http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/us/31 ... =TOPIXNEWS

2nd Huge Georgia Drug Find Points to Pattern, Officials Say

By BRENDA GOODMAN
Published: August 31, 2006

ATLANTA, Aug. 30 — Just six days after federal agents set a Georgia record by confiscating 187 pounds of crystal methamphetamine buried behind a home in Buford, federal, state and local law enforcement officers found 341 pounds of the crystals in Gainesville, Ga., the authorities announced Wednesday.

Executing a search warrant on Aug. 22, officers found packages of methamphetamine crystals, which look like broken rock candy, hidden in the closets and the garage and under freshly disturbed mounds of dirt in the backyard. They also found 300 marijuana plants, three sets of digital scales and a gun.

The stash was the sixth-largest supply of methamphetamine confiscated in the United States since 1970, said Ruth Porter-Whipple, the group supervisor of the Atlanta field division of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The discovery and the brazenness with which drug dealers seem to operate in North Georgia have alarmed drug enforcement agents and confirmed Atlanta’s emerging role as a hub for the distribution of crystal methamphetamine, called ice.

“What we’re seeing a flood of, particularly in Georgia, is the ice,” Ms. Porter-Whipple said. “We have watched the seizures steadily increase, which would be indicative of what’s out there and available.”

Large shipments of mass-produced crystal methamphetamine, almost exclusively imported from Mexico by large drug cartels, have all but erased gains made by new state drugs laws that limit the sale of cold medicines and other household ingredients used to make the drug in the United States, according to the 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment, an annual report released by the National Drug Intelligence Center, the federal agency that documents the traffic patterns of illegal drugs through the United States.

“Mexican criminal groups appear to be using Atlanta as an emerging distribution center from which methamphetamine shipments are transported primarily to Midwestern and Southeastern drug markets,” said Michael F. Walther, director of the center.

The primary entry points for Mexican drug runners had been Arizona and California, and the distribution of methamphetamine, a highly addictive nervous system stimulant that causes euphoria and appetite loss, had been mostly concentrated in the West and Midwest.

That pattern, though, has started to change as the drug networks have taken note of Atlanta’s central location and “demographic significance,” Ms. Porter-Whipple said.

In the Gainesville case, prosecutors have charged three brothers, Alejandro, Socorro and Sacarias Martinez-Menera, and a fourth man, Arnulfo Pineda-Rivera, with possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. Alejandro Martinez-Menera and Mr. Pineda-Rivera have been arrested.

Agents are still looking for Socorro and Sacarias Martinez-Menera.