Houses once used as meth labs dot the country, threaten health of unknowing future residents

Jaimee Alkinani and her husband had just bought their first home in a quiet suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. The house was nice: three bedrooms, tree-lined street, kids riding bikes down the sidewalk, and friendly neighbors who waved when they passed.

The Alkinanis had just opened a small business near their home, had an eleven-month-old child, and Jaimee was eight months pregnant. The family was on its way. But soon things turned for the worse.

A few days after they had moved in, a neighbor welcomed them with disturbing news. "Your house used to be a meth lab," he said, a fact that the seller had never disclosed. So they called their real estate agent. He told them not to worry, that the house had been decontaminated. The agent even produced a certificate from the local health department to prove it.

Then the family started getting sick.

Within five months, Jaimee and her husband developed sinus problems that required surgery. When their baby was born, he had serious lung issues that caused him to stop breathing a few times. He also wasn't gaining weight, and was in and out of the hospital.

So the Alkinanis had their house tested for methamphetamine. The results made Jaimee put her kids in the car and immediately abandon her new home, with all the family's possessions still inside: The house's level of methamphetamine contamination was 63 times higher than the level at which the Utah State Health Department condemns a house.

From Migranes to Skin Burns -- and Possibly Cancer

Houses formerly used as meth labs, called meth houses, put their residents at risk of serious health consequences, says Stan Smith, a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Drug Endangered Children Task Force, a division of the California Drug Enforcement Agency.  

Upon moving into a meth house, people have experienced short-term health problems ranging from migraines and respiratory difficulties to skin irritation and burns.

Long-term problems are less well known, but the results from a 2009 study in Toxological Sciences suggest that methamphetamine chemicals may cause cancer in humans.

Children Most Vulnerable

Because children have small, developing bodies, as well as tendencies to play on the ground and put things in their mouths, they are especially susceptible to adverse health effects from meth lab contamination.

"When we go into a lab, if there are children, the first thing we do is take the children to the hospital and assess them for contamination," said Smith.

The chemicals used in methamphetamine production are highly toxic and range from pseudoephenadrine -- the main ingredient in meth and an active ingredient in decongestants -- to any one of 32 other precursor chemicals. These include acetone, the active ingredient in nail polish remover, and phosphine, a widely used insecticide.  

Home-cooking meth spreads toxic substances to every inch of the room where the meth was cooked and beyond. Nothing escapes contamination: the carpet, walls, furniture, drapes, air ducts, even the air itself becomes toxic. "Ingesting some of these chemicals, even a tiny drop, can cause immediate death," said Smith.  

"When we go into a meth lab, we have on respirators, Tyvek suits, shoe coverings, gloves, and eye goggles," said Sergeant Cory Craig, a state highway patrolman and narcotics specialist based in northern Missouri. Police treat methamphetamine labs as hazardous waste sites. They remove meth-making hardware and chemicals, and often hire professional cleaning companies to sanitize the house.

The sheer amount of chemicals removed from labs is staggering. Consider Missouri alone. "Since 1998 we've seized 12,354 meth labs, 251,000 pounds of solid waste, and 118,000 pounds of toxic waste," Craig said.

No National Standard for Cleanup, and State Rules Vary

In dealing with toxic chemicals, most meth lab clean-up crews follow general guidelines. In the room where the meth was made, they scrub all surfaces, repaint the walls, replace the carpets and air filters, and air out the property.

However, there are no national standards for meth lab cleanups, and regulations differ from state to state. In some states, getting a license to decontaminate a house is as easy as taking a few hours of class and a written test. "There are some bad certification methods out there. You could be a pizza delivery guy, study for a month, pay $250, and be certified," said Joe Mazzuca, a methamphetamine contamination expert and CEO of Meth Lab Cleanup, a nationwide meth-lab-specific cleanup company based in Boise, Idaho.

In the Alkinanis' case, the person who decontaminated their house shirked his responsibility by cleaning too quickly and not using the correct cleaning agents.

