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SAN DIEGO ---- Nearly half of all the women arrested in San Diego County in 2003 were high on methamphetamine, county supervisors were told Wednesday.

The county board was also told that more women, percentage wise, than men between the ages of 25 and 40 in county jails tested positive for the insidious drug between 2000 and 2003.

In a two-hour-plus informational conference Wednesday, drug enforcement, public safety, rehabilitation experts and recovering drug addicts told the Board of Supervisors that the county has made progress in its fight against methamphetamine.

But they said meth use is still a plague that threatens communities and devastates victims, including an increasing number of women and children.

"Where there's meth, there's physical and emotional pain, there's crime, there's violence, and there's death," said Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Misha Piastro.

Supervisors took no action at the meeting but said they would use the information to set future drug prevention, rehabilitation and law enforcement policies to cope with the methamphetamine problem.

Referred to as "speed," "crank," "tweak" and "ice," methamphetamine is a highly addictive stimulant of the nervous system. People who inject, smoke, or ingest it get an eight-to-24-hour "high" that makes them feel energetic and powerful. But the high is typically followed by a severe depressive "crash," and users often become paranoid and violent.

Piastro, who worked as an undercover narcotics agent in San Diego County for seven years, said the drug is literally "cooked up" from highly toxic, dangerous chemicals in makeshift laboratories in homes all around the county.

San Diego County was known as the nation's "methamphetamine capital" in the 1980s because federal and local drug enforcement officers busted hundreds of clandestine "super-meth laboratories" that could churn out massive amounts of the drug.

In 1996, supervisors created the county's Methamphetamine Strike Force ---- a collaboration of roughly 70 local, state and federal public health, law enforcement, court, education, treatment, prevention and intervention agencies.

Wednesday's meeting was arranged by county board Chairwoman Dianne Jacob, who called the statistics "alarming," and county District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, who did not attend the meeting.

Dumanis, in a letter read by Jacob at Wednesday's meeting, said the county had seen a 58 percent reduction in the number of seized methamphetamine labs since the strike force was created, and that more methamphetamine users were entering rehabilitation treatment centers.

However, the panel said the methamphetamine problem was still widespread.

Ironically, one of the most effective things state and federal governments have done to combat methamphetamine manufacturing may have put more women and children in the drug's path.

In the late 1980s, federal and state lawmakers created laws to make it harder for people to buy the chemicals needed to create methamphetamine.

Piastro said that successfully shut down "super labs" in the United States, which have now moved south into Mexico. But it also prompted the spread of mini-labs that operate out of homes.

Officials said the result is that more women than ever before are involved in "cooking" and using methamphetamine ---- and more innocent children are exposed to the chemicals and the drug itself, which can be inhaled during the cooking process or picked up from residue that falls on furniture, floors and other surfaces.

Rehabilitation officials said methamphetamine is more addictive than most other drugs, and addicts typically require many recovery attempts to become clean. Several recovering female addicts who testified at Wednesday's meeting reported that they continued to take the drug during or right after pregnancies even though they knew it was bad for their children.

Long-term use can cause strokes, enlarged hearts and non-alcoholic liver disease, doctors said.

County officials said they've created a new program to immediately remove and tend to children in homes where methamphetamine arrests are made to respond to the growing problem.

Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.