SALT LAKE CITY BECOMING AN UNLIKELY BATTLEFIELD IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Editor's note: While the Tribune has covered Salt Lake City's
methamphetamine culture before, the following is offered as a look at how
other parts of the country view Utah.

Pioneer Park was named for the clean-living founders of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The neatly groomed common of shade trees and
footpaths is six blocks from Temple Square, world headquarters of the Mormon
faith.

It is also a prime location for scoring drugs.

"They're here if you want them," said Kathy Kennedy, 48, an admitted
alcoholic and former heroin addict who has dabbled in cocaine and
methamphetamine.

Unemployed for years, she was killing the afternoon in the park, as she does
most days. "There's every kind of drug. This isn't different than any other
city."

Salt Lake may be the last place one would expect to find a thriving
narcotics culture. After all, the teachings of the Mormon Church, which
remains Utah's dominant institution and is the wellspring of its
law-and-order politics, forbid even coffee and cigarettes.

But the drug scourge has not spared the Utah capital, for reasons that
Mormon leaders concede may be beyond the church's powers of spiritual
persuasion. They include the same earthly temptations, family failings and
youthful rebelliousness that bedevil any community.

"I wish we knew why these things happen," said Harold Brown, management
director of the church's social services programs. "We have our share of
problems. We wish we didn't."

Over the past few years, authorities in the greater Salt Lake area have
reported sharp increases in the trafficking of heroin; cocaine; marijuana;
methamphetamine, also known as crank or speed; and so-called club drugs like
ecstasy and GHB. The proliferation of meth laboratories has been especially
dramatic.

"Meth is all around," said Kennedy, who moved here from Oregon last fall.
Bone thin and bleary eyed, her face pitted with sores, she pointed toward a
distant corner framed by maples and elms. "You can buy meth right down
there. You can buy anything."

Utah ranks among the top 10 states for total meth labs, and No. 1 for
"speed" cookeries per capita, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration.

In the early 1990s, the DEA and local police agencies raided about a
half-dozen labs a year in the Beehive State. They busted 266 in 1999 --
mainly in the Salt Lake region -- and are on a pace to at least equal that
number this year.

The typically closet-sized labs are turning up throughout the city and
county, from downtown hotel rooms to suburban garages to foothill shanties
along the emerald Wasatch Mountains.

Outside Salt Lake, meth makers favor the deep recesses of Utah's national
forests. The state has also posted record confiscations of speed smuggled
into the country by Mexican dealers.

"I didn't think there would be this much of a problem here. All I knew about
Salt Lake City was the religion and things like that," said Keith, a Salt
Lake DEA investigator who joined the federal bureau in 1998, after 15 years
as a Dallas police officer. He asked that his last name be withheld because
he works undercover.

The 38-year-old agent, who was wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, fought off
a yawn. He had been up since 4 a.m. to kick in the door of a suspected meth
lab. The target was a small house in a quiet, blue-collar neighborhood
within a mile of the DEA building.

"There's a lot more meth here than in Dallas," said Keith, taking in the
building's third-floor view of temple spires, the skyline's signature
feature. "It was surprising."

The magnitude of the meth epidemic also surprised Lisa Jorgensen, a state
children services worker assigned to the Salt Lake police. Her job is to
rescue youngsters from drug-infested homes. In Salt Lake County, 65 percent
of children taken from their parents by the state come from meth dens,
according to the Utah Department of Human Services.

"They live in just deplorable, chronic, horrible neglect," said Jorgensen,
who was hunched over a computer at the downtown police station. "We get 20
to 25 cases a month."

The DEA has expanded its Salt Lake staff to root out the meth labs. Federal
prosecutors have also cracked down. They are zeroing in on meth peddlers who
use Utah's sparsely inhabited highway corridors to ship the drug from
Mexico.

Since 1996, the U.S Attorney's Office in Salt Lake has prosecuted nearly
1,000 Mexican nationals for drug crimes, most involving meth.

"We're the crossroads of the West [for] Mexican meth," said U.S. Attorney
Paul Warner.

