POLICE LACK RESOURCES TO KEEP UP IN SOUTHERN MISSOURI'S METH BELT

HOUSTON, Mo. - Deep in the Ozarks, most of Texas County's 23,000
residents are asleep by midnight, and the sheriff's department stops
patrols around 3 a.m. That's about the time the county's
fastest-growing industry gets cooking.

The nightly narcotics ritual varies. Whether it's January or July,
outdoor Christmas lights might go on at one drug house; someone will
screw a red bulb into a porch light at another. Just like the coded
messages spray-painted on the gravelly pavement of one desolate ridge
road, they're signs that a methamphetamine market is open for business.

Meth - often called glass, ice, crank or speed - is sold in powder,
crystal and liquid form. Users can snort it, but more often they smoke
it from pipes or inject it into their veins. It's a cheap high that,
for the cost of a single dose of crack, can keep users in a state of
sleepless euphoria - or manic paranoia - for days.

This week, Missouri Gov. Bob Holden will call for a renewed offensive
against meth. He's expected to push for more prevention and treatment
programs, especially in rural areas hit hardest by the drug.

In a telephone interview, Holden praised the work of the police but
said it's time "to start solving the problem, not just managing the
problem."

For police, "managing the problem" has been tough, expensive and
dangerous work. Many say it seems to have little effect on the amount
of meth on the street.

In 2001 and 2002, Missouri led the nation in the number of
methamphetamine labs discovered by police. Illinois ranked a distant
ninth on that list in 2002, with most meth activity reported in the
southern part of the state. It will be weeks before the Missouri
Highway Patrol finishes tallying its data for last year, but Patrol
Capt. Ronald K. Replogle says an increase in meth raids seems likely.

Replogle runs the patrol's drug and crime division and co-chairs a
state meth task force. He said police, especially rural departments,
lack the resources to keep up with Missouri's meth explosion.

That's certainly the case in Missouri's meth belt -a band of 43 rural
counties south of Interstate 44. Although the area is home to less
than 30 percent of the state's population, it accounted for more than
60 percent of the state's meth lab raids in recent years.

For years, rural sheriffs and small-town narcotics investigators in
the meth belt have hoped that the meth trade would level off. But many
say they're seeing more users and more sophisticated meth-making labs.

Officials won't speculate on how many Missourians are addicted to
methamphetamine, but police and addicts say if an accurate estimate
were possible it would shock politicians, policymakers and the public.

An addict's story

"People you would never imagine are using it," said Christy, 34, an
addict who asked that her last name be withheld.

In a Texas County high school, Christy was pretty and blond, the girl
everyone wanted to date. She was a popular cheerleader who helped make
anti-drug posters to keep other students on the straight and narrow.
Later, she was a student at St. Louis College of Pharmacy in the
Central West End. Then she moved home to Texas County, to be near
friends and family.

It wasn't long before her boyfriend turned her on to Oxycontin, the
powerful prescription painkiller and opium derivative that sometimes
is sold illegally as "hillbilly heroin." By 1994, she was using meth
as a stimulant to counter the sleepiness Oxycontin can cause.
Sheriff's deputies said meth transformed her into a 95-pound crank
addict with an insatiable hunger for speed.

When Christy was interviewed at the Texas County jail last year, she
was looking better. She was sober and well-fed, but she looked tired
and older than her years. Police arrested her on a drug charge while
she was serving five years' probation - the result of a forgery conviction.

She was sentenced to 120 days "shock time" in prison and has since
been released.

Christy blames herself for trying meth and for moving back to rural
Missouri.

Typically, drugs are a big-city temptation. But not with Christy. And,
it seems, not with meth.

"The truth is, there is nothing to do in these areas," she said.
"There is nothing to do but drugs."

Of course, the drug isn't just a rural vice. State crime data show
meth is made, sold and used throughout the St. Louis area.

