METH INVADES RURAL TOWNS

LEXINGTON, Neb. -- Here in the heart of America's Heartland, healthy corn
crops, juicy steaks, amiable neighbors and winning Cornhusker football
teams are the pleasures that have long kept people happy.

But recently, folks have experimented with a different pleasure. This one
is illegal.

Methamphetamine, a stimulant long prevalent on the East and West coasts,
has become a new pastime. Take a population admired for rural innocence,
mix in a powerful, available drug that breeds violence, and the results are
stunning.

Here in Lexington, population 9,000, gang violence is on the rise as
members of Mexican cartels descend to meet the drug demand.

Meth traffickers have been arrested in tiny towns such as Dannebrog, with
just 320 residents. And in equally small places, police are stumbling upon
makeshift labs where people have tried to combine household and
agricultural chemicals -- often in dangerously toxic mixtures -- to
manufacture methamphetamine.

"It has overwhelmed us," says Glenn Kemp, an investigator with a Nebraska
drug task force. "It wasn't hard to believe when Iowa got a methamphetamine
problem. Or Kansas or Missouri. But Nebraska? South Dakota? Here's
wholesomeness. Well, come to our communities. We're no different from
anywhere else, even if we're less populated."

It may seem like the nation's most unlikely drug war, but authorities have
an explanation for the rise of methamphetamine. Over the past decade,
low-skill meat-packing plants have sprouted in small towns, drawing
outsiders seeking jobs. Police say their arrival has allowed drug-peddling
gangs from Mexico and California to infiltrate farm towns where, a decade
ago, they would have stood out.

At the same time, recipes for homemade meth have become accessible on the
Internet. An important ingredient -- anhydrous ammonia -- is used by
farmers in irrigation and is widely available. Users can steal anhydrous
ammonia from farm storage tanks, pick up other ingredients (such as cold
medication and lithium batteries) at a convenience store, and cook meth for
themselves.

"It was curiosity that made me start," says May, a 36-year-old Nebraska
native and recovering user from Lexington who asked that her last name not
be used. She says she used to buy meth from a pig farmer who manufactured
it himself. Friends were using meth, and May couldn't resist. "They had
energy and company all the time," she says. "They were happy and always
laughing."

A mother of five, May quit using last January. In February, she was served
with a federal indictment on charges of drug distribution. Months earlier,
she had put a relative who wanted to sell meth in touch with a buyer in
Lexington, not realizing her actions opened her to charges of drug
distribution. She expects to escape jail time because she has cooperated
with prosecutors.

"I know I've taken a lot of drugs off the street," she says with an air of
pride. "But Lexington is probably the meth capital of Nebraska. It's in the
schools. It's everywhere."

Meth has spread to Spalding, a Greeley County community of 582 residents in
the Sandhills region of central Nebraska.

In October, Spalding's part-time police officer and a sheriff's deputy
recovered chemicals used to make methamphetamine in a farmhouse. Excited by
their discovery -- and unaware that trained drug officers use body suits
and oxygen masks when handling such materials -- the officers put the
chemicals in their patrol car, took them to the village hall and spread
them out on a table.

When a special drug enforcement team reached Spalding the next day, they
shut down the hall and the town's main street for 14 hours, disposed of the
contaminated table, ordered the carpeting scrubbed and told the county
attorney to throw away his clothing because he was standing in the room for
too long.

"There are only three officers in our county," says Paul Asche, the sheriff
in Greeley County. "We sometimes struggle to get the day-to-day stuff done.
We don't have resources to spend manpower on drug investigations."

In 1997, authorities in Nebraska uncovered two meth labs in the state. In
1999, they found 38, and they discovered 35 last year. They look at
neighboring states and see how the problems can multiply. Iowa officials
found 85 labs in 1997, and then 500 in 1999. In Kansas, the number of
discovered labs jumped from 99 to 492 in the same span.