Meth aside, Utah is not afflicted with the level of drug-related offenses
found in much of the metropolitan West. Its violent crime rate is roughly 35
percent below that of Western states and the nation as a whole.
Nevertheless, the Utah trend for all drugs has been troubling.

Seizures of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and GHB are up by
substantial margins, the DEA says. Ecstasy and GHB top the list, soaring
from 3,034 doses two years ago to 13,586 in 1999 and 120,827 in the first
five months of this year.

"We hate to see it," said Salt Lake police Capt. Roger Winkler. "Utah has
always been above this. It hits home."

Ecstasy and GHB have exploded despite a Salt Lake club scene that is
virtually dormant by non-Utah standards. The Mormon influence translates
into tough limits on alcohol sales. Most bars require customers to buy
memberships before imbibing. And they are often restricted to serving
low-alcohol beer.

But there is a sprinkling of nightspots in and around Salt Lake's hotel
district, where construction is booming in anticipation of the 2002 Winter
Olympics. The blue laws have done little to keep ecstasy and GHB out of the
hands of young revelers.

"People can always find a connection," said Jan Hansen, a 20-year-old
college student who was sipping a latte at Cup of Joe, a downtown
coffeehouse.

"Lots of things are frowned on here, but people still use them," said
Hansen, a Salt Lake native. He sported a silver stud in his lower lip and a
pair of earrings. "I've tried 'ex.' "

His buddy and fellow student, Garrett Smith, 21, also told of sampling
ecstasy. "At my high school here, there were only 20 good Mormons," Smith
said. "The rest were, like, jocks who just wanted to get stoned."

Salt Lake's drug counselors know the type. They have seen the demand for
treatment spike 20 percent since the mid-1990s, driven largely by meth users
under age 35. Clinic operators say that while most speed addicts are
lower-income white people, the meth plague has cut across the socioeconomic
spectrum.

"I don't know why we're seeing proportionately more meth here than other
places," said Bruce Jacobson, director of the Cornerstone clinic near
downtown. "We wonder about that ourselves.

"Obviously, we live in a more conservative area. But I can't say with any
confidence or certainty what the influence of the Mormon Church is on the
drug problem here."

Barbara Hardy, who heads Salt Lake County's drug abuse programs, considers
the church a mixed blessing in her mission. Its anti-drug strictures, she
says, have undoubtedly steered countless young people away from narcotics.

Then again, Hardy added, the church's preeminence may have fostered a false
sense of security. Utah's population of 2.1 million is 70 percent Mormon, a
figure that has been fairly constant for four decades. About 60 percent of
the Salt Lake region's 1.2 million residents belong to the church.

"It's easier here to look the other way and say the drug problem doesn't
happen," said Hardy. "Denial is a wonderful thing."

Church spokesman Dale Bills sat down to discuss drugs in a paneled
conference room at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. The gem of marbled
columns and stained-glass ceilings was once the Hotel Utah. It's across Main
Street from Temple Square, whose six-spired worship hall is Salt Lake's
tangible heart and soul.

"Our message is the same, the doctrine is the same, the principles are the
same," said Bills, referring to the church's stance on drugs. "We set a high
standard, but not all kids are perfect."

The church offers its own drug treatment programs, including 57 weekly
group-counseling sessions in Utah. "It's sort of our take on AA," said James
Goodrich, the church's welfare director for northern Utah.

Attendance is modest, however; 15 to 20 people turn out at each meeting.
Brown, the Mormon social services executive, said the church has yet to see
a marked upswing in demand for help.

"It has not been reported to me that we have any dramatic increases," he
added. But he acknowledged that admission rolls at secular clinics might
paint a darker picture.

Don Mendrala, now in his fourth year as chief of the DEA's Salt Lake office,
says he had envisioned a much brighter picture when he transferred here
after stints in St. Louis and Chicago.

"I thought this would be a nice, quiet community," he said. His desk phone
was ringing. Night had begun to fall, a busy time. "I'd been completely
unaware of the problems."

The phone bleated away. Mendrala had to iron out the details of a predawn
raid set for the following morning. "We want to get 'em while they're
sleeping," he said.

It was another meth lab. Not far from Pioneer Park.