The Next Crack Cocaine?

When meth, which, nationally, has been a largely rural epidemic, swept east across the nation, it hit the Shenandoah Valley hard, becoming one of the most-seized drugs in that part of the region. Labs have more recently popped up in semi-rural areas of Southern Maryland and Anne Arundel, where addicts are called "methnecks."

The labs require only simple equipment, such as bottles and tubing, which is easy to hide in almost any kind of building. The ingredients for the drug include medications containing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, red phosphorous and hydrochloric acid.

The epicenter of meth use in the region is the District's gay community, where the drug showed up about five years ago and has been spreading quickly ever since, health officials said. Known as Tina in most gay circles, the drug has become the primary drug of choice, topping even alcohol among patients admitted to the Whitman-Walker Clinic, which primarily serves gay clients in the District.

"It's everywhere," Parson said. "I would defy you to find anybody in the metropolitan area who is white and gay and doesn't know one person who is using meth."

The drug is particularly troubling to medical workers in the gay community because meth is associated with risky sexual behavior. Some gay meth addicts use the Internet to find partners to use the drug and have sex -- known as party 'n' play -- encounters that sometimes turn into multiple-day sex parties.

Shipman said meth addicts are three times as likely to contract HIV as non-users because they tend to have unprotected sex and multiple partners.

Health experts say the addiction is particularly hard to treat. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says there is currently no "safe and tested" medication to treat meth addiction. Programs rely on counseling and behavioral modification.

Experts said one of the biggest problems in bringing attention to the meth problem in the area is the lack of reliable statistics on the number of users. Richard Rawson, a professor at UCLA who has been studying the drug for two decades, said public health indicators that should indicate the meth problem -- such as emergency room visits and patients in treatment -- lag five to seven years behind the emergence of the drug.

"In some places, the public health people are saying, 'Well, we're not seeing it; it's not that big a problem here,' " he said. "But that's not what the data means."

The best predictors of an emerging meth epidemic, Rawson said, are the presence of meth use in the gay community and the discovery of even small numbers of meth labs.

At the DEA's meth lab training facility in Quantico, officials have identified the growing problem in the Washington area and are admitting increasing numbers of local police officers. In a recent class for 41 state and local officers held last month, seven were from the Washington area, including Annapolis and Montgomery, Prince George's, Calvert and Fauquier counties.

"We know the growth in Maryland and Virginia is exponential," said John Michael Donnelly, chief of the training unit.