The Nebraska Crime Commission reports that meth-related arrests by state
drug task forces shot up by 160 percent between 1996 and 1999, from 278 to
720. County attorneys throughout Nebraska say they are being forced to
ignore lesser offenses -- such as growing marijuana -- that may have
brought stiff sentences and made headlines a decade ago. Crime labs across
the state are struggling with a backlog of meth to examine.

In 1996, Congress labeled portions of the Midwest a High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area (HIDTA) and began funneling $8 million a year to Iowa,
Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and the Dakotas to combat meth. But the money is
spread thin. Nebraska's share, $1.1 million, has been enough to launch a
successful awareness campaign and hire a handful of drug experts who
crisscross the state. But many county sheriff's departments -- some amount
to a single sheriff -- and the Nebraska State Patrol are often alone in
dealing with meth.

"This is a whole new drug, with a whole new type of people," says Nancy
Martinez, who coordinates Nebraska's arm of HIDTA from the U.S. attorney's
office in Omaha. "Most of our deputies didn't go to the FBI academy. They
aren't trained. They didn't know what to do with it."

There are towns in Nebraska that have been wholly transformed by the meth
problem, farm communities with streets now home to gangs, jails full of
users and county attorneys flooded with drug cases.

Lexington sits along Interstate 80, which has become an artery for
smuggling meth across Nebraska. The sheriff's department made 102
meth-related arrests in 1999 and 67 through September of last year. But
meth, which can cause fits of paranoia or violence, has been linked to
other crimes, including seven homicides since 1994.

Residents of Lexington have been caught selling meth in bars, farm fields
or the parking lot at Wal-Mart. There are now four confirmed street gangs
in town, all connected with documented gangs from California, Mexico or
Guatemala. The last homicide in Lexington, in November, was gang-related.

Elizabeth Waterman, the county prosecutor in Lexington, says her office is
overloaded with meth cases and she wants to hire two more lawyers. But
applicants are turned off when they find out about the workload.

"In the pre-meth days, you saw investigations into things that don't seem
serious now -- like marijuana distribution," Waterman says. "I don't want
to give the impression that it's OK. But it used to be that it was a real
big deal if someone was found to be in possession of a pound of marijuana."

Nebraska authorities have seen widespread meth use in high schools and are
concerned it is spreading to pupils as young as 12 or 13. At Lexington High
School and Lexington Middle School, counselors are planning to show a video
called "Methamphetamines: The Icy Death."

Throughout the state, though, meth is described as an ill that can be
cured. Law enforcement authorities like to point out that, despite an
apparent lack of narcotics experience, they were able to handle a milder
outbreak of cocaine use in the 1980s.

Randy Morehead, a criminal investigator with the Nebraska State Patrol,
says he has seen small-town cops go up against drug traffickers, and
actually likes their chances.

For example, Morehead recalls how it took old-fashioned policing to nab a
meth trafficker in St. Paul, Neb., (population 2,009) last year. A box
containing 80 needles, tiny bags with meth residue and an envelope with a
ZIP code scrawled on it was found in a field. An officer in the St. Paul
Police Department traced it to a house -- with help from his father, who
works at the post office.

"Working a small town has its advantages," Morehead says. "We just called Dad."

In Lexington, Fernando Barranco, a substance-abuse counselor, says many of
his clients are employees at the meat-packing plant. They used the drug --
innocently, they assumed -- for energy to work extra hours and gain
overtime pay.

Barranco also has treated housewives on farms who heard meth was an "upper"
and took it to impress demanding husbands, lose weight or stay alert to
care for children. Within months, they became so dependent they were
trafficking to make money to buy more, he said.

Still some Nebraskans pretend that the meth problem isn't there. At the
Coney Island Cafe, three blocks from the county jail in Grand Island --
with a population of 42,000, one of Nebraska's larger cities -- owner Gus
Katrouzos prefers to talk about the five generations of children who have
come for his famous hot dogs and malts than to discuss any drug problem.

"Good people still ignore it," he says. "You don't talk about it. You just
go to church and pray a lot."