Be courteous: snort it, or shoot it, instead.

Kidding.

Meth smoke taints motels

Montrose - The motel on a popular strip of Montrose inns was busy with Thanksgiving travelers when drug agents used a passkey to enter room 108.

Inside they found a woman lying on a bed. A glass pipe for smoking methamphetamine was next to her. Meth was found in her purse.

Her boyfriend was arrested when he came back to the room where they had been living for weeks. He was found with more meth and a disassembled shotgun. The pair had allegedly sold meth to undercover agents from this base of operation in the weeks preceding the bust.

As in the majority of motel and hotel busts, a maid with a vacuum, disinfectant sprays and dust cloths cleaned the room in the normal way. And it was rented again within days.

While no official data are available, experience shows that meth dealers and users love to stay in hotels, said Tom Gorman, agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Grand Junction.

"I can't think of an investigation we've done that doesn't connect to a hotel or motel," he said.

But motel owners and managers don't need to do anything out of the ordinary when meth is smoked in a room. They don't need to inform health authorities or have anyone evaluate the room for contamination. And they don't need to inform the next party renting the room that meth had been smoked there.

That is troublesome for researchers at National Jewish Hospital, who have found residues the day after the simulated smoking of meth in a motel room. The residue levels far exceeded safe levels set by the state for cleanups after meth labs are found.

"We know it sticks around up to 24 hours later and the levels don't go down much," said Mike VanDyke, an industrial hygienist at National Jewish. "We're guessing it is at least days, likely weeks and possibly months before it goes down."

National Jewish is waiting on federal funding to do further testing to determine that time frame and also to determine what kind of health hazard that residue might pose.


Rob Derrera, an estimator with COCAT restoration contractors in Denver, said his workers have found higher levels of residue in rooms where meth has only been smoked than in rooms where it has been cooked. He said the unknown is how much smoking over what period of time it takes to push levels to the hazardous zone.

Until those answers come, the smoking of meth in hotel and motel rooms is under the radar of health regulations.

If a motel owner decides to do testing and cleanup, it could cost thousands of dollars for a single room. Tests for residues on furniture, walls, rugs and other surfaces cost upwards of $100 each. Cleanup might not be as extensive as the mandated cleanups for meth labs, but would still range from about $3,000 to $7,000 for the average 300- square-foot room, Derrera said.

He said cleanup could range from disposing of anything porous, such as carpet and drapes, and scrubbing the walls multiple times with special chemicals to entirely gutting a room - tearing out drywall and vanities and discarding all furnishings as his company sometimes has to with meth labs.

"Hotels and motels have a built-in disincentive to report. The testing and remediation is very expensive," Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said.

He said that a recently formed statewide meth task force might take up an educational effort to deal with the motel problem.