LOCAL PRODUCTION DOWN, BUT IMPORTS DRIVE ILLEGAL INDUSTRY

NEWLAND - Kevin Frye takes a call on his ninth day as Avery County's
sheriff from someone reporting a neighbor as a drug dealer.

Frye asks the caller what the drugs look like, what price they fetch,
where the dealer goes when he travels down the mountain for new supplies.

He wants his deputies to have the same kind of conversations.

"The drug dealers and the thugs out here, they have their community
networks," the sheriff said. " . We need the good citizens out there
to be our eyes and ears."

Most of the sheriffs in Western North Carolina were replaced in the
Nov. 7 election, and most of the region's 10 new top lawmen come in
with new ideas for disrupting the drug trade.

They take office at a time when rural law enforcement's nemesis, the
methamphetamine industry, is also under new management.

Frye and his fellow sheriffs echo a federal assessment of Southeast
trends when they say that new laws are shutting down the meth labs
that flourished only two years ago.

At the same time, they agree, addicts have found that imports from
Mexico of what's known as crystal meth or ice feed their habits as
well as the homemade, powdered variety. On the highways

Aggressive marketing and declining price have made the purer crystal
meth more attractive.

The drugs come in on the highways, where some new sheriffs are
focusing their efforts.

Rutherford County's Jack Conner said he plans within a month to have
a new drug interdiction team in place that will patrol the roads and
highways looking for shipments.

"You look for tinted windows, out of state vehicles, anything that
would draw your attention a little bit," the sheriff said.

Four deputies will make up the team, while four others will continue
to take on drug dealers by more conventional means such as undercover
drug purchases.

Like Conner, Buncombe County Sheriff Van Duncan said he would
dedicate officers to patrolling the highways looking for drugs.

The state has tentatively approved a grant that will pay for one
Henderson County sheriff's deputy to focus solely on making traffic
stops, Sheriff Rick Davis said.

Henderson County has for several years been a hub for meth coming in
from Mexico, a trend highlighted by the county's involvement in four
major recent federal investigations targeting meth.

Grand juries indicted 85 people after the investigations, which were
announced last month.

Some have been convicted, including Reymundo Rodriguez, 24, sentenced
to more than 22 years in federal prison. He was found guilty of
several crimes in Henderson County, including conspiracy to
distribute meth and possession of a firearm by an illegal alien.
Regional cooperation

The new sheriffs are beefing up their drug enforcement in other ways
besides highway interdiction.

Transylvania County has devoted a second detective to drugs. Now the
department can pursue more than one investigation at a time, Sheriff
David Mahoney said.

The county also is seeking a grant to train dogs to sniff out drugs.

Mahoney said he made a campaign promise to devote more resources to
anti-drug efforts.

While attending a week of training for new sheriffs in Raleigh, he
sat down with Duncan and Davis to talk about working more closely. He
said that includes their efforts to deal with drug dealers, who pay
no attention to the county line.

"We have an opportunity here to take a huge step forward in how we
deal with drugs and crime regionally," Mahoney said.