NORTHERN EXPOSURE

The Most Dangerous Drug Of The '90S Comes To Northern New England. Is
Massachusetts Next?

On a chilly autumn night, Scott Hafford, a man with no criminal history,
got his guns and went to rob somebody. It was a few minutes past 9 p.m. on
November 13, 1997, when Hafford, a 31-year-old construction worker, drove
to the Paradis Family Supermarket in Fort Kent, Maine, a small logging
village on the US-Canadian border. He pulled on a ski mask, grabbed his .44
Magnum revolver, and stuck a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun in his belt. He
forced his way into the supermarket, which had just closed, and demanded
that employees open the safe. He threatened to kill anyone who didn't
cooperate. It soon became clear that the employees weren't capable of
opening the market's safe. Flustered, Hafford yelled at the workers to lie
down on the floor. He then took a young male employee by the shoulder and
led him out the market's rear entrance, pausing briefly to have the
employee run back and grab him two cases of Budweiser. Hafford must have
thought he was home free, but when he got outside, he was confronted by an
armed Fort Kent patrolman, who screamed at him to put down his weapon.
After a brief, tense standoff, Hafford gave up, whereupon he was tackled by
police.

Fort Kent police chief Kenneth Michaud, who arrived at the market moments
later, says he found the handcuffed suspect in a nearly delirious state.
Hafford, who was from the town of Bridgewater, 100 miles to the south, told
police he was high on crank -- slang for methamphetamine, a powerful
synthetic stimulant that causes intense feelings of euphoria, as well as
paranoia, and is sometimes tied to violence. Hafford, it turned out, had
been bingeing on crank for five straight days without sleep.

"He was crazier than a cut cat," Michaud recalls. "He was not himself at all."

Indeed, Scott Hafford -- a husband and a father of three -- was a hard-core
meth addict. He also proved to be a sign of the times. Over the past few
years, the deepest reaches of northern Maine have witnessed a startling,
unprecedented burst of methamphetamine trafficking and use. Meth arrests
and seizures, virtually unheard-of in the region a decade ago, have jumped
dramatically. So have meth-related crimes. In May, drug agents working in
Aroostook County (where Scott Hafford lived) seized seven pounds of
methamphetamine, with an estimated street value of more than $320,000 -- a
haul local authorities believe is the largest meth bust in New England
history. Meth now easily eclipses cocaine and heroin as the county's top
hard-drug priority.

"Methamphetamine is a serious drug issue for northern Maine, and
potentially for all of Maine," says Jay McCloskey, the United States
Attorney in Bangor. "It's one of the most disturbing criminal trends I've
seen in my 20 years as a federal prosecutor."

Northern Maine's methamphetamine problem troubles authorities for a number
of reasons. The first is simply that meth is there. The drug -- which is
known alternately as speed, crank, chalk, go-fast, and, in its smokeable
form, crystal meth, glass, and ice -- has long been abundant along the West
Coast and in the Midwest, where law-enforcement officials describe a crisis
comparable to the crack-cocaine chaos of the late 1980s to mid '90s. But it
has not deeply penetrated most of New England. Last year, for example, the
Massachusetts State Police seized less than one-fifth of a gram of meth. By
comparison, in Aroostook County -- a region with a population smaller than
that of Cambridge -- 3305 grams of meth had been seized this year as of May.

What's more, the problem is continuing to grow. Every time one meth ring is
stopped, another pops up. Law-enforcement authorities in the region say
that lack of resources and personnel leaves them ill equipped to handle the
mounting crisis. "It presents huge problems for our agency," says Roy
McKinney, the director of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency (MDEA), the
state's chief drug-fighting outfit. And meth's impact is not limited to the
police blotter. The drug has torn apart families, friendships, even
workplaces. Substance-abuse counselors in the Aroostook region report a
rising number of meth-dependent clients -- men and women, blue- and
white-collar workers, young adults and old people. The drug has also
infiltrated Aroostook's adolescent population. "There are a select few
[teens] who are using it," says Mark Nelson, a local counselor who works in
several Aroostook-area high schools.

No one is certain how methamphetamine has gained a foothold here. Some
people believe it's coming via air mail; others think it was brought by
truckers, by loggers, or by smugglers traveling down from Canada. It's also
quite possible that the drug is being manufactured locally; though a
clandestine meth lab hasn't been found in Maine for years, it's hard to
find a local person who doesn't think there's someone out there in the
forest cooking the drug. And almost no one thinks the methamphetamine trade
will stay limited to Aroostook. Officials believe it's only a matter of
time before meth begins arriving in heavy volume in cities such as Augusta
and Portland and, eventually, Boston. Potentially, it adds up to a major
regional drug problem. Because, to paraphrase an old sporting clichE9, you
don't stop methamphetamine. You can only hope to contain it.

Aroostook County is the northernmost territory in Maine, almost two hours
up from Bangor and spanning a long stretch of the US-Canadian border
running east from Quebec to New Brunswick. At 6400 square miles, Aroostook
makes up more than one-fifth of Maine and is bigger than Connecticut and
Rhode Island combined. Almost all of it is rural. Potato farms,
pastureland, and logging forests are punctuated by small townships huddled
along US Route 1 -- Houlton, Bridgewater, Mars Hill, Presque Isle, Caribou,
Madawaska, Fort Kent. Winters in Aroostook tend to be cold and long, but in
summer, when the lake-laden region offers prime camping, fishing, and deer
and bear hunting, it becomes a tourist destination. In 1997 and '98,
Aroostook gained some unexpected notice when the band Phish played a series
of Woodstock-like rock concerts at the abandoned Loring Air Force Base.

