Meth, Shattered Lives, Part 2D

PROSECUTOR LEADS CRUSADE AGAINST METH

TAHLEQUAH - The suspected "meth cooker" sat hunched down in the back of an
Adair County horse trailer, a semi-automatic rifle aimed under his chin.

Bobby Lamone Sanders had seen the law coming miles back, fired a few shots
their way and got shot himself before he fled and eventually stole a
telephone repairman's truck. He broke into a home, then ended up surrounded
in a horse trailer by a drug task force team, including narcotics officer
Dale Harrold, the husband of Sequoyah County District Attorney Dianne
Barker-Harrold, who leads nothing short of a war against meth labs in her
four-county region in northeastern Oklahoma.

"Either you're gonna kill me or I'm gonna kill you," was the gist of the
suspect's promise, before an officer tossed a flash-bang device into the
barn to distract him. This time it worked. No one got hurt and Sanders was
taken into custody.

That hasn't always been the case.

If anyone wonders why Barker-Harrold has made it a personal crusade to rid
her counties of methamphetamine labs, they only need to look at how these
so-called "mom-and-pop" operations have consumed her region. Not only has
this highly addictive stove-top substance turned decent country folks into
paranoid drug addicts, it is the catalyst for burglaries, contamination,
broken homes, neglected children, crowded courts, overwhelmed labs - the
list goes on.

In Oklahoma, there's a meth lab for every 5,000 people. In Barker-
Harrold's district, there's one for every 500.

"My district is the most dangerous in the nation," Barker-Harrold said. "We
have more pipe bombs, more explosives, more booby traps than any place in
the United States."

A Black Day

Her commitment was solidified on Sept. 24, 1999 - a day she calls her
lowest point as a prosecutor in the district where she also grew up and
raised a family.

Barker-Harrold was in the sixth car of a drug bust caravan descending in
the wee hours on a backwoods shack near Sallisaw. Before her car had even
rolled to a stop, a call came across the radio: "Officer down! Officer down!"

Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper David "Rocky" Eales was on the front line
of a spray of gunfire that came from the isolated house.

Eales got hit under the armpit, an inch away from his bullet-proof vest. He
died on the way to the hospital.

The suspect, Kenneth Barrett, was described by his family as a ne'er-
do-well who had sold drugs and caused trouble for years. He faces trial on
a murder charge later this year.

Since that shoot-out, there have been five others related to meth cooking.
No one else has died - yet - but there are close calls.

Barker-Harrold's district has a history of harboring hideouts for
criminals, the most famous being Pretty Boy Floyd of Sequoyah County. Meth
cookers are drawn to the isolation of the area, making it the perfect
burrow for their smelly and dangerous drug breweries, - or, as
Barker-Harrold calls them, "Beavis and Butthead labs."

These do-it-yourself labs are found in old rot-gut trailers and banged-up
cars in the woods of the Ozarks and Cookson Hills, as well as in the
garages and kitchens of ordinary homes. Poverty also contributes to the
prevalence of meth use and manufacturing in rural areas. The poorer folks
are, the more it seems to happen.

There's even a family aspect to it. Rural meth cookers are often the latest
in a string of chemical cultivators. Some are the grandchildren of
moonshiners and children of marijuana growers - only now the game is far
more dangerous. Instead of shotguns for protection, they pack automatic
weapons, set deadly booby traps, and put everyone around them in danger.

Authorities are also at risk. Most officers now know to wear protective
clothing before entering a suspected meth lab, but that wasn't always so,
nor do they always know what they're getting into.

One Muldrow officer recently learned the hard way when he popped the trunk
of a car on a traffic stop, opened a lid, and was knocked out cold by a
whiff of hydrochloric acid.

Taxpayers are affected too. Cleaning a meth lab costs between $2,500 and
$40,000, Barker-Harrold said, and that is only the start. Costs for court
action, child welfare workers, prisons, contamination and so forth suck
budgets dry, especially in sparsely populated areas.

State legislators have helped some by providing counties with income from
the bogus check recovery program, drug asset forfeitures and others
income-generating programs. Federal grants also help.

Legal Challenges

But Barker-Harrold fears the problem, which exploded in 1997, hasn't even
reached its peak. And the obstacles are daunting.

Meth, for one, is said to be addictive on the first try and is cheap to
make. In an experiment she conducted for a rural North Carolina town,
Barker-Harrold said she bought everything she needed to make $1,300 worth
of meth at local stores for $48. Not one clerk raised a suspicious eyebrow.

Meth recipes are on the Internet and cookers also teach each other. It is
said that in a five-year period, one meth cook trains 10 new ones.

Punishment is also an obstacle - a big one.

While bigger cities have a jury term about every month, rural counties may
have only a few each year. These jurors are needed to hear cases of
homicide, rape and other violent crimes. Since meth cooking is considered a
non-violent crime, it becomes a lower priority on the docket.

On top of that, the wait for lab results can exceed a year. Meth cooks know
it can take two or three years for them to be prosecuted.

"Sometimes I get criticized because people think I focus too much on the
meth, but with meth, people steal, they write hot checks, they forge
checks, they pawn other people's property, they burglarize people's
houses," said Barker-Harrold. "We have never gone to a drug house where we
don't find stolen property or stolen vehicles or a chop shop or something."

Barker-Harrold said she offers plea bargains and probation just to get
something done.

"If you have a high rate of homicide, what do you think is going to get
tried first? Homicide cases. And there's not much time left to try anything
else," Barker-Harrold said. "The threat of them really going to jail for a
drug crime, unless it's multiple times, in the state system, is very slim
because, for the most part, they're not violent crimes."

Whenever possible, she turns suspects over to the federal system, where
swifter and harsher punishment await. But generally it takes multiple
crimes, or adding weapons charges, to get them federally prosecuted.

Education, Treatment Promising

The gung-ho prosecutor is not the only one who realizes the magnitude of
meth's reach. Bruce Sewell, the chief district judge of Wagoner and
Cherokee counties, said while he has seen some progress made through drug
court and community service, it is hardly close to being solved.

Some small relief is coming, he says, with the Legislature appointing a
special judge for their district. His court will also start holding
Saturday dockets to help keep up with demand.

"Methamphetamine is the No. 1 crime problem that we have," Sewell said. "It
is the genesis of the criminal underworld at this point. Everything
revolves around methamphetamine, from the burglaries to the senseless
violence ... It's just unbelievable."

Headway is also being made in educating the public. Teachers are taught to
notice children who come to school smelling of chemicals, who are sleepy
and filthy. Some major discount stores, like Wal-Mart, also now have
"trips" for suspicious purchases, like large quantities of cold medicine
containing a key ingredient.

Clerks notice too. Barker-Harrold said one approached her husband in a
store recently after noticing he was wearing a Drug Enforcement
Administration T-shirt. She pointed him toward a customer who regularly
bought meth ingredients. Two days later, the customer was busted.

"I think that we've preached the gospel of meth enough that they're
becoming more and more aware," Barker-Harrold said.

What has worked best so far are drug courts and community service, rather
than a ticket straight to jail.

"They are the best thing that has happened to the criminal justice system
in the last 40 years," Judge Sewell said of the jail alternatives.

And yet, the end doesn't seem near, which means more arrests, more addicts,
and more old-fashioned shoot-outs with all-too-familiar results.

"We're not going to put every drug dealer in prison. And we're not going to
cure every addicted person," Barker-Harrold said. "But if you can
discourage it, if you can get the incidents to a manageable levels, you
accomplished something. And you can't give up."