Metropolitan Narcotics Unit, said he's aware of cars of four and five people driving into Stark County on scavenger hunts at retail stores here.
"There's a business I know of down here where they are coming to buy cases of matches," he said. Stevens estimated he cooked meth 50 times. His last cook was Sept. 29 in a garage on Beech Street NE in Washington Township, at the home of a friend, Rick Sholtis.
A camera hidden in a Pepsi sign, which still hangs on the garage, was supposed to alert the crew if police were coming, Stevens said.
They were cooking in the back room when metro officers showed up and busted the lab. Stevens, Sholtis and two other men were convicted of making meth.
From Richland Correctional Institution, Stevens says he's not going back to meth. He'll be nearly 50 when released from prison. "Six years is a nice ... chunk of my life. I don't want to come back."
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