METHAMPHETAMINE CHALLENGING RURAL COMMUNITIES

KNOXVILLE -- Police chiefs and county sheriffs from across Tennessee met in
Knoxville Wednesday with representatives from the Drug Enforcement
Administration, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Attorney's Office,
and the Tennessee National Guard, to discuss ways to combat the growing
epidemic of methamphetamine use in the state.

A report from the National Drug Intelligence Center stated Tennessee leads
the Southeast in the number of methamphetamine labs found by authorities in
the past three years.

"The top three challenges that rural America faces today is first, health
care; second, availability of safe drinking water; and third, security from
proliferation of drugs -- primarily methamphetamine -- in rural parts of
the Tennessee valley," said U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.

Meth is easy and cheap to produce, and unlike drugs such as marijuana and
cocaine, much of which must be imported, meth is easily manufactured
domestically with common household items such as batteries and cold medicine.

"This meth problem has been called the moonshine of our generation, but I
would say times 100," said Wamp. "People lived through the moonshine
problem. They're not living through the meth problem."

According to the sponsors of Wednesday's conference, there are retail and
wholesale operators. Small-time methamphetamine producers stash labs
everywhere from mobile homes to car trunks, while Mexican-organized crime
has streamlined the high end of the industry in the past few years,
supplying both finished product and the raw materials required for
production, called "cooking" in the drug trade. They claim that what was
once a regional West Coast problem can now be found in big cities and small
towns alike.

Throughout the Southeast, there were 1,116 meth labs seized between January
1999 and July 2001. Tennessee led the region with 510 labs seized followed
by Mississippi with 222; Alabama, 192; Georgia, 89; Florida, 53; Louisiana,
27; North Carolina, 13; and South Carolina, 10.

Experts at Wednesday's confrence said that In 1999, more than a million
Americans used meth in just one year, more than used crack and almost three
times as many as used heroin. The allure of the drug, also called crystal,
crank and dozens of other names, is energy, the sort of raw, unbridled,
jumpy rush that comes from supercharging the brain with a dopamine high
similar to a jolt of adrenaline; the same sort of energy received from
doing cocaine.

But unlike cocaine, or even crack which provides a high of a couple hours
at best, meth users can stay up for eight to 12 hours or more, depending
how they ingest the drug: smoking, snorting, swallowing or injecting it.

"This is decimating families and destroying communities," said Wamp. "We
need to put all the resources at our disposal in this fight."