METHAMPHETAMINE: THE SOCIAL TOLL ON RURAL AMERICA

In Holmes County, the devil's drug has taken hold, as it has in many
overwhelmingly white, poor areas. It's easy to make, easy to hide, even
easier to get hooked. And it devastates lives.

BONIFAY - Crystal Gainey sat on the wooden steps of her mobile home,
sobbing into her tiny hands. Her boyfriend sat shirtless in the back of a
patrol car, handcuffed, facing drug charges.

Gainey, 19, chain-smoked Marlboro Lights between bursts of tears and tried
to convince the deputies she didn't use methamphetamine, that she knew
nothing of her boyfriend's dealings, that the thin glass meth pipes,
blackened and cracked by heat, belonged to him.

Her eyes were red and sunken, she weighed maybe 85 pounds. The car carrying
her boyfriend pulled away, trailing dust down the long dirt road, bound for
the county lockup.

She tried meth just once, she said, back in high school. Holmes County
Sheriff's investigator John Tate asked to see her fingers. There was a dark
callus on Gainey's right index finger.

"That's from holding that meth pipe," Tate said.

"It's from feeding my chickens."

"When's the last time you smoked it?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Last three days?"

"I don't know. I don't do it all the time. I don't know when the last time
was, but it's been about a week."

Chief Deputy Eddie Ingram told her to pack a few essentials - underwear,
cigarettes, her driver's license - then ushered her to his maroon unmarked
car. Ingram has arrested scores of young women like her in the past year.
They all remind him of someone he knew.

They call it the devil's drug, for its powers of deception. Users feel
alive, euphoric. At first they feel in control. Then most get hooked.

Methamphetamine, known as meth, crystal meth, crank or speed, has burned
its way east across America in the past decade, entrenching itself in small
towns with little history of hard-core drug abuse.

Today, meth is eating away at many communities the way crack ravaged inner
cities in the 1980s. Unlike crack, meth has thrived in places that are
overwhelmingly white and rural as well as poor.

Places where dense woods or barren expanses make it easy to hide a meth
lab. Places with too few cops and scant resources for treating the addicted.

Places like Holmes County, 100 miles west of Tallahassee, a wild montage of
dense woods, blackwater swamps and cotton fields, more like neighboring
Alabama than most of Florida.

Meth arrived here in 1996, smuggled across Interstate 10 from the west.
Then a couple years ago, locals learned to make it with over-the-counter
cold medicines, common household cleaners and a hot plate.

Meth became far more available. Casual drug users once content to puff pot
advanced to meth.

Twenty-five dollars will buy a quarter-gram hit that will keep the user
flying all day. It is usually smoked, or mixed with water and injected.
Users will do anything to get it, even steal from their neighbors, or
abandon their children.

Residents say the drug has worn at the foundation of small-town living, and
the security once taken for granted in an area of large, extended families
and relationships that go back generations.

Since Feb. 1, when it launched a concerted attack on meth and began keeping
records, the Holmes County Sheriff's Office has arrested 467 people on
meth-related charges and raided 57 labs - one-quarter of the Florida total
for the past year.

The county has only 18,500 residents.

Days, nights and weekends, deputies chase down suspected meth makers,
knocking on doors of tired frame houses and mobile homes set deep in the
woods, warrens of squalor guarded by rusting appliances and braying hounds.

The department often lacks the money to cover overtime, but deputies work
it anyway. Most have friends or relatives on meth, and they see themselves
as crusaders in an epic battle of good vs. evil.

Sheriff Dennis Lee's recent collars include a cousin. A deputy's son was
jailed last year after a meth-driven rampage in Georgia. This summer, Chief
Deputy Ingram called Alabama authorities to arrest his first cousin, his
hunting partner since childhood, for cooking meth.

On Waukesha Avenue, Bonifay's main street, fliers on utility poles and shop
windows listed goods stolen by addicts to feed their habit: Fishing gear,
guns, grills and all-terrain vehicles.

