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Meth's legacy: burns, ruined lives

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Meth's legacy: burns, ruined lives
University Hospital burn unit seeing more and more victims of methamphetamine labs
By Sarah Huntley, News Staff Writer
One in seven patients admitted to Denver's premier burn treatment center last year was a confirmed or suspected casualty of methamphetamine labs.
Mangled hands. Maimed arms. Melted faces.
They're showing up at University Hospital with tragic regularity.
"There's a break in reality between wanting to make the drugs and realizing what tremendous risk you are placing yourself in," said Paul Bauling, director of the hospital's burn unit.
"You're going to damage and cook your brain when you use (meth), but you're going to damage and cook your skin when you make it."
Methamphetamine has taken hold in Colorado, posing dangers never before confronted in the drug world. Law enforcement officers throughout the state are busting labs, many in residential neighborhoods, at a rate of more than one a day.
Just two years ago, Bauling said, meth-related burns barely made a blip on hospitals' patient loads. University logged only a handful of cases then.
But last year the numbers went up. Bauling estimated he and his burn team colleagues treated a dozen patients who were known to be manufacturing speed when their injuries occurred. Another dozen were likely involved in the illegal activity but lied about what happened.
"Most people don't walk in the door and say, 'Oops, I got burned in a meth lab,' " Bauling said.
Many patients are left at the emergency room alone, as the car that brought them peels away. Others come in hours after their agony started, probably so associates can clean up the labs.
Doctors treat patients the same, no matter how the burns occurred. They are prohibited by confidentiality rules from calling police.
But those on the front lines at University want to get the message out: "This is going to kill you. If it doesn't kill you, it's going to ruin the rest of your life. . . . You may never be able to use your hands again. You may never be able to put a hamburger in your mouth," Bauling said. "The risk isn't worth the high."
Burn victims typically remain hospitalized for months, undergoing excruciating treatment in hopes of restoring the use of their limbs and affixing skin that can bend. Even after they are released, patients face years of rehabilitation.
Twenty-six-year-old George H. had experienced pain in his life, but nothing like what he found when he woke up with third- and fourth-degree burns over 26 percent of his body.
The name on his hospital door said John Doe. George had been abandoned at Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge by someone, he doesn't know who, then flown to University. He'd been unconscious for eight days.
"It was hell," he said. "Being burned is the worst experience anyone can suffer. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I don't wish it on the people who did this."
George, who asked that his last name be withheld because he wants no contact with his past life, admits his burns were the result of his involvement in methamphetamine.
But he says he wasn't cooking speed; he was dealing it.
George was burned in January 2000 after he says he tried to settle a debt with his partner and get out of a business that had gutted his life. He was taken to a cabin in Empire, he says, where one of his former associates doused him with gasoline and lit a match.
That's the last thing he says he remembers.
When he came to University Hospital at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Cente, George thought he was dead. He couldn't lift his head. His eyes were burned shut. All he could see was white.
"I started screaming and hooting and hollering," he said. "And the nurses came in and told me what had happened."
George's arms, chest and neck were rippled with burns. Flames had eaten his face and ears, causing injuries that would later become infected and nibble away at the tops of his lobes.
The rest of his upper body was saved by a cotton tank top.
Two years later, George's eyes shine through a face that has seen the benefit of plastic surgery, but deep scars remain on his chest and arms.
He hopes his story will save someone else's life. What happened to him, he says, saved his.
"I'd been tweaking for six years. I woke up every day for six years trying to quit," he said.
Nine days before he was burned, he fell to the ground and made a deal with God. "If I'm not out of this ---- in 10 days, strike me down with lightning," George remembers thinking. "Be careful what you ask for. I got what I asked for, a day early."
Still, the experience gave George the strength he'd lacked. On April 23, he'll celebrate two years of freedom from drugs. He's completing a deferred sentence stemming from his arrest on several drug-related charges and hopes to become a drug counselor.
Registered nurse Kimberlee LaMothe is amazed when some patients come in for clinics and admit they've returned to their old ways.
"You put a lot of time into them and you do a lot of teaching," she said. "But some people will go back to the meth. They couldn't walk away."
Others, like George, learn from their past.
"This is the only reason I'm clean today," George said as he took off his shirt to show his wounds. "This started out as simple using and turned into me fighting for my life. . . . It can happen to anyone. That's the bottom line."
Contact Sarah Huntley at (303) 892-5212 or [email protected].
March 16, 2002
Rocky Mountain News
To see photos and the origional location go here..
 