Police nationwide track meth-interdiction efforts by counting the
number of so-called meth-lab discoveries - a term that includes raids
on working drug labs, as well as abandoned labs, ingredient caches and
meth-related dumpsites found by police. In the first 10 months of last
year - the most recent period for which statistics are available -
police in Jefferson County discovered 146 meth labs, the most in the
state. A total of 208 other labs were found in St. Louis and the
counties of St. Louis, St. Charles and Lincoln. Fifty-two labs were
found in Madison County in 2002, though no other Metro East-area
counties recorded a significant number of labs.

The high number of meth busts in the St. Louis area can be misleading.
They reflect the successes of well-trained, well-funded police forces.
Although there is certainly a meth problem in the St. Louis area,
police say the drug hasn't become a serious rival to crack cocaine and
heroin. At least, not yet.

To see just how destructive meth can be, you need to look more than
100 miles southwest of St. Louis, in the heart of the meth belt.

"Biggest problem in this county"

Much of the meth sold in America comes from California or Mexico,
where it is produced in massive quantities by large
cocaine-trafficking organizations. But in Missouri, a more potent meth
is made locally from legal ingredients such as ether, over-the-counter
cold pills and anhydrous ammonia, a farm fertilizer. Statewide, police
in 2002 made 2,725 "meth-lab discoveries" - or about one out of every
six reported nationwide. Police in Texas County found 141 labs,
ingredient caches and dumpsites - or a little more than 5 percent of
Missouri's 2002 total.

Many Missouri politicians say the state's ranking is a sign of success
and evidence that police are effective at cracking down on the drug.
But police in Texas County don't see arrests as a turning of the tide.
Some of them see a drug problem that's growing, spurring other crimes,
endangering children and causing a spike in diseases from shared needles.

"It used to be moonshine, then there was marijuana growing. Now it's
meth, and it's worse than anything that came before it," said Texas
County's silver-haired sheriff, Wade "Dean" Belshe. "Methamphetamine
is by far the biggest problem in this county."

Belshe's top meth investigator, Sgt. Glenn Buckner, says police in
rural Missouri lack the money, manpower, equipment and training to
fight a large-scale drug war.

Tall, lean and crew-cut, Buckner looks like he should be drilling
recruits at nearby Fort Leonard Wood. It's a far different look from
that of the long-haired, goateed and heavily pierced Buckner who -
while working undercover for a regional narcotics task force years ago
- - bought methamphetamine from dealers, cooks, even small-town police
officers.

When he talks about meth, Buckner sounds more like a sociologist than
a hardened drug cop.

"The majority of people on meth are good people deep down," he said.
"We can arrest them, but there is a limit to what we can do."

Belshe and Buckner say there should be more treatment for meth
addicts, but they aren't giving up on arrests or lab raids. In fact,
the eight officers and deputies of the Texas County Sheriff's
Department have a meth-fighting record that should be the envy of
Missouri law enforcement. In 2002, they raided one lab for every 163
county residents.

Texas County is rugged, hilly, and sprawling - a little bigger than
the city of St. Louis and St. Louis and St. Charles counties combined.
Its population is about the same as that of Webster Groves. It's a
place of winding roads, dense forests and tiny towns. Because of meth,
the county and dozens like it throughout the state are losing some of
their charm and innocence.

Cooking up trouble

Outsiders often think of southern Missouri as a place to go for
fishing, outlet malls and country music. But historically, the Ozarker
was sometimes cast in the popular culture as an armed roughneck, quick
to anger, leery of strangers and skilled principally in making moonshine.

It's a stereotype that area residents have long tried to overcome.
That description was unfair to most old-time Ozarkers, but police say
it's not for the hundreds - maybe thousands - of methamphetamine cooks
who have set up shop across the region.

"We moved to a small town to get away from this kind of thing . . .
from drugs and crime," said James Smith, who recently moved his family
from Dallas to Missouri's Texas County, where his wife has relatives.
"But it's worse here."

Smith and his wife, Mary, walked out of the county courthouse with
three young children in tow. They were seeking a restraining order
against their neighbor, a woman who they say cooks meth and has
threatened to kill one of their sons because she thinks the boy is
spying on her drug business.

One block away, a grandmother protested in front of the prosecuting
attorney's office. She says her daughter's ex-husband is molesting her
grandson. She says the abuse started after the man got hooked on meth.

