Last February, 11-year-old Kristen Kelley drank from a leftover bottle of Sprite to quench her thirst after jumping on a trampoline. A few seconds later, Kelley began choking as she walked into her parents’ Weaver home.

When her father asked her what was wrong, Kelley told him she thought she’d drunk kerosene.

Her parents rushed her to Regional Medical Center, and she was later transported to Birmingham’s Children’s Hospital to be treated for severe throat and stomach burns.

For a while, doctors thought Kelley would have to eat through a feeding tube for the rest of her life. That is, if she even lived.

It turns out the clear liquid in the Sprite bottle Kelley picked wasn’t kerosene but hydrochloric acid her cousin used to cook methamphetamine.

The cousin, 43-year-old Thurman Tubbs, is in the Calhoun County Jail awaiting a jury trial on first-degree assault, chemical endangerment of child and methamphetamine manufacturing charges.

After extensive surgery, Kelley not only survived but has almost fully recovered, police said.

Still, her near-fatal encounter is just one example of the danger caused by the drug’s growing local presence.

Methamphetamine manufacturing and use is on the rise in Calhoun County, local law-enforcement officials agree, but you wouldn’t be able to tell it by looking at the numbers — meth arrests have either gone down or stayed steady in the past five years.

So far this year, the Calhoun-Cleburne Drug and Violent Crime Task Force has arrested 101 people for meth manufacturing and possession, and netted 160 total meth-related cases. That’s right on track with numbers from last year and from five years ago — in 2009, the task force arrested 159 people and saw 237 cases related to meth.

In 2005, there were 185 arrests and 207 total cases.

But the task force and officers at the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office and Anniston, Jacksonville and Oxford police agree the number of arrests hasn’t kept up with the growing number of local people who manufacture meth.

Most officers say the problem comes down to the basic law of supply and demand — they say the number of Calhoun County meth labs has more than tripled, but the number of task force officers has increased by only two, from seven people to nine.

“The fact is that a lot more people do it (use and make meth) here now than in the past,” said Lt. Chris Roberson, commander of the drug task force. “It’s everywhere.”

Large meth presence, small task force

Roberson said for every one person the force arrests on meth-related charges, there are another 10 people it hasn’t caught.

That’s in line with state trends, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Birmingham office.

Matthew Germanowski, a DEA task force specialist, said the number of meth labs in Alabama has grown by about 20 percent from 2009 to 2010. The DEA’s state and local task force based in Birmingham estimates that it seized 700 meth labs in Alabama already this year compared to last year’s 400 labs.

Germanowski said that increase is largely a result of the many meth addicts who have learned to cook their own meth. He said the new, small-scale labs that cook the drug in plastic bottles are easier to make and harder for police to find; state DEA agents and local police figure many more labs are out there that they simply don’t know about.

“The quality of the meth has decreased, but there is less exposure to the police,” he said.

That lack of exposure coupled with the task force’s small size compared to the size of the area meth problem makes it impossible for local arrests to reflect the increasing methamphetamine presence in Calhoun County, Roberson said.

“Every day we are inundated with intel about meth labs and dump sites,” he said. “We have enough to work meth cases 24 hours a day, every day.”

Anniston police Capt. Richard Smith, who commanded the task force before Roberson and was one of the first investigators on the team when it started in 1988, agreed. He pointed out the task force has always struggled to split its time between meth and other drugs.

“It’s a constant problem dealing with the amount of meth that’s out there,” said Smith, who now oversees the investigations division at the Anniston Police Department. “Meth labs have taken off, but you still have crack, pills, powder cocaine and marijuana here, too.”

And the number of task force officers has pretty much stayed the same. Part of a $9 million grant from the Alabama Department of Economics and Community Affairs pays for five people to work on the force at all times. One of those officers is stationed at the DEA in Birmingham. The Anniston Police Department pays for a full-time force commander. After that, additional officers come from city departments when they can spare them.

As a result, task force numbers fluctuate between six and eight officers at any given time — not enough to keep up with the ever-growing amount of meth users in Calhoun County, said Smith.

“There’s a spike in users because anyone can cook now,” he said.

Shake-and-bake meth: easier to make, harder to find

According to the DEA, the National Drug Intelligence Center and local task force members, the spike in methamphetamine popularity occurred two years ago when local users caught on to a now-widespread manufacturing process known as “shake and bake.”

The phrase that once referred to a simple way to prepare chicken for dinner now holds a more sinister connotation. It refers to the latest trend in meth manufacturing — that is, small-scale manufacturing where chemicals are combined with pseudoephedrine in a plastic bottle. Enclosed in the bottle, the chemical combination gives off heat, which cooks the methamphetamine out of the liquid mixture.

The mobility, efficiency and relative ease of this cooking process means meth users with little to no knowledge of basic chemistry can make the drug by combining chemicals, pseudoephedrine and water in a Gatorade bottle.

Prior to the advent of shake-and-bake, chances were that at least one person in a meth-making operation had some knowledge of the dangerous chemistry involved and didn’t use the drug, meaning some type of clear-headed safeguards were in place, said Chuck Battles, a local task force member for more than eight years.

The shake-and-bake method first appeared in Calhoun County around 2004 but task force members said it didn’t catch on until a couple years later, after a 2006 federal law made it harder for meth manufacturers to purchase large amounts of pseudoephedrine.