Cold medicines have become contraband. The active ingredient, ephedrine or
pseudoephedrine, is what gives meth its buzz, and meth cooks distill it
with harsh chemicals such as acetone. At the new Wal-Mart in nearby
Chipley, a sign warns shoppers in the cold and flu aisle that they're under
surveillance.

The staff at Bonifay's 25-bed public hospital has become expert at treating
meth addicts with oozing boils, caused by toxins leaching through their
skin. Hallucinating meth users often scar themselves by digging with pins
and knives at imaginary bugs they feel boring into their flesh.

Deputies often find children living in squalor, among noxious chemicals,
when they raid meth labs. Recovering addicts said youngsters are taught to
strip the heads off matches to get the red phosphorous, which is used in
making meth.

Scores of Holmes County children are living with relatives because their
parents are in prison for meth-related crimes or are too addicted to care
for them.

One of them is Samantha Peacock, a precocious 4-year-old living with her
grandparents.

Her father, Eddie Peacock, was convicted last summer for trafficking meth
and other charges. Eddie's brother, Alvie, was arrested in March, after
police got a tip he was cooking meth in his mobile home. Each man got two
years in prison.

Eddie, 29, and Alvie, 28, left four young children, who are living with
relatives.

Samantha, Eddie's youngest, lives with his parents and sister off a dirt
road in an area called the Campsites, for its dearth of permanent homes,
near the inky waters of the Choctawhatchee River. She is blond and social,
a tomboy who delights in catching lizards and looking for alligators in the
swamp.

Her mother is strung out on meth and sees the girl rarely. She relinquished
custody after a daycare worker found a vial of meth in Samantha's diaper bag.

Last week, Samantha's grandfather, Ed Peacock, 66, a retired logger, pushed
her on the swing while her grandmother, Gloria Peacock, rocked on the porch
and talked about her sons, good boys who loved to hunt and fish, good
fathers before they got tangled in meth. Her oldest daughter is under house
arrest for meth possession, too.

It is like this across the county, from Ponce de Leon to Esto.

"It makes you mad, it makes you angry, but all you can do is pray. And we
been going to church. I have to believe God's going to take care of it,"
Mrs. Peacock, 52, said. "I don't see how it can keep going like it's going.
To me, it's just like the devil's in here, and he knows the weakest spots,
and he hits them."

Eddie Ingram chews Levi Garrett tobacco and peppers his conversation with
"buddy" and "partner" and quick little jokes that temper his imposing size.
He is 6 feet tall and 270 pounds, with a neck like an oak stump. At 43, he
can bench-press 415 pounds.

He was working for a department in metro Atlanta when Holmes County Sheriff
Lee hired him to coordinate the meth war here in February. He grew up in
nearby Dothan, Ala., and moving back was worth the $15,000 pay cut.

On his desk at the Sheriff's Office, housed in the 70-year-old former jail
in Bonifay, Ingram keeps a Bible embossed with his name. He speaks often of
redemption, but he also knows a thing or two about sin.

If he hadn't cheated on his ex-wife, they might not have divorced.

If they hadn't divorced, she wouldn't have taken up with Ricky Kelly, a
long-haul trucker with a lengthy criminal record and an itch for meth.
Maybe his kids would still have their mama.

Now he sees his ex-wife, Cynthia S. Kelly, in the young women he arrests.
The experience has infused him with a strong sense of empathy. He sees his
kids in their kids. The guilt still eats at him.

"The mother of my young'uns was in this mess, and I seen her in the same
shape you're in right now, and we had this same conversation," Ingram told
Crystal Gainey the day he picked her up. "And she's dead now."

Ingram has spent the past 23 years as a lawman in Florida, Georgia and
Alabama. He and Cynthia met in Marianna in the early 1980s, when she was a
waiter and he worked for another department.

They married soon after, then divorced in 1989.

