It cost U.S. taxpayers more than $2 million to put Pablo Cervantes and five of his colleagues behind bars for making meth.

Les Weidman will tell you it's worth every penny.

"If you add up the number of years they are going to spend in prison," he says, after pondering the amount for a moment, "and then you add up the number and kinds of things they would be doing on the street during that time, their drug trafficking and the poisoning of our children and our waterways and our health system and all the things that go along with methamphetamine's impact . . . $2 million to put meth people away for a long period of time? Absolutely."

Weidman is the sheriff of Stanislaus County and has been for 10 years. He grew up in the county -- "I can take a rock and throw it out my office window and just about hit my grandfather's ranch, where I grew up" -- and his only real job as an adult has been with the Sheriff's Department, starting three decades ago.

That makes him a veteran in the Central Valley meth war. And if you ask him or most any other Central Valley cop or prosecutor about that war, they'll tell you it's going to cost a lot of money to win.

Take U.S. vs. Cervantes, what Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Shipley calls "a very typical case." It involved two meth labs, one between Fresno and Sanger and one in Southern California's Orange County. Law enforcement agents confiscated about 40 pounds of meth and about 80 pounds of pseudoephedrine (which can make about 75 more pounds of meth), three firearms and 10 suspects, eight of them Mexican citizens. Ultimately, six suspects were convicted or pleaded guilty.

Based on figures and estimates provided by various local, state and federal agencies, law enforcement spent $2.08 million to bring Cervantes and his band of meth makers to justice, most of that for their prison time.

"It's a war," Weidman says, "and wars cost money."

About 2,300 inmates are in state prisons for making drugs, most of them for making meth. It costs a little more than $21,000 a year to keep each there, or about $49.7 million per year. The Bureau of Nar- cotics Enforcement, the Department of Justice division that is the state's main drug-fighting force, had a $77.9 million budget last year.

Most of that pays for 380 agents. More than one-third of those agents devote almost all their time to fighting meth.

The cops say it's not enough.

"We could always use more money and more people," says Ron Gravitt, chief of the BNE clandestine labs unit. "But narcotic enforcement, contrary to what most people believe, is not that high a priority in this country."

Or in this state.

The BNE's budget has grown at about the same rate as the overall state budget during the past decade, but the percentage provided by the federal government has increased from less than 2 percent of its total budget to more than 28 percent.

Two years ago, the BNE got an $18 mil- lion federal grant to fight meth production in California and used most of it to hire 79 agents who work full time on meth crimes. "It's year to year," Gravitt says, "so we could get cut off at any time."

The state did chip in an extra $300,000 in the 1998-99 fiscal year budget specifically for Central Valley meth-fighting efforts, but despite the handsome state budget surplus, the grant was not included in either the 1999-2000 or 2000-2001 budget years.

"Quite frankly," Weidman says, "it's not the federal government's responsibility to protect the inland areas of the state of California. But it is the state's. They need to recognize their responsibility, but to this point there has been very little attention given to the problem by the state Legislature."

A bill that would have provided $6 million to local police and sheriff departments in nine Central Valley counties to fight meth was introduced last year. The proposed spending gradually was whittled down to $300,000 before the bill was killed by a Senate committee because the funding was "redundant" to other crime-fighting programs.

The reasons for the legislative inertia range from philosophical opposition by some legislators to the war on drugs, to inefficient lobbying efforts by law enforcement. But the most pragmatic explanation may be that of a longtime legislative staffer: "Why should we pay for something that the feds will take care of?"

One of the more innovative federal drug-fighting programs, Central Valley law enforcement officials say, is the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program. Created by Congress in 1988, it is run by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the office of the White House drug czar.

The program helps local and state crime fighters coordinate drug-control efforts and eliminates embarrassing snafus, such as undercover cops from one agency busting undercover cops from another. Regions and states can apply for HIDTA status, and it is granted based on the area's drug problems and its potential impact on other parts of the country.

"It helps make people more efficient; it gets people reading off the same page in terms of targets, so you're not chasing the same people at the same time and duplicating efforts," Weidman says.

