METH STALKS RURAL GEORGIA

Cheap, Easily Manufactured Stimulant Is Countryside's Fastest-Growing Drug
Problem, and Abuse Can Be Deadly.

Williamson - Rural Pike County reached a ghastly milestone this
year: its first methamphetamine-related murder charge.

Seven-month-old Chandler Cheshire drowned in a bathtub. His mother,
Deborah Dickens, 23, was arrested and charged with murder and meth
possession. Ronnie Dale Cheshire, 43, the baby's father and Dickens'
common-law husband, was charged with meth possession and being party
to murder.

"My son's dead because of me doing meth," Dickens said during an April
bond hearing. She told the court she was taking a bath with her baby
after being up for three days on a binge. She said she passed out.

"I found him in the tub floating on his stomach," she
testified.

Here, as in many rural Georgia counties, the powerful stimulant
methamphetamine has become the fastest-growing illegal drug problem in
only a few years. Meth arrests in Pike have jumped from six in 2000 to
17 last year.

"I am worried because when things like this start to happen in the
open, they tend to be the tip of the iceberg," said Darryl Dean,
superintendent of Pike County Schools.

In this county about 45 miles south of downtown Atlanta, open roads
are flanked by acres of farmland and forest. A handful of quaint towns
sit within Pike's 218 square miles, but most of the county's 15,000
people do not live in places like Zebulon, Concord or Meansville. They
live in remote homes off country roads - favorite haunts for those
making and using meth.

People in Pike have a lot of space, but as in most of rural Georgia,
many don't have much money. The median per capita income is $17,661,
according to the census, compared with $21,154 statewide.

How to Stop It?

These twin characteristics of country life - far-flung homes and
widespread poverty - have made Pike and many of Georgia's other 125
rural counties fertile ground for methamphetamine manufacture and
abuse. The drug has been spreading across rural Georgia since at least
2000, an analysis of Georgia Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab data by
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

Down the road from Dickens' home, 72-year-old retiree J.W. Fain said
the onset of the meth problem has him baffled.

"It's here, and it looks like it is everywhere," he said. "You got to
do something about it, but I just don't know what you do to stop it."

The Journal-Constitution found that the number of incidents of meth
being seized by police and sent for GBI testing is twice as high in
relation to population in Georgia's rural counties as in its urban or
suburban ones. The AJC defined 126 counties in Georgia as rural based
upon low population density according to the 2000 census. The
remaining 33 counties were classified as urban or suburban.

From 2000 through 2003, the number of meth seizures in rural Georgia
increased more than 116 percent - from 854 to 1,852.

This year, four children in rural Georgia, including the baby in Pike,
have died in what police suspect are meth-related incidents.

GBI Director Vernon Keenan said meth is overwhelming law enforcement
in parts of Georgia. "Rural areas are taking up all of our resources,"
he said.

Cheap, Available High

Methamphetamine has become such a problem in Georgia that the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration is funding a statewide "meth summit"
in Atlanta in August. More than 200 federal, state and local law
enforcement officials and others are expected to attend.

In the 1990s, easy and cheap methods for making the drug were
developed on the West Coast, and those methods have been spreading
through rural states. Made with ingredients including cold remedies
and farm fertilizer, meth has become a modern version of moonshine.
People cook up the drug in secluded homes, trailers and sheds because
the process can emit strong chemical fumes, which could make neighbors
and police suspicious.

Though cocaine and marijuana remain the most abused illegal drugs in
Georgia, methamphetamine is quickly gaining popularity. Since 2000,
the GBI Crime Lab has tested fewer samples of confiscated cocaine and
marijuana --- while its tests of meth have more than doubled.

The drug is popular with poor, rural users, who find other stimulants,
like cocaine, expensive and more difficult to obtain. Meth can keep
abusers up for days and make them paranoid and delusional. To feed
their habit, they often resort to petty theft and writing bad checks,
police say.