Their children, Ashley, now 19, and Jesse, now 16, lived with Cynthia. She
was a good mother, family said, but she changed when she married Kelly
several years later. She started smoking marijuana, then switched to meth.

Photos in Ashley's album chronicle her mother's decline: Jeans and dresses
gave way to too-tight mini-skirts and low-cut blouses. She dyed her brown
hair an unnatural red. Her face grew sunken and drawn.

Cynthia and Ricky Kelly had custody of five children - Ashley, Jesse and
three of Ricky's sons from another marriage. Ashley said her mother and
stepfather parents spent more money on drugs than food, and the kids often
went hungry.

Ashley recalled waiting in the car while her mom and stepfather spent hours
inside friends' homes, smoking meth.

Some nights, when her mom and Ricky Kelly were partying, other men came
over, and her mother spent time with them in the bedroom. Ashley, who was
10 and 11 at the time, prayed a lot.

"I didn't want to tell on her because she's my mama," she said. "I knew
what my daddy did to other people who did drugs, and I didn't want him to
do that to her."

It ended one day in late 1997. Her mom and Ricky Kelly hadn't come home the
night before, and Ashley went to a neighbor for help when she felt ill.
When her mother got back, she was incensed.

"She beat the crap out of me (that) morning and she beat the crap out of me
all day long," said Ashley, a sophomore at Chipola College.

Another relative called Ingram, who came for the children. He won custody
soon after.

Until then, Ingram hadn't realized how heavily his ex-wife was using drugs,
and says his children hadn't told him they were mistreated.

In May 1998, he and Cynthia had a tearful, hourlong talk. She told him she
was hooked on meth and had traded her body for drugs. She said she wanted
to leave her abusive husband.

The next month, Ingram allowed the children to visit her for the first time
in six months. Two days later, while they waited for her to come and take
them to the beach, Cynthia ran her car into a slow-moving tractor at 60 mph
on a two-lane road near her home. An autopsy showed high levels of meth in
her system. Her car left no skid marks.

A year later, Ricky Kelly, 46, was one of 31 people arrested when police
busted a major Panhandle methamphetamine ring. He was sentenced to five
years in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute narcotics, including
meth. He gets out next summer.

Cynthia is buried in the front yard of his empty mobile home, under a pink
granite tombstone.

A tip had led Ingram and his men to Crystal Gainey's place, a white mobile
home next to a pasture outside Bonifay. Barking dogs announced the two
squad cars. Her boyfriend, Jeremy Butler, watched through the storm door,
then ran for the back.

Gainey met them at the stoop. The tipster had told police Butler was
selling meth.

Gainey acted mystified and said Butler was in the shower. She let Ingram
inside, and he found Butler in the bathroom, shirtless and angry,
repeatedly shouting "this ain't right" and demanding he get a search warrant.

Ingram led him to the front door while Sgt. Chris Hunter and investigator
John Tate searched the home. They found a small plastic bag of marijuana on
the couch, a tin of marijuana seeds and two glass meth pipes hidden in an
eyeglass case.

The residue inside was enough to charge the couple with possession.

Butler already was on probation for possession of marijuana. A deputy led
him away in handcuffs.

Gainey pleaded ignorance. She works nights and attends Chipola College by
day, so she's not home much. She said she didn't know Jeremy dealt drugs.
She didn't smoke meth.

But the deputies were unmoved. She looked like a meth user. She lived like
a meth user.

Gainey's arms and legs were reed thin, her skin sallow. Inside her home,
eight bags of trash sat by the door. Bugs buzzed around dishes spilling
from the kitchen sink.

Crusty droppings from her boyfriend's young pit bull covered a 2-month-old
newspaper on the kitchen floor.

Gainey would cry one minute and curse the next. She kept apologizing for
the mess and offered deputies a drink of water.

Outside, Hunter searched her turquoise Ford Explorer. He walked inside with
a purple SpongeBob SquarePants makeup case.

"Is this yours?" he asked.

