METH CASES MAKE MOUNTAIN OF TROUBLE

At one time, Jeremy Smith was a handsome boy. A high school football player
in Arab, he had his pick of girls, said his mother, Dorothy York.

That was before methamphetamine. Before Smith lost almost 50 pounds. Before
his teeth started falling out.

Before his gaunt appearance drove his father to set up his arrest.

"I'd a lot rather see him down in the county jail than dead," Ellis York
said. So when Smith asked for a ride to Huntsville, his father said yes,
then called police instead. Smith wore long sleeves that day last August,
an attempt to hide the marks that track his path since he first injected
the drug five years ago during a drunken ride to the short-track races at
Talladega.

"I loved it," said Smith, now 25. "It made you feel like you were on top of
the world."

That was an illusion.

"Life went downhill, quick," Smith said.

Meth weaves an illusion for its users, but the reality it creates for their
families and for law enforcement is harsh.

The Drug Enforcement Administration ranks the highly addictive combination
of common household chemicals as Alabama's No. 1 drug threat. Meth abuse
has passed cocaine and ranks behind only marijuana, the DEA estimates in
its 2005 State Fact Sheets.

As the drug spreads, state crime labs can't keep pace with the mounting
evidence being seized. The Department of Human Resources in some counties
is overwhelmed by foster care needs for children who lose their parents to
addiction. Treatment programs carry waiting lists of people either choosing
to quit the drug or being forced to by arrests. Nationally, health care
professionals worry that a string of AIDS cases will follow as users share
needles and take part in risky sexual behavior while high.

The drug is reaching into the lives of people who would never dream of
taking it. The Legislature has moved some regular cold medicines behind the
counter and is debating expanding the ban and requiring customers to sign
when they buy the pills. The main ingredients in many allergy and cold
medicines, ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, also are key ingredients needed to
make meth.

For all that, putting a number to the rising problem is an imprecise
science. The Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center combines arrest
records for meth and amphetamines, a chemical cousin still used in
prescription medications, into a single category, though officials say meth
crimes make up the overwhelming majority of those arrests.

Arrests for sales in that category increased 30-fold between 1999 and 2003,
from 14 to 411 a year. Arrests for possession rose from 105 in 1999 to 571
in 2003, a 444 percent increase.

Attorney General Troy King is organizing a task force to devise a plan for
tackling the meth problem, but he said the state has been slow to gear up
for the fight. "The problem is already out of control," he said.

'Meth Mountain':

Meth has been a major problem on the West Coast and in parts of the
Southwest for years and moved east on a wide front.

Last year, authorities in Missouri seized chemicals and equipment needed to
make the drug at 2,707 separate locations, more than any other state. Three
other Midwestern states ranked in the top five, along with Tennessee.
Authorities reported 523 labs in Alabama. According to the DEA, lab busts
have increased dramatically in Jackson, Marshall, Etowah, Madison, Houston,
Baldwin, DeKalb, and Walker counties.

Meth is most often a white or off-white powder that is smoked, snorted,
injected or swallowed, and it's comparatively easy to make. Many of the
labs busted are in people's homes or garages, although they create
dangerous wastes and foul odor.

In Jackson County, authorities busted their first meth lab in 1994 and
found only one more over the next three years. Now, they find about 100 a year.

"If we had the people, we could do two labs a day," said Chuck Phillips,
chief drug investigator for the Jackson County sheriff's department. "They
are everywhere."

Meth use is so rampant in Marshall County that it has inspired a nickname
for Sand Mountain, the plateau that is the county's geographic backbone.
"You can go over to Foodland and interview a 60-year-old lady, and she'll
know it's Meth Mountain," Smith said.

Marshall County's drug task force busted three labs in 1999. Last year, the
task force busted 127 - and so far this year, the number has reached 60.
That doesn't completely convey the problem, though. Marshall County
District Attorney Steve Marshall estimates 80 percent of the drug in the
county is imported, mostly from Mexico.

Three of the county's five school systems perform random drug tests on
students, one of the recommendations from a community task force formed to
address the problem.

Even hardened officers are affected by the conditions they sometimes find
when they go into homes-turned-labs.

When authorities busted a lab in Grant a year and a half ago, they found a
little girl about two weeks past open heart surgery, said Angela Sparks,
director of the Marshall County Court referral program.

"The air was so toxic, it took three hours to ventilate to where you could
breathe without a mask," said Rob Savage, head of the county's Drug
Enforcement Unit.

On a raid in Albertville, investigators found a child's sippy cup sitting
on a table beside a pipe used to smoke meth, Sparks said. "It's really kind
of ominous," she said.

Intense effect:

The first time a person does meth - whether snorted, smoked, injected or
swallowed -he feels an intense rush that lasts a few minutes, followed by a
lasting high as meth floods the brain with dopamine, a chemical messenger
that stimulates brain cells and enhances pleasure.

"It gives you this rush like you never had before," Smith said. "You run
500 miles per hour."

Dr. John Standridge, an addiction specialist with the Council for Alcohol
and Drug Abuse Services in Chattanooga, said meth addicts are enslaved by a
futile effort to recapture the joy of that first buzz.

"Then more and more, they need it just to feel less bad," Standridge said.

Smith, the former football player in Arab, followed that pattern, becoming
a regular user quickly. He had lots of friends and never lacked people to
party with. Eventually, he quit work and sold marijuana and other drugs to
help pay for his addiction.

He would binge on the drug for days. At one point, he said, he stayed up 28
days.

He spent most of his time around other users. He saw the meth-induced
behavior that police say is common. Users don't eat or sleep much. They
find ways to burn off the energy meth gives them, sometimes to the point of
being comical.

