Buying the ingredients used to “cook” the illegal stimulant methamphetamine is a harder task today in Kansas than it was a few years ago. As a result, the number of potentially explosive meth labs discovered across the state has dropped sharply.

A big reason for that improvement, federal officials said Thursday, is the work of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. During a morning ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., KBI director and Lawrence resident Larry Welch accepted an award from the White House to recognize the agency’s work in the fight against meth.

It was part of a series of events across the country commemorating what President Bush declared to be “National Methamphetamine Awareness Day.”

“It recognizes the KBI’s leadership in this battle on methamphetamine since the epidemic rose to the national level,” said Dave Barton, director of the Midwest High-Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area program, an umbrella group that began in 1996 to pull agencies in six states together in response to what was seen as a growing meth problem. “I think today is a perfect day to recognize some of the success that the KBI has had. : No doubt we’d be a lot worse off without the leadership of the KBI.”

In recent years, the KBI’s work against meth has included training police across the state about how to spot and handle meth labs; lending agents to anti-meth task forces in cities including Great Bend, Overland Park, Pittsburg and Wichita; and pushing for changes in the law to make it harder to buy a key ingredient in meth: the over-the-counter drug pseudoephedrine, commonly known by the brand name Sudafed.

The result has been a noticeable drop in meth-lab “incidents” statewide, including the discovery of dump sites where toxic ingredients have been left behind – often on roadsides. For example, there were three meth-lab incidents in Kansas in September, compared with 35 in 2004, according to the KBI.

“We’ve made great strides, especially concerning meth manufacture, but the struggle against this devastating drug continues,” KBI director Welch said in a statement.

But is use of the drug declining? The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy on Thursday cited numbers showing a 12.4 percent decrease in positive workplace tests for amphetamines, including meth, for the first five months of 2006, compared with the same period one year earlier.

Police here, however, say they haven’t noticed a drop in the availability or use of meth, in part because of the prevalence of imported meth from Mexico.

“You still see people using it almost as much as cocaine and crack, so it’s widely available,” said Lawrence Police Sgt. Tarik Khatib, head of the city-county drug unit. “The locally grown stuff has been replaced.”

KBI spokesman Smith said: “I would like to think that use is down, but I doubt that. That’s not our experience in Kansas.”