Gainey nodded. He removed a small glass vial with a silver screw top, a few
tiny crystals clinging to its side. Crystal meth.

She asked if she was going to jail. "Yes ma'am," Ingram said. Then he
offered a way out: Get treatment, stay out of trouble and charges could be
withheld.

Gainey buried her hands in the gray sleeves of her sweatshirt. She is
studying agricultural science, and hopes to be a farmer or extension agent.
This summer, her father put her in a detox program in Panama City. She
didn't want to return.

"I'll check in with you. I'll do whatever. I just don't want to go
long-term. I want to be with my mama," Gainey said.

Ingram led her to his car, and asked if her mom used drugs.

"Lord no," she said. "She don't even cuss. She don't smoke. She goes to
church every Sunday."

"You need to take her hand and go with her." * * *

Twenty minutes later, as the sun dropped over the cemetery, they pulled
into the gravel lot of Mount Olive Baptist Church, a little white country
church on a hill. Ten young men and women sat at folding tables inside the
concrete block annex.

Ingram rapped on the door and called for Jeana Griffin.

You'd never know it to look at her now, the pretty young woman in jeans and
a white Dixie Cowgirls T-shirt. This time last year, Griffin was one of the
county's biggest meth cooks, drifting from one decrepit mobile home to
another, strung out and paranoid and always on the run.

Now she's limping toward recovery. As leader of a 12-step program for meth
addicts at Mount Olive, she's trying to pull others along.

She began using meth in the mid 1990s, and quit when Ingram arrested her in
April for manufacturing methamphetamine. Along the way, her addiction
destroyed her marriage, broke her grandfather's heart, scrambled her mind.
She lost her state insurance license and now works the counter at Hardee's.

Griffin, 33, pleaded guilty to six felony counts and was sentenced to two
years' house arrest and two years' probation. An electronic ankle bracelet
monitors every move.

When Ingram called for her, Griffin stepped into the evening cool and shook
Gainey's hand, then hugged her. The younger girl began crying, and they
walked away to talk and smoke, their shoes crunching in the gravel. Griffin
led her inside.

Holmes County Sheriff Dennis Lee, prosecutors and the local circuit judge
subscribe to the notion that treating meth users is more productive than
locking them up.

"I know their families, and where they come from, and most of them come
from good families," said Lee, 45, elected six years ago.

Rather than charge her, Ingram called Gainey's mother after the meeting. He
spent two hours with them in his office, explaining what Gainey must do to
avoid drug charges: Move home with her mother, attend the 12-step meetings,
check in weekly, stay in school, hold a job.

If she stumbles, she will be charged, and could face a year or two in
prison for possession of meth and marijuana. About 20 first-time offenders
have gotten similar chances in recent months, but none have made good.

Most are now at the county work camp in stripes, picking collards in the
jail's lush garden and washing the county's cars.

Roughly nine of 10 meth users relapse within six months, experts say.
Kicking the drug is especially hard in rural areas, because they can't
escape the people and places they associate with meth.

Last week, Crystal Gainey stopped by the Sheriff's Office to check in. It's
been a month since Ingram knocked on her door, and she says she's doing
well. Her skin is rosy and she's gained a few pounds. She turned 20 last week.

She moved in with her mom 15 miles west of Bonifay, where she tends a
horse, goats and chickens. She and her mother attend Chipola College
together four days a week. Three nights a week they deal cards at the dog
track in Ebro. They go to church Sundays, and Gainey has faithfully
attended the 12-step meetings at Mount Olive. Her boyfriend, Jeremy Butler,
22, is serving a 90-day jail sentence for violating probation and faces new
charges, including possession of meth. Records show he's been arrested at
least three other times on drug, burglary and assault charges.

Ingram and Gainey's family have warned Crystal to stay clear of him
whenever he's set free. But Gainey isn't making any promises. They had
lived together for 10 months, and she misses him. Really, she says, there's
no reason to break up.