Czech drug epidemic threatens to spread through Europe

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This from The International Herald Tribune:

Czech drug epidemic threatens to spread through Europe

By Nicholas Kulish
Published: November 22, 2007


The methamphetamine epidemic is not just a scourge of the American heartland. It has a powerful foothold here in the heart of Central Europe. Home meth labs are sprouting up all over the country to produce this cheap, potent drug using the pseudoephedrine found in common cold medications.
In 2000, Czech police busted 19 cooking facilities. By last year that number had grown to 416 - in a country of just 10.2 million people.

The appetite for methamphetamine in the Czech drug scene grew out of the strange ingenuity fostered among users cut off from imported highs by the Iron Curtain. Now the consumption of this strongly addictive, often-injected stimulant appears to be spreading from the Czech Republic to the rest of Europe.

Whether it is carried by the flow of Czech workers migrating within the European Union for jobs or simply is gaining appeal as a half-price alternative to cocaine is unclear. But the number of countries in Europe reporting seizures of methamphetamine more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, from 11 to 25, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says.

Methamphetamine remains for now an underground drug in Europe, far behind heroin and the Continent's swiftly growing cocaine habit. Though the quantity seized rose fourfold over the same period to 135 kilograms, or almost 300 pounds, that is a small amount compared to the 5,150 kilograms seized in the United States. But the concern is that the European growth lays the tracks - in demand, production and distribution - that could lead to an explosion in use.

The sudden growth of the drug in the United States and its expansion from a regional issue to a national one serves as a warning, said an expert at the UN drug office.

"It must be feared that something similar could happen in Europe," said Thomas Pietschmann, a main author of the annual UN World Drug Report.

Czech legislators and law-enforcement officials are attempting to crack down on the local, small-time producers who according to the police are preparing enough methamphetamine for the entire Czech market.

But the experience in the United States has shown that once the demand is there, the need can be filled by the tidal flows of the global drug market. Though the United States has made significant headway in the fight against small meth producers with tighter restrictions on the sales of the medications used in its production, enormous labs in Mexico and Asia continued to supply U.S. users.

The challenge is "to stop the methamphetamine market while it's in its infancy," Pietschmann said. "Once it's established it's really far more difficult."
Pietschmann said that in addition to the Czech Republic exporting to neighboring countries, the Baltic states were producing the drug for Northern ones like Sweden and Finland; he even heard about two labs busted in Vienna, where his office is based.

"It's dangerous because it's so easy to produce," Pietschmann said.

A meth cook in the tiny Czech town of Jesenik, not far from the Polish border, said he once sent several batches of the drug - known locally by an old trade name, pervitin - to friends in England who went there for work.
"They wanted to escape from Jesenik, to escape pervitin, but when they got there they asked me to send it," said the cook, who covered his face and refused to give his name out of fear of prosecution.

In his crude laboratory, the world outside was cut off with makeshift blackout curtains, old rugs and worn blankets hung over windows. The cook tended with painstaking care to the bubbling red stew that he said would yield 30 grams, or more than an ounce, of homemade methamphetamine.

Though that batch alone - which could produce hundreds of doses - would be worth, based on average street prices, around €1,200, or about $1,800, on the street, he was so short on cash that he could not even make calls on his prepay mobile phone because it was out of credits. He said that he did not sell his output but used it or shared with friends.

The police here say that such tight circles of users are the norm, and the decentralization is part of the difficulty in shutting down operations.
"If one of them is seized, three mushroom up somewhere else," said Bretislav Brejcha, head of the methodology and prevention group at the police's national drug headquarters.

In the decades when what was then Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule, junkies largely had to produce their own highs by concentrating medications. These drugs were produced by small, tight-knit rings of users, known as "squads," for their own consumption rather than for distribution and sale. Meth came on the scene here in the early 1970s, and it and other drugs boomed with the end of communism and opening of the country in 1989.

Of the roughly 30,000 "problem drug users" identified by the Czech government, 20,000 use pervitin, the same name used by the Nazi military when it gave the drug to its soldiers and pilots to combat fatigue. Among problem users, 90 percent are injecting the drug with needles rather than snorting or smoking it. More than a third of intravenous drug users in the Czech Republic have hepatitis C, although their HIV infection rate remains contained, below 1 percent.

Street drugs are popular here. According to the UN drug office, the Czech Republic has high levels of cannabis use, the highest for ecstasy and "by far" the worst methamphetamine abuse in Europe.

That may have been encouraged by the accessibility of the key ingredient. The town of Roztoky, just outside of Prague, had one of the world's largest ephedrine factories until 2002. According to the Czech police, that was the year the factory began to shut down its production of the chemical. Not coincidentally, they say, it was the first year the number of seized labs really jumped, nearly quadrupling from 28 the previous year to 104.

The police said that up to that point, larger, more-organized rings were getting ephedrine from the factory and producing in quantity for street sales. Now, the production system has reverted to the squads of the communist days and is reaching smaller, out of the way places.

The Parliament is working on legislation to give pharmacists discretion over the quantity of cold medication containing pseudoephedrine they sell to any individual customer. Pseudoephedrine is used to produce the drug when pure ephedrine is not available. Others say a national registry listing all sales of precursor drugs should be mandatory.

"A solution where a pharmacy will be deciding without a national registry is not going to solve the problem," Brejcha said.

The meth cook in Jesenik agreed with that point: "There will be pharmacists who consider 100 boxes a proper amount." He admitted to using the drug for over a decade but admitted to cooking it for only two and half years.

A short distance from the Polish border, Jesenik is among the most isolated corners in the Czech Republic. There are no highways and even a small November snowfall in the mountains makes switchbacks on the sharply curving roads dangerous.

Unlike many small rural communities, the inhabitants here do not have deep roots. Ethnic Germans were the main population but were expelled after World War II. The industries from the Communist period largely disappeared after the Velvet Revolution toppled the regime.

"Young and educated people are away," said Jiri Stana, the deputy mayor. "There is no work for them. Who is clever enough is in Prague."

The local government keeps no statistics on the number of methamphetamine users, but the head of a small, overstretched drug clinic near the bus station in this town of 12,500 said employees had given out over 17,000 clean needles in just the first 10 months of the year.

"In bigger towns, the situation is really anonymous," said Josef Vondrka, 31, who runs the town's drug clinic and is himself a former user. "Here it's much more personal. To go to a pharmacy and ask for syringes immediately ends anonymity."

Katerina Zachovalova contributed reporting from Jesenik, Czech Republic.