Police stress that Texas County is safe, but they admit that these
ugly slices of small-town life are becoming more common.

While police haven't linked any murders in Texas County to the meth
trade, they say two unsolved missing-person cases probably involve the
drug. The common belief among police and addicts throughout rural
Missouri is that most meth killings go unreported.

"The hills are full of bodies. . . . There's plenty of people in the
meth world who have disappeared, and nobody will ever find them," said
Rich, a recovering addict and former meth cook in his early 50s who
was interviewed at a drug rehab center in Salem, Mo.

The center treats users from neighboring Texas and Dent counties. The
center's administrators allow patients to be interviewed, but only if
their last names are not published.

When Rich cooked methamphetamine, his lab was well-protected in his
secluded home on top of a wooded Ozark knob, he said. Fitted to the
hickory and maple trees were shotgun booby traps with triggers tied to
tripwires. Rich kept more guns in the house.

Paranoia and rage aren't uncommon among hard-core meth users. They can
view everyone around them - relatives, neighbors, even fellow addicts
- - as potential police informers.

Rich said that he worried about police, too, but that he was terrified
of other meth cooks and addicts. They could try to steal drugs or meth
ingredients; a user might kill to erase a drug debt; a cook might
eliminate the competition. Or, more likely, someone like Rich might
get the bad name - deserving or not - of "narc."

Meth-related homicides have been reported in several southern Missouri
counties. Often, they happen when a drug deal goes awry. That's what
police say sparked a triple killing in Dent County in 2002.

Buckner, the Texas County meth investigator, estimates that 75 percent
of the burglaries in the county are carried out by meth users and that
80 percent of those held in the county jail are addicted to the drug.

Addicts and kids

"Methamphetamine touches people's lives in enormous ways here," said
Dr. Jeffrey Kerr, who for nine years has been head of the emergency
room at Texas County Memorial Hospital in Houston.

About 50 of each month's 1,000 or so ER admissions are meth-related,
and these cases are "an escalating problem," Kerr said.

Users want treatment for abscesses on their arms and legs from bad
needle injections, or they're sent to the hospital after psychotic
outbursts. Kerr has treated addicts in their 20s and 30s who have
suffered meth-induced heart attacks and strokes. And there are plenty
of patients needing treatment for chemical burns and other accidents
suffered at meth labs.

Several rural Missouri counties have seen a sharp increase in
hepatitis C - the blood-borne virus that kills about 10,000 Americans
each year. Although the number of new infections of the debilitating
liver disease is dropping nationwide, places such as Texas County are
seeing new infections climb.

The county health department reported seven new cases in 1999, 11 in
2000 and 22 in 2001. State public health officials say the number of
new infections reached 31 in 2002, the most recent figures available.
Improved infection reporting might explain some of the increase, but
Kerr believes most infections go unreported and untreated. He says
that needle-sharing among meth users could lead to a hepatitis C
epidemic in rural Missouri.

But addicts aren't the only victims of meth use.

Russell Shelden is chief juvenile officer for Missouri 25th Circuit
Court, which comprises several south-central Missouri counties,
including Texas County. He says that every year more children are
injured in drug labs and more juveniles become users.

But the most troubling fact, Shelden says, is that a growing number of
meth-using mothers are having children that are born addicted to the
drug.

More than a decade ago, public outcry over "crack babies" led to the
prosecution of more than 200 mothers suspected of smoking cocaine
while pregnant. Scientists still are trying to determine to what
extent fetuses exposed to cocaine are likely to develop physical and
behavioral disabilities. But even less is known about "meth babies,"
or the consequences of childhood exposure to meth ingredients like
ether and anhydrous ammonia.

"Who knows what the long-term health effects that meth is going to
have on (exposed) children when they reach adolescence or adulthood?
We have no idea," Shelden said.

Although Kerr is quick to say that most Texas County residents are
law-abiding and that southern Missouri isn't "a drug free-for-all," he
warns that meth puts children here in danger.

"My advice to a parent who has a child hooked on methamphetamine is to
get that kid out of town," he said. "Get them out as soon as possible."