RURAL AREAS FIGHTING DRUGS

Police Call Problem 'Beyond Epidemic'

Prentiss, Miss. --- The trophy houses, with wrought-iron gates and
grand-columned entryways, keep popping up on little country roads here, in
clearings in the piney woods and near doublewide trailers. Sometimes, there
is a Mercedes or two in the driveway.

In the affluent suburbs of Boston, New York or Dallas, these fake chateaus
might belong to successful doctors, lawyers or software company owners. But
Prentiss, a small town in south-central Mississippi, has no industry or
affluent professional class in the conventional sense. The last sizable
factory moved to Mexico three years ago, leaving an unemployment rate of 25
percent.

Instead, the police say, these houses belong to drug dealers made rich by a
flourishing business in crack, methamphetamines, marijuana and OxyContin,
the prescription painkiller. They are the most visible manifestation of an
explosion of rural drugs and crime that is overwhelming local law
enforcement agencies and bringing the sort of violence normally associated
with poor neighborhoods of big cities. The upsurge has been felt across the
United States from Maine to Oregon and from Georgia to Texas, even as drug
use in most cities has been declining.

In December, for example, Ron Jones, one of five members of the Prentiss
Police Department and the son of the police chief, was shot to death as he
entered an apartment to serve a search warrant for drugs.

It was the most recent of 14 homicides in the last two years in Jefferson
Davis County, which has 14,000 residents, giving the county a homicide rate
of 50 per 100,000.

That is higher than the rates of Detroit, Washington and New Orleans ---
cities that regularly have the highest homicide rates in the nation.

Nationwide, while the rate of arrests in drug crimes has fallen 11.2
percent in cities with more than 250,000 residents over the last five
years, it has risen 10.5 percent in rural areas, according to the FBI.

Even more striking, from 1990 to 1999, the last year for which figures are
available, the percentage of drug-related homicides tripled in rural areas
but fell by almost half in big cities.

To measure the problem another way, a continuing survey of drug use among
junior high and high school students by the University of Michigan has
found that crack is now more widely used among eighth-, 10th- and
12th-graders in rural areas than among those in metropolitan areas.

Methamphetamine use is now highest in rural areas among all three grades,
and heroin use is about equal in urban and rural areas, the survey found.

The spread of drugs in the countryside is uneven, the experts say, with
heavy concentrations of certain drugs in some counties.

In Washington County, for instance, at the far northeastern corner of
Maine, prosecutions in crimes involving OxyContin are 10 times what they
were in 1998, say law enforcement officials, who estimate that at least
1,000 of the county's 35,000 residents are addicts.

"It's gone beyond the epidemic stage," Sheriff Joe Tibbetts said. "I can't
think of a family in Washington County that hasn't been scathed by it in
some way."

His officers' families are among those who have been affected, Tibbetts said.

One reason for the growth in rural drug problems, federal officials say, is
that aggressive prosecution in cities has led dealers to seek safety in the
farms and forests of rural counties, which have far fewer law enforcement
officers.