ATTORNEY ENCOURAGING PREACHERS TO TOUCH ON METH PROBLEM

Don't go by the sermon topic printed in your church bulletin Sunday.
The preacher may switch topics to talk about drugs.

It's all part of "Meth Sunday," a campaign by community leaders and
the U.S. attorney for western Kentucky to get the whole community
involved in the fight against drugs.

"One of the things they wanted us to understand is how devastating it
is," said the Rev. Jeff Carter, pastor at Wesleyan Heights United
Methodist Church, who attended an informational meeting on Meth Sunday
early this week.

"If churches are going to care about their communities, we can't bury
our heads in the sand," Carter said. "When people are in crisis, the
first place people want to turn is their church."

About 400 ministers were invited to participate, said Vivian Simmons,
a local marriage and family therapist who has been working to educate
the public about the methamphetamine problem here.

The drug affects church members in all sorts of ways, she said. She's
counseled an attorney who used meth to stay awake and women who used
it to lose weight. Her clients have also included a man raising his
grandchildren because his son went to prison for manufacturing meth.

"Ninety percent of burglaries in our area are drug related, and meth
is the number one drug in western Kentucky," Simmons said.

The problem is so big it dominates law enforcement officers' time to
the point they can't get to other cases, she said. Meth labs are a
hazard to innocent neighbors. And the drug ultimately costs all
taxpayers because they end up paying for the care of burned-out
addicts, Simmons said. "It burns up the neurotransmitters in their
brain. They're going to be vegetables with continued use."

To help ministers get the word out, U.S. Attorney Steven S. Reed is
distributing a short video and a fact sheet about the problem. The
packet won't arrive at most churches by this Sunday, however, said an
assistant in Reed's office.

Some pastors, including Carter, have said their services were already
planned around another theme anyway, but they will use the information
on other days or in other settings, such as youth group meetings.

Ministers have been very supportive in efforts to organize forums and
educate the public about meth, Simmons said.

One such effort will be the "Meth Madness" forum May 22 at Owensboro
Community College. The public is invited to attend from 7 to 9 p.m. in
the Blandford Lecture Hall.

A panel of experts will answer questions about meth, and the program
will be shown live on Owensboro cable channel 51 and will be heard
live on OCC Radio, which is Owensboro cable channel 52. The audio
signal will also be available live on the Internet at
www.occ-online.org/radio.