From January to early April of this year, 709 meth seizures occurred
in the state's rural counties, the newspaper's analysis of GBI Crime
Lab data found. Those seizures included drugs confiscated during meth
lab raids, in traffic stops, and during arrests at people's homes and
other places. The pace puts rural counties on track to have more than
2,000 meth seizures this year, a record.

The newspaper's analysis of GBI data also found:

From January to early April of this year, meth seizures made up 24.3
percent of all drug seizures in rural Georgia. In 2000, meth seizures
accounted for 6.1 percent of drugs seized by police in rural counties.
In urban and suburban counties, meth seizures as a percentage of total
drug seizures went from 3.7 percent to 19.3 percent during the same
period.

Meth abuse is spreading rapidly south and east through the state. The
highest concentration of meth seizures tested by the GBI is in
northwest Georgia. In 2000, 14 rural Georgia counties had more than 15
meth seizures tested by the GBI. By 2003, the number had risen to 31
counties.

The rate of meth seizures for rural counties rose from 36 per 1,000
people in 2000 to 83 seizures per 1,000 people in 2003, an increase of
131 percent. The rate of meth seizures in urban and suburban counties
rose from 17 per 1,000 people to 38 per 1,000 people during the same
period, an increase of 124 percent.

In Spalding County, just north of Pike, there were 31 meth-related
arrests in 2000. In 2003, the number had climbed to 156, an increase
of more than 400 percent.

This March in Spalding, three boys and their 27-year-old baby sitter
died in a trailer fire that police speculated was started by a meth
lab. No one has been charged in the deaths, according to the county
Sheriff's Department. Police are awaiting a federal Drug Enforcement
Administration analysis of evidence collected from the charred
trailer, and toxicology test results from the GBI Crime Lab on two men
who survived the fire, said Sheriff's Capt. Franklin Allen.

'We Can't Get Them All'

Before this year, authorities knew of only one instance in which
parents were charged with murder in connection with methamphetamine.
In 2001, 1-year-old Chelton Hicks died after a meth lab caught fire
and destroyed his family's home in Catoosa County, in northwest Georgia.

This February, his parents were found guilty of felony murder and
sentenced to life in prison.

The only rural counties that the meth problem doesn't appear to have
penetrated significantly are a handful of agricultural counties
located south of Augusta and east of Macon.

"Everything's gone to meth now," said William T. McBroom, district
attorney for Pike, Fayette, Spalding and Upson counties. "It's just
come in a wave. . . . I don't think it's going to get any better
anytime soon."

Pike County Sheriff Jimmy Thomas said he was devoting more officers to
the meth problem and drug abuse in general, which is part of the
reason for the increased arrests in his county. But his resources are
limited. He usually has about four deputies on the road at any one
time in a county about one-third larger than the city of Atlanta. He
knows people are manufacturing and using the drug in remote parts of
Pike.

"We can't get them all," he said.

Already this year, Pike sheriff's deputies have discovered two meth
labs in houses and one in a car. In the previous four years combined,
Pike sheriff's deputies had busted only two labs.

"It's going to get worse," Thomas said.

No Haven From Drugs

A review of the 49 meth-related arrests in Pike since 2000 paints a
profile of who is using the drug in rural Georgia. According to
records, 40 of those arrested were men; nine were women. All were
white. The average age of men arrested was a little more than 33. The
average age for women was 32. Most were unemployed, and many had not
completed high school.

On a recent visit to Dickens and Cheshire's home, set on a gravel road
across from farmland, family members would not comment.

Next-door neighbor Julie Williams said she was shocked to hear that
meth was being used in a home that seemed, from the outside, fairly
normal.

Williams, 30, said she and her husband moved from metro Atlanta about
four years ago to raise their six children in a place where problems
like drug abuse would be less prevalent.

"We actually moved to get away from that sort of thing," she said.
"Honestly, we just thought our kids would be safer in the country."