For a while, the meth trade was at a standstill — both nationally and locally. In Calhoun County, the number of meth labs in the area dropped significantly after the pseudoephedrine law passed.

In 2007, the task force made only 88 meth-related arrests — less than half of the 185 arrests that 2005 saw.

But in 2008, the shake-and-bake technique began to spread across the county with the speed of the dangerous flash fires it creates — and the number of meth arrests doubled again to 191 in just one year. During that time, addicts with access to the Internet and Gatorade bottles became self-employed drug cooks, too.

The profile of the meth cook had evolved.

“You definitely don’t have to be rocket scientist — meth heads are the ones making meth now,” said Battles.

Oxford police Chief Bill Partridge agrees.

“These people can cook it in a hurry in their car,” he said. “It (shake and bake) is a more ingenious, quicker way to cook it.”

But many meth users have gotten smarter about hiding their shake-and-bake labs over the past four years — a trend that’s been relatively effective in keeping police in the dark about the true number of labs and users in Calhoun County, Smith said.

“It’s infinitely easier to hide now,” he said.

The recurring faces of meth

Despite the ease of transporting and hiding these “mini” meth labs, local police say they still catch the same addicts over and over again.

In fact, Battles said, it’s rare for the task force to arrest someone on meth charges who hasn’t been arrested at least once before.

Local police describe the problem as twofold: One, meth is a highly addictive drug that hooks its users and rarely lets go — no matter the repercussions.

Two, even though manufacturing meth is a Class A felony that carries 10- to 20-year sentences, most people who are convicted spend less than 18 months in prison or no time at all.

Drug task force members and Anniston, Oxford and Jacksonville police all have countless stories about the times they’ve arrested the same meth users on the same possession and manufacturing charges.

The drug, which can be smoked, injected or snorted, has a speed-like effect on the user’s brain and central nervous system, Roberson said. Meth stimulates its users, who experience excitement and nervousness sometimes to the point of paranoia. Some addicts hallucinate when they’re high.

Partridge remembers one man whose hallucinations were particularly strong. The man called Oxford police complaining that police cars had surrounded his house. When police arrived at the house, there were no vehicles — police or otherwise — to be found, Partridge said.

Meth causes different people to have different experiences, but addiction is one thing most users have in common.

“It’s the only drug that hits all 13 pleasure sensors in the brain,” said Battles.

Users’ willingness to continue getting high despite numerous arrests and physical deterioration like rotting teeth and sore-ridden skin is a tribute to the severity of the addiction, said Jacksonville police Chief Tommy Thompson.

“They just can’t stop once they’ve started (using meth). Or at least they rarely can,” said Thompson, who attributes 50 percent of all Jacksonville thefts to the area meth trade.

Battles told a story about one meth addict who has been arrested and sent to jail eight separate times this year on possession and manufacturing charges. He said the last time the task force arrested the man, he told Battles not to even bother.

According to Battles, he said, “when I get out, I’m going to be back cooking.”

Police say people convicted for possession or manufacturing of meth rarely spend much more than a year in prison.

Sheriff Larry Amerson said there’s just not enough room in the already-overcrowded state prisons for them to be there for long.

Because drug crimes are considered “victimless” crimes, people convicted of having or selling meth are often released before their sentence is up to make room for more violent criminals, Amerson said.

“Meth users might serve five months of an eight-year sentence and then get out,” he said.

Other times, meth possession convictions don’t even land people in prison. Rather, judges give them community service or other alternative sentences in an effort to alleviate overcrowding, he said.

Fifty-eight percent of state drug convictions do not go to prison, an Alabama Department of Pardons and Paroles report shows.

Robert Oaks, assistant executive director of the department, said the majority of state prisons and county jails are filled beyond their capacity.

State prisons today contain 31,705 people but were built to house no more than 13,400, Oaks said.

“So when someone is in (prison) on a methamphetamine case, that person is going to be looked at for release or for alternative sentencing before more violent crimes,” he said.

But that makes it hard for police to keep repeat users off the street and even harder to stop the rampant spread of the drug, Roberson said.

“This thing consumes all of our time, all of our resources,” he said. “And then there’s the addicts who say ‘I know I’m going to get caught, but whatever.’”

A ‘trashy’ drug’s danger to society

The trash left in the wake of shake-and-bake labs is yet another aspect of the trade that keeps the task force and other local law-enforcement agencies busy around the clock. Police say the tendency to toss used, chemical-covered plastic bottles, coffee filters and stripped lithium batteries in backyards, vacant parking lots and along neighborhood roads and highways is just as much of a threat to the local community as the fires caused by meth labs.

“On top of responding to active cooking, a lot of our time is dedicated to cleanup of trash people dump after making meth,” said Roberson. “It’s dangerous.”

And Kristen Kelley’s family knows just how dangerous that trash can be.

Roberson said he talks to the family about once a month, both to check up on Kelley and to remind himself the growing number of shake-and-bake meth labs doesn’t just affect those who choose to use it.

“It’s a constant struggle, but it’s necessary,” he said.

Smith agreed.

“Meth is a dirty drug,” he said. “It’s much worse, much more dangerous than anything else out there right now, especially in terms of its effects on our society.”

Contact Star staff writer Cameron Steele at 256-235-3562.