While some states employ effective regulations, such as Colorado, Washington, and North Carolina, some experts think that many may not. In Idaho, for example, a former lab is deemed "clean" when there is less than one tenth of a microgram of methamphetamine per square centimeter in the room where meth was cooked. If the amount of meth detected is at such a low level, some state regulators think, meth's precursor chemicals are at low levels, too.  "We just check for meth," said Jim Faust of Idaho's Clandestine Drug Lab Clean up Program, a statewide program based in Boise, Idaho.

Like Idaho, many states only check for meth in the room where the drug was cooked. This method doesn't account for toxic dust or harmful chemicals that may have traveled to other parts of the house. A compounding factor is that many states do not require that the person cleaning the meth house be professionally trained or licensed in methamphetamine or hazardous waste cleanup.  

Of all the toxic chemicals in a meth house, methamphetamine itself is probably the hardest to clean up, but it is actually the least hazardous. Meth's precursors pose the greatest health risk to residents of a former meth lab. When people smoke or shoot meth they face serious health risks, but they usually don't die; they just get high. Many of meth's toxic precursors, if smoked or injected, are lethal.

Toxics Can Persist After Cleanup

Even if a meth house is cleaned properly, some experts worry that toxic substances may hang around. Glenn Morrison, an engineering professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Mo., questions the adequacy of current meth house cleanup standards, emphasizing their failure to ensure the removal of toxic chemicals that are absorbed by the home. "These clean-ups tend to be somewhat superficial when it comes to permanent building materials," he said.

Morrison recently received funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to investigate exactly how methamphetamine contamination resides in buildings. He hopes to figure out whether current meth lab cleanup protocols properly address contamination. "Building materials absorb pollutants, even if the materials are not obviously porous or fleecy. This contamination can be re-released, even after the building has been cleaned," Morrison said.

9 in 10 Meth Houses Never Discovered

Professional contractors estimate that about 90 percent of meth houses are never uncovered, and their tenants will likely never know about their homes' toxicity. Many of the meth houses that are discovered are listed on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Clandestine Drug Lab Registry or on other state databases.

The DEA's registry lists 113,464 meth labs that were uncovered from 1999 to 2008.  Many meth experts think it's an underestimate of the total number of labs in homes around the country.  "The record keeping is horrific.  The DEA's list can't be relied upon because it's completely voluntary," said Dawn Turner, who started methlabhomes.com, a free, web-based resource for people who have unknowingly purchased a meth house. "I've heard estimates that there are a million to a million and a half meth homes and most of them are never found by the police department," she added.

In the area where the Alkinanis lived, there were 250 known meth houses and most of their owners had no clue about their homes' nefarious past.  The exact number of meth houses in U.S. is still unknown.

And although meth houses are more concentrated in certain states -- Missouri is the meth capitol of the world, with 1,471 labs discovered in 2008 alone -- there are meth houses in all fifty states.

Consider a lab found in Framingham, Mass., a town with an average home price of around $350,000. Or a lab found in Norwalk, Conn., where the average home is valued at $694,000. "There is a misconception that these houses are crack houses. They are absolutely not. A meth house in Kentucky recently went on the market for $700,000 dollars," Turner said.

With so many homes potentially contaminated by methamphetamine production, meth experts estimate that thousands to tens of thousands of people have discovered that what they thought was the American dream -- a nice home for the family -- is actually an American nightmare, with the potential to cause of a range of health problems and a stack of medical bills.

But is the issue receiving enough attention? Not for people like Turner. "States are really dragging their feet on this issue," she said.

The Alkinanis agree. Because there were no meth lab disclosure laws in Utah at the time they bought their house, they have no financial or legal recourse.

"We are paying the price for what one person did," said Jaimee Alkinani. "My child will likely have a lifetime of permanent medical issues because of this house, and we are going into bankruptcy because we can't sell the house."

This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

Image: "The production of meth leaves a fine residue throughout any house ... In this house we found meth, oxy, cocaine, valuim and traces of heroin. We destroy the residue by applying 35% hydrogen peroxide." Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22341277@N07/ / CC BY-ND 2.0