Meth's popularity stems partly from its ease of manufacture

Most of the ingredients needed to make methamphetamine are shown July 24, 2003, in Oklahoma City. It's not just the high that makes meth. The drug is also relatively quick, cheap and easy to make with ingredients that are readily available in stores. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

By Clayton Bellamy

It's not just the high that makes methamphetamine popular. The drug is also relatively quick, cheap and easy to make with ingredients that are readily available in stores.

With about $100, a good recipe and four hours of spare time, an addict can make half-an-ounce of the off-white powder _ enough to get three or four people high for a long weekend.

"The high lasts three-and-a-half to four hours, and it can have lasting effects even longer," said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Narcotics. "That's another reason it's so attractive. It doesn't take much to keep them going for several days."

Unlike with cocaine, heroin or often marijuana, meth users don't have to rely on a shipment from South America or Asia. Meth is typically made in small amounts in houses, apartments or motel rooms.

"Most people are under the mistaken conception that they're making pounds of this stuff and selling it for a lot of money," Woodward said. "These aren't drug dealers. These are addicts."

Meth is pure pseudoephedrine, an abundant ingredient in over-the-counter cold medicines. Before the early 1990s, meth was made with another active ingredient and took days to create.

To make the drug, a manufacturer extracts the chemical from the pill, removes an attached molecule of oxygen and dries the pseudoephedrine into a powder.

Pseudoephedrine is removed from pills with acetone (found in nail polish remover), ether (from starter fluid cans) or methyl alcohol (in antifreeze). It takes about 600 to 900 pills for a half-ounce.

The oxygen is stripped using one of two methods _ the red phosphorous method or the Birch method.

In the first, red phosphorous from matches or road flares are mixed with iodine crystals (used in veterinary products) to make an acid that pulls the oxygen away from the pseudoephedrine.

Birch method users remove the oxygen with lithium metal from commercial batteries or sodium metal from drain clog openers and anhydrous ammonia, which is often stolen from farmers who use it as a fertilizer.

Both processes produce a liquid called meth oil, which is then dried into powder using hydrogen chloride gas. Makers often wear respirators in this step to prevent the gas from burning their lungs.

Hydrogen chloride gas is made from combining salt with acid from drain clog openers or from mixing aluminum foil and another acid commonly used in swimming pools or concrete.

The process leaves meth that is between 95 percent to 100 percent pure and about five or six pounds of waste _ acids, ether, anhydrous ammonia and so on. The chemicals are often poured down toilets or dumped in fields.

"A lot of farmers, hunters and fishermen are running along these hazardous chemicals and are not aware of what they're seeing," Woodward said.

Officers in chemical suits and respirators cleaned up 1,254 labs in 2002 in Oklahoma, at a cost of $4.3 million, or $3,500 per lab, he said.

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Meth's popularity stems partly from its ease of manufacture