"You see people mowing their yards at 4 in the morning and strapping lights
to weed eaters," said Smith, who now is serving time in the Marshall County
Community Corrections Facility and gets out in July.

Indiscriminate sex was common, too.

"There's always women around. You can take a really good person and turn
her into a whore in three days," Smith said.

During his addiction, Smith fathered a son out of wedlock. The child, now
16 months old, lives with his mother.

Smith said he never shared a needle, but he saw plenty of people who did.
He said he saw friends sharpen needles on matchbox strike plates.

It's this kind of behavior that has health care workers worried about the
spread of AIDS. Dr. J.P. Lofgren, epidemiologist for the Alabama Department
of Public Health, said he hasn't seen any indications of the spread of
disease specifically from meth - yet. "It's going to happen if people are
sharing needles," Lofgren said.

Other health effects of meth are more immediately obvious. It can cause a
rapid rise in blood pressure that can lead to stroke. It also can make the
heart race and disrupt the normal heartbeat, which can be fatal.

It can cause paranoia, hallucinations and violent rages. Meth use decreases
appetite and can cause severe weight loss and tooth decay.

Long term, the drug damages the heart, blood vessels in the brain and brain
cells.

In the year that ended Sept. 30, 1,782 of the people who turned to
state-supported drug addiction programs listed meth as their primary drug
of choice. That's a 25 percent increase from the year before and ranked
meth fourth behind alcohol, marijuana and cocaine.

"A couple of years ago, it wasn't even on our radar screen," said Kent
Hunt, associate commissioner for substance abuse services for the Alabama
Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

The list of people waiting to enter treatment facilities generally hovers
between 350 and 550. "The system is stretched to the limit," Hunt said.
"The problem is getting more and more pronounced."

Standridge, the addiction specialist from Chattanooga, said there is no
medicine to help beat meth addiction. Treatment involves helping people
learn to control the craving, which he said diminishes over time.

"I don't know if it ever goes away completely," he said.

Dr. Mary Holley of Albertville started a Christian-based outreach program,
Mothers Against Methamphetamine, after her brother's addiction led to his
suicide at age 24. Holley, 45, says the only way to beat methamphetamine is
through faith.

"An addict is broken at a very deep level," Holley said. "This is not a
superficial thing. You need to heal people from the inside out."

Broken families:

It's not just the addicts who are broken. Often, their families are, too.

The numbers of children in the state's custody has risen in counties
hardest hit by meth. Wayne Sellers, director of the Marshall County
Department of Human Resources, said his county has 164 children in foster
care, compared to 97 three years ago. Meth is the main reason, he said.

Jackson County averaged 56 children in foster care four years ago, said
Kristie Crabtree, a child welfare supervisor for that county's DHR. Today
it has 136, half of whom are in care because of meth.

Crabtree worries about physical and psychological problems that will
surface later in children rescued from meth homes.

"There will not ever be enough resources to meet the needs of what crystal
meth is doing," Crabtree said.

Less obvious is the pain meth use causes adult members of the family.

On a recent Sunday, Smith talked about his addiction at his parents' home
near Arab, the house where he grew up. The rural setting stirs thoughts of
barbecues, fishing and afternoon naps, not drug addiction. The family owns
a small lake a short walk from the back door. There are front and back
decks, birdhouses, gardens, stone paths, a swing and flower designs on the
propane tank and mailbox, signs of Dorothy York's artistic talents.

Inside, the words "Bless this House," hang in a frame over the sofa. The
hallway wall is covered with family photos. Smith's 1984 kindergarten
diploma hangs beside his younger brother's.

Joseph York, 22, graduated from Mississippi State University recently with
a bachelor's degree in Spanish.

Smith said he's got a long way to go to catch up and make his family proud.

"I'm the biggest disgrace there is to this family," he said.

"You know we still love you," his father said.

"Love you, but don't like you a bit," his mother said. "I don't sugar coat
it for him."

At one time, Smith seemed on his way to becoming a productive adult. He
graduated from Arab High School in 1997. He joined the Army but served only
about six weeks because doctors discovered he had a back problem. He
returned to Arab and got a good job in the shipping department of a
Huntsville company that made cell phones.

Then came meth. By 2002, he had stopped showing up at his parents' house
for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Smith tried to hide his hollow cheeks and the deep circles below his eyes.

"I can put on makeup as good as a woman," he said.

But Ellis York saw that the son he adopted as a baby was wasting away.

"I didn't figure he'd live but another month or two," Ellis York said. "He
had lost all that weight. His eyes were sunk in. His cheeks were sunk in."

When Ellis York made an appointment with police, they arrested Smith for an
unpaid fine. He later received a two-year sentence for possession of
marijuana. He's serving his time at the Marshall County Community
Corrections Facility in Albertville, which houses about 75 nonviolent felons.

Like others in the program, Smith works full time, driving a truck for a
poultry plant in Albertville. He's allowed weekly visits to his parents'
house. He's scheduled for release July 23 and plans to live in Albertville
and keep his job at the poultry plant. He wants to go to college and study
poultry science.

Dorothy York wants her son to be a good dad to the baby he fathered while
on meth.

"I want that baby to look at him and say, 'That's my daddy. I'm proud of
him,'" she said.

Smith said it will take 10 years to rebuild the relationships he had with
his parents before the addiction.

"It's heartbreaking, you know what I mean? Your mom, your dad, everybody
you love growing up. You lose it. It's gone," Smith said. He's vowed to
stay clean once he gets out of jail. His mother says he won't get another
chance.

"I've done told him if he gets back out there and winds up getting back in
it, he will never set foot on this property again," she said.