Authorities found and dismantled an active meth lab inside a Mount Hope Avenue apartment building Wednesday, and they are searching for the people behind it.
Drug agents were called to 36 Mount Hope Ave. around 9:30 a.m. after a Bangor police officer spotted two backpacks and a purse containing ingredients to make methamphetamine in the building’s hallway, including a bottle of corrosive, muriatic acid, according to Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland.
When drug agents arrived, they found two more liquid-filled bottles in which someone had mixed the chemical ingredients to make meth, he said. After processing the scene, the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency’s lab team sent samples from the three bottles away for testing, and turned the rest of the lab over to the state Department of Environmental Protection to be safely destroyed. Bangor police and fire assisted at the scene, McCausland said.
Authorities did not make any arrests Wednesday, and they are looking for the suspected cooks behind the lab.
It was the eighth meth lab that drug agents have responded to in 2018, and the second in Bangor in a week, said Cmdr. Darrell Crandall, the leader for the MDEA in northern Maine. Agents responded on March 29 to a discarded bottle containing the remnants of a lab found on Essex Street, he said. On Tuesday, drug agents busted a lab on Verona Island where they found 33 bottles used to make meth and a 5-year-old child was living, McCausland said.
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