METH ENFORCEMENT IS SPREAD THIN

Officials Meet At A Statewide Summit To Brainstorm Solutions.

CLACKAMAS -- State police, whose ranks are thinned by budget cuts, retirement
and new obligations for Homeland Security, have less than one-third as many
troopers searching for methamphetamine labs today as two years ago, officials
said Thursday.

That means fewer drug labs are found and destroyed, said state police
Superintendent Ron Ruecker, speaking at a statewide "methamphetamine summit."

In the first such gathering in Oregon, police and social workers met to create
solutions to the growing meth epidemic in the state, where an estimated 116,000
people out of a population of 4.1 million use methamphetamine.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Crime Prevention Council
sponsored the two-day summit in Clackamas. The summit marked the 10th such
event held in states across the West.

Springing first from rural labs in Southern California, methamphetamine have
spread north and east during the past two decades, and production has dispersed
to thousands of tiny, low-tech labs, participants said.

That trend is reflected in lab seizures in Oregon. Police seized fewer than 20
in 1990; by 2001, they seized 591, said Chuck Karl, director of the state's
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.

The seizures dipped to 529 last year.

The more dramatic drop came this year.

According to statistics compiled this week, police have seized 285 labs and
expect to end the year with at least 100 fewer than in 2002, Karl said.

"Does that mean we're getting a handle on the meth problem? I don't think so,"
Karl said. "The state's economic woes have impacted arrests of drug abusers."

The Oregon State Police had assigned 40 troopers to drug task forces in
2001-02; now, only 12 work exclusively on drug task forces, said Detective Ed
Mouery, another participant at the summit.