Since its inception, the HIDTA budget has grown from $25 million to $190 million and from five areas to 31. But the Central Valley HIDTA, encompassing nine counties from Sacramento to Kern, was created only last year, despite the Valley's indisputable meth problems and its equally indisputable impact on the rest of the nation's meth problems.

One of the reasons for the delay, according to Weidman, vice chairman of the Central Valley HIDTA, was sort of a "meth myopia": Congressional members in other parts of the country didn't care about meth because it wasn't yet a problem in their area. As a result, Valley cops were turned down.

"So we restarted our efforts and this time made a lot of political hay about it," he says.

"We got together from Sacramento to Kern County and beat on every . . . door we had to, stormed Capitol Hill and really put out a message that we are in dire straits."

The message got through. The designation was announced in June 1999, and the group -- representatives from 42 federal, state and local agencies -- began operations in January. It appears to have paid immediate dividends. Through the first five months of the year, HIDTA closed down more than 60 labs, made 126 arrests, and seized 130 pounds of finished meth, a hefty 22,000 liters of meth solution and more than $500,000 in cash.

"My team was able to expand to 16 people," says Bob Pennal, a BNE agent who supervises the Fresno Meth Task Force. "You have a team of six, and then you have two in court and one sick, and you're down to two or three people. With 16, you can go on offense."

And all for what amounts to chump change, in government circles.

The Central Valley HIDTA's budget for the current year is $1.5 million, the smallest budget of any in the country. By comparison, the Lake County, Ind., HIDTA gets $3 million; the Milwaukee HIDTA gets $4.5 million. The other three California HIDTAs, based in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, get $2.5 million, $13.9 million and $10 million, respectively.

The Valley HIDTA money pays for a director, a small staff, some ill-furnished offices, a little equipment and some overtime pay for agents. Otherwise, local agencies foot the bill for their officers to take part. Weidman, for example, spends $130,000 of his budget to provide two officers to the program.

There isn't likely to be a flood of new HIDTA funds any time soon. Valley officials and elected representatives have lobbied hard to increase HIDTA funding to $2.5 million, but sources indicate the chances are no better than 50-50 that the current budget level will almost certainly be frozen.

That's a bitter pill for locals to swallow, especially when they read that more than $1 billion in U.S. drug-fighting aid in the new federal budget is likely to be sent to Colombia. Says a frustrated Valley cop: "We are fighting the wrong war in the wrong place."

But when it comes to fighting for federal funds, some of the Valley's opponents are a lot closer than South America. Congressmen from Washington and Oregon, seeing the results of the program, have announced they will push to more than double their HIDTAs' budgets from $5.1 million to $12 million. States in the Midwest are clamoring for some of California's $18 million federal grant, citing the growing number of meth labs in Iowa and Missouri.

California cops argue the number of labs, by itself, is a specious measurement.

"There are literally thousands of little bitty labs springing up all over the Midwest," says Bill Ruzzamenti, a DEA special agent and director of the Central Valley HIDTA. ". . . but of the labs we seize, many of them are capable of producing 100 pounds of methamphetamine at a whack . . . it really isn't the same scenario as out here, where they are producing meth for the entire country."

Outside California, that argument finds little sympathy, even among DEA colleagues.

"That's only one side of the question," says DEA special agent Guy Hargreaves, a Washington, D.C.-based national meth expert. "Sure, there is more production, but you have to remember it takes almost as much time to raid and guard and clean up a small lab as a big lab. You seize a lab in Missouri that is only making an ounce, the officer there still has to stand guard over the place for X number of hours until the cleanup crew comes in."

There's an old saying: To kill a snake, you cut off its head, not its tail. Valley meth hunters are working that strategy.

"Four years ago, we sat down with DEA and we talked through a strategy about what we were going to be able to do about this because we saw it was an ever-expanding problem and it was starting to move East," Gravitt says. "The strategy was that the primary thing to concentrate on was suppliers and the secondary thing was to go after the Mexican national organizations."

The suppliers Gravitt refers to are the people and companies who supply ephedrine and pseudoephedrine -- the key ingredients in meth -- to those who actually make it.

