OFFICIALS FEAR SURGE IN METH AS FUNDING DRIES UP

Midwest States' Dramatic Gains Against Drug Threatened By Planned Federal Cuts

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A common fear is sweeping through the Midwest's
drug-enforcement community: that methamphetamine, the narcotic
scourge that has wounded middle America as no drug ever before, is
about to surge again because of extreme federal slashes in police funding.

In Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska, the story
is the same. Just as statistics show that anti-meth task forces may
be beginning to gain an upper hand on those who manufacture, deal and
use the highly addictive and destructive drug, the source of the
majority of these states' drug-enforcement funding is slated to
disappear overnight.

"It couldn't come at a worse time," said Terry Lemming, the statewide
drug-enforcement coordinator for the Illinois State Police. "After
all the success we've started to have, this could set the Midwest
back a good 20 years in our fight against this drug."

President Bush, whose administration has long expressed the opinion
that federal dollars should not be the primary means of funding state
and local law enforcement, has dramatically cut funding in the 2009
budget for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, the
primary program used to finance drug enforcement in nearly every
state. The proposed cut would trim $170 million, virtually the entire
Byrne program for drug enforcement.

Although Congress has signaled it will fight to restore funding to
the drug-enforcement program, those on both sides of the political
aisle have acknowledged they very likely could fail; the war on
terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they say, have
trumped the nation's war on drugs at home. Other sources of funding
include money from state and local government, but it is often a
smaller percentage of the total.

The ramifications for the ongoing battle against methamphetamine in
the Midwest could be enormous:

In Iowa, where Mexican drug cartels have gained control over the bulk
of meth distribution, officials say they face losing nearly
three-quarters of their drug-enforcement budget.

In Illinois, where meth continues to make inroads into rural
communities, addicting youth and adults alike, drug-enforcement
officials say they would have to eliminate more than half of the
state's meth-fighting task forces.

In Missouri, where a startling 20 percent of the nation's meth
arrests are made, officials grimly predict they will have to start
laying off a significant number of their already overwhelmed
drug-enforcement officers.

"I don't think anyone is yet fully appreciating what this is going to
mean for the rates of people getting addicted to this drug as well as
to overall public safety," said Gary Kendall, director of the Iowa
Office of Drug Control Policy.

Trying to find funds

State legislatures in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri are trying to
replace the lost federal funds with money from state coffers, but
drug-enforcement officials worry that will prove difficult or
impossible during the current economic downturn.

"We're preparing for the worst," Lemming said. "And if that comes to
pass, it will be devastating."

Indeed, methamphetamine statistics show how much is at stake. In
Illinois, for example, law-enforcement officials say they have been
so successful that they halved the number of labs operating from 2003
to 2007. Lemming said that is the result of nearly two decades of
building up 23 multicounty task forces that specialize--quite
successfully--in fighting meth.

He cited a 2005 study by the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority that
showed in areas where anti-drug task forces were at work, violent
crime had been significantly reduced.

"If we cannot at least keep the current level of federal funding, we
will have to dissolve 12 of our 23 task forces," Lemming said. "The
people of Illinois will see a dramatic change in violence and drug
use as a result."

Iowa officials cite the same worries about closing the lion's share
of their anti-meth task forces. But they have other fears too. Since
the state has been so successful at cutting down in-state meth
productions--lab busts have plummeted from more than 1,300 in 2004 to
less than 200 last year, an indication their numbers are drastically
down--the state has seen an influx of meth from drug cartels.

"First we zoned in on the labs, and the numbers show how well we
did," said Kendall. "Now we are poised to really start having a real
impact on the Mexican drug cartels that are now bringing in the meth.
But if we have to eliminate more than half of our task forces, we
won't stand a chance at that."

Like officials in virtually every state in the Midwest, Kendall said,
local police and sheriff's departments have neither the staff,
resources nor training to effectively fight the war on meth.

"Without the work of our task forces, Missouri could find itself in
the position where everything that's been done in the last 5 to 10
years is virtually undone," said Capt. Tim Forney, the operating
chief for the Northeast Missouri Narcotics Task Force.

Forney said that federal funds for task forces like his have been
decreasing for the past several years. In the past two years, he
said, his task force had more than $70,000 in funding cuts and had to
lay off one officer.

"Less personnel means less enforcement," he said.

Much at stake in Missouri

Missouri will certainly feel the federal slashes as much as any state
in the Midwest. Because one-fifth of the nation's meth arrests occur
in the state, it has been heavily funded by the Byrne assistance
grant, a program named for a New York City police officer killed by
drug dealers in 1988. Missouri currently gets about $9 million from
the federal fund.

"In Missouri, we especially understand what's at stake," said Forney,
noting that the state still had about 1,200 meth lab busts in 2007.

Liz Rehmer, a Missouri mother whose son began using meth in his early
20s and is now in prison for drug-related offenses, has watched the
debate over Byrne funding with shock. She lives in a county where the
anti-meth task force is 100 percent funded by Byrne money, and she
fears what will result from the dismantling of such law-enforcement efforts.

"The Midwest will see more and more addicts, more and more children
in foster care, and the prisons will be full to the point that they
are bursting," she said. "Crime will go up. The number of addicts
will be shocking. It won't even take five years for it to be a
full-blown epidemic."

So many states are worried about the slashes to federal funding that
drug-enforcement officials representing 45 states traveled last week
to Washington to lobby Congress to restore Byrne funding. Lemming
said the sense was of bipartisan support among members of Congress,
but that financial realities during this time of war might prevent
the money from being appropriated.

"What I fear is that we're about to dismantle everything we've been
doing for a decade to fight meth in the Midwest," he said. "I think
citizens and politicians will very quickly discover what a disaster
that is for drug use rates and public safety, and then we'll want to
go back to what we were doing.

"But if we tear down the infrastructure that we've spent all this
time building, it will be very difficult to restore a year or two
from now. We may not be able to fix what we've broken."