and another related article:
'Speed' trap
Colorado busting a meth lab a day, but hasn't seen peak in number of clandestine 'cookeries'
By Sarah Huntley, News Staff Writer
Colorado cops raid meth labs at a rate of more than one a day.
Two women are dead after sucking in smoke when an explosion blasted through a basement cookery. Dozens of drug cookers are suffering serious burns.
And the toll on children who grow up breathing toxic fumes, soaking in a deadly lifestyle, is yet to be known.
By all accounts, the state is reeling from a "speed" manufacturing madness, and law enforcement officials say there's no cure in sight.
"This is not anything we've ever had to deal with before," said Sgt. Jim Gerhardt of the North Metro Task Force. "(But) we haven't seen even the climax here in Colorado. That's what the history of other states tell us."
From 1999 to 2001, the number of methamphetamine lab busts in Colorado tripled, exceeding 450 last year.
Adams County has the most busts; investigators with the North Metro Task Force took down 73 clandestine labs in 2001 and have discovered 35 so far this year.
The task force's commander, Lt. Lori Moriarty, remembers the start of the scourge. It was 1999, when two busts a month seemed like a strain.
"Right now if we had two labs a month, we'd be ecstatic," she said.
The increase has forced law enforcement agencies across the Front Range to devise new strategies to confront the drug's unique challenges.
Unlike many other illegal drugs, methamphetamine swept across the country from west to east, plaguing California and Washington long before it showed up in Colorado.
What's most significant is how -- and where -- the stimulant is made. Thanks to easily obtained ingredients, such as the pseudoephedrine in many cold medicines, and the dissemination of information over the Internet, the drug can be brewed in users' homes.
But not without significant risk. The process involves a potentially lethal concoction of highly volatile chemicals, some odorless and some not, that permeates carpets and walls. More sophisticated manufacturers have rigged the labs to drain the hazardous waste into their neighborhood sewer system. Others capture the fumes in garbage bags that wind up at the county landfill.
Children often are living in the homes where meth labs are operating, exposing them to deadly vapors and searing chemicals. Fires are frequent.
The state logged its first fatalities in January, when Pamela English and Tammy Campbell, both 33-year-old meth addicts, were trapped in a crawl space in a Denver home.
Moriarty believes speed shops, whether in houses, motels, vehicles or campsites, pose "the biggest safety issue for our community today."
Moriarty's crew began focusing on meth labs in the early spring of 2001, after two investigators returned from training at Quantico with disturbing news: The task force's previous approach to clandestine labs was woefully inadequate.
"We went head-first," Moriarty said. "We said, what is it going to take to do this right? We weren't going to say it was too hard."'
The fact that Adams County has uncovered more labs does not mean the problem is more prevalent in the northern suburbs.
"There are no demographic issues with this drug. It's everywhere," Moriarty said. "We're just at a different stage of recognition."
North Metro made several decisions that Moriarty and Gerhardt believe put their agencies on track for identifying more labs.
The task force decided that every investigator and supervisor needed to complete rigorous training in detecting clandestine laboratories.
Then they spread the word. Since May, North Metro investigators have trained more than 1,000 officers on how to recognize the clues of meth manufacturing.
Officers discover the majority of labs, often when responding to non-drug calls, Gerhardt said. The training helps them rapidly recognize a lab when they're on a call -- which investigators say could save their lives.
After nearly every class, officers come out saying, "Oh my God, do you know how many labs I've been in and didn't even know it?" Moriarty said.
Sgt. Mark Olin, who heads the Denver Police Department's crime analysis unit, said his agency needs equipment and more manpower dedicated to finding clandestine labs.
"North Metro has a response vehicle. Other task forces have response vehicles. I've got the trunk of my car," he said. "We are going to become so saturated with caseloads and response calls, we aren't going to have enough trained people . . . Burnout is right down the street."
The task force approach is considered key to law enforcement success.
"It holds great benefits because it opens a lot of doors that individual agencies don't have available to them," said Lt. Al Wilson, who commands the West Metro Task Force in Jefferson County.
Investigators said they hope agencies will come together to address the problem in statewide cooperation.
"It's going to take a team effort to make sure the state of Colorado is a safe environment and not a hazardous dump site," Moriarty said. "We can't bury our heads in the sand."
Contact Sarah Huntley at (303) 892-5212 or [email protected].
March 15, 2002
 
"This is going to kill you. If it doesn't kill you, it's going to ruin the rest of your life. . . . You may never be able to use your hands again. You may never be able to put a hamburger in your mouth," Bauling said. "The risk isn't worth the high."
I'm sorry, but that bit made me laugh... The worst thing for Americans about never being able to use your hands again is not being able to put a hamburger in your mouth...
 
I guess the moral of the first story is "don't sell meth because you might get burned when someone throws gasoline on you and lights you up."
 
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