"It's like there is this war, and there is this supply line, and if you cut the supply line, you win," says U.S. Attorney Paul Seave, the top federal cop in a district that covers 34 California counties between Bakersfield and the Oregon border.

The problem, he says, is determining who is using the legal products illegally.

"I think the DEA in Washington has the feeling that most ephedrine and pseudoephedrine is not being smuggled in," he says. "Most of it is coming in through a legal source."

Seave points to a chart showing that the legal importation of meth ingredients has jumped from about 614 metric tons in 1994 to about 1,100 metric tons in 1998, a 79 percent increase.

"Unless the amount of allergies and colds suffered in this country has doubled in the past 10 years," he deadpans, "something else is going on."

That was precisely what happened in the case of Danny Rosen. In 1996, Rosen was the 35-year-old owner of Danco Distributing Inc., a struggling company in Redding that sold products such as beef jerky and shampoo to mom-and-pop stores up and down the Valley. Then, according to federal court documents, he and his wife, Bette Ann, discovered the profits to be made in selling ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Between late 1996 and early 1998, Danco distributed more than 12,000 cases, or more than 100 million tablets. That's enough to supply more than 45,000 asthma or allergy sufferers daily medication for a year or to make roughly 8,000 pounds of meth. Danco's annual sales went from $825,000 to more than $5 million.

Of course, little of it was going to customers with stuffy noses. Most of it was going to people who served as go-betweens to meth makers. One of them later told police he was buying cases of chemicals from Danco for $1,500 each, then selling it to meth makers for $2,500 each.

They used an elaborate system: Pills were shipped to phony business addresses, or real businesses acting as fronts, in neighboring states (one was a Las Vegas shoe store).

Danco's customers tried to cover their tracks by exchanging cash from the meth makers for cashier's checks from a bank in Malibu. They used the cashier's checks to pay Danco. The checks always were for amounts less than $10,000, the threshold that must be reported to the Internal Revenue Service. They hedged their bets further by paying a bank official to help cover the paper trail.

In the end, the ring was tripped up by a tip from IRS agents who got suspicious about the bank transactions. "It was like peeling back the layers of an onion," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Samantha Spangler, who prosecuted the case. "The more they investigated, the more they found."

The Rosens and four confederates were convicted in federal court in late April on 23 counts associated with the conspiracy. They are awaiting sentencing.

Seave and Spangler say the strategy of targeting meth ingredients appears to be working, at least to a degree. The price of pseudoephedrine has gone up 400 percent to 500 percent, and meth makers are diluting their product to less than 20 per- cent pure to make it stretch and maintain their profits.

"So in that sense," Seave says, "our focus is having some success. But our strategy has to keep evolving. The crooks are always ahead of us."

Adopting new strategies means adopting new tools or adapting old ones. In Sutter County, for example, Sheriff Jim Denney successfully asked Sutter County Supervisors last June to pony up $5,000 to buy a drug-sniffing dog for interdiction on Highway 99.

"The CHP has done a great job knocking them down on I-5," he said. "The dealers take the product up to Washington and Oregon and then to the Midwest, and they bring the money back the same way . . . but as they put the squeeze on them over there, I know this product has got to be coming up 99, and the dog will really help us deal with that."

In the Legislature, Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, successfully proposed spending $500,000 to buy Valley meth fighters a machine called the Standoff Chemical Agent Detector. Developed by the military for battlefield use, it takes in air and analyzes it for chemical content. The device, about the size of a small X-ray machine, uses infrared technology to look at a building and measure the air content and energy emanations from it. It would allow cops to determine not only if a building contained a meth lab, but what kind of chemicals were present.

"Is it going to be something that will totally solve our methamphetamine problem?" Cardoza says. "Probably not. But I believe it will be a useful tool and maybe give some drug dealers pause when they start to manufacture meth that there is this machine that can drive down the street and detect the chemicals and give police a lead as to where to start looking."

Fixing the Valley's meth problem, from a cop's point of view, won't be easy -- and may be impossible. "We're never going to totally win the war on drugs, not the way it's going now," says Denney, a 25-year veteran who was elected Sutter County sheriff in 1998, "but we have to make them work for it."