Aroostook faces many of the problems that typically confront rural areas:
isolation, poverty, and an ever-thinning population. More than 100,000
people lived in the county as recently as 1960, but that number has now
dwindled to around 77,000. The biggest recent hit came in 1994, when the
military base closed, eliminating 8000 jobs. Unemployment hovers around
seven percent, about one and a half times the national average, and wages
are low: the per capita income in Aroostook in 1996 was less than $19,000.
In recent years, the local economy has begun to stabilize as the sagging
farming and logging industries have been supplemented by factory and retail
jobs, and by a small surge of professionals arriving from urban areas.
Houlton, the county seat, is home to a recently expanded Smith & Wesson
plant that makes all the company's handcuffs and .22-caliber pistols.
Houlton also has a Burger King and a Wal-Mart. Still, like the rest of
Aroostook, it has a decidedly small-town pace. There is one movie theater,
one video store, and an auto-parts shop at the town line called Hubcap
Heaven. Mennonite families sell vegetables out of the parking lot of a
vacant pizza parlor. The motto on the masthead of the local newspaper, the
Houlton Pioneer Times, reads: THE ONLY NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD INTERESTED IN
HOULTON, MAINE.

It may not be the liveliest of places, but residents praise the Aroostook
region for its unhurried way of life, its neighborly intimacy, and its
affordability -- a handsome four-bedroom Victorian house in downtown
Houlton can be had for around $50,000. "I think they're the friendliest
people you ever want to meet," says Allan Bean, a native Texan who was
Loring's last base commander and now serves as Houlton's town manager.
"It's the way the world was -- the way people were in the 1950s. You should
lock your car, but you don't need to. You know all the kids. Everyone knows
everyone -- and everyone looks after everyone."

Crime in Aroostook is generally very low -- weekly police reports feature
minor incidents such as hunting without a permit, petty larceny, and
drunken snowmobiling -- but illicit drugs have been part of the local
landscape for some time. Historically, the chief drug (besides, of course,
alcohol) has been marijuana: local farmers hiding crops in the middle of
the woods, roommates harvesting plants in the basement. Cocaine, crack,
heroin, and LSD made occasional appearances. Small amounts of
methamphetamine, too, had trickled in and out of northern Maine for years,
but the supply was fairly limited. A trucker or a local laborer might be
arrested for simple possession, or a small-time dealer might be busted, but
that was about the extent of it.

The current methamphetamine problem in Aroostook is a totally different
beast. Since about five years ago, when police first began noticing
methamphetamine in the region, the supply has steadily increased. In 1995,
agents from the MDEA (a separate operation from the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration, or DEA) seized 106 grams of meth in Aroostook
County, enough to supply more than a couple hundred users (one gram of meth
can supply eight to 20 "hits"). No meth was seized in 1996, but in 1997,
the total rose to 429 grams. The next year, 788 grams were seized, and 1999
- -- thanks to the big bust in May -- has seen a haul of more than 3000 grams
so far. Those sums are quite small compared to the totals in meth-infested
regions like the West Coast, but they are not insignificant, either. "Seven
pounds is a big case in anyone's book, whether it's Maine or California,"
says McCloskey, the US Attorney. "And the thought of it in Aroostook is
startling, to say the least."

And it appears that Aroostook's seizures are unrivaled elsewhere in New
England. Though the US Drug Enforcement Administration's New England field
office reports that methamphetamine use has been rising in this area over
the past few years -- a clandestine lab was seized in Westport,
Massachusetts, in January 1998, for example -- it's fair to say that it's
not yet common in this part of the country, where cocaine, crack, and
heroin remain the top problems. "We've not seen as severe a meth problem as
we've seen in other parts of the country," says New England DEA
spokesperson Pamela Mersky-Hay. "However, the availability is increasing."
Tom Clark, a Boston-based epidemiologist who monitors New England drug
trends for the National Institutes of Health's Community Epidemiology Work
Group, agrees that meth is a small part of the overall local drug
landscape. "There's been very little activity," Clark says. "What's going
on in Maine looks like one of those unpredictable blips."

It can be difficult for a person from New England to appreciate the extent
of the methamphetamine problem that plagues much of this country. But make
no mistake: in many parts of the US, meth is the illegal drug of the 1990s.
Fueled by well-organized Mexican cartels (which have largely supplanted the
outlaw biker gangs that once dominated the trade) and a burgeoning network
of clandestine domestic labs, crank has positively exploded this decade in
Hawaii, California (where authorities seized 1006 meth labs last year),
Oregon, Washington, and southwestern states including Arizona, Nevada, and
New Mexico. Recently, the meth trade has rammed headlong into the Rockies
and the nation's heartland, and the drug is now commonplace in Nebraska,
South Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, and Kansas. In Kansas, for example,
authorities seized four clandestine methamphetamine labs five years ago;
this year, they had seized 238 by the end of May.

This crisis has confounded state and local authorities and has frustrated
federal officials, who continue to funnel money toward the problem and to
rewrite drug laws so that they punish meth suppliers more severely. In
1996, President Clinton signed the Comprehensive Methamphetamine Control
Act, which, among other things, gave authorities more money to detect and
seize clandestine labs. Two years ago, US drug czar Barry McCaffrey
designated Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota a High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) for methamphetamine; North Dakota
was added in February of this year. Though meth use is reported to have
stabilized and even diminished slightly in hot spots like Southern
California, there is no indication that the drug is on the decline overall.
An advance copy of the 1999 findings of NIH's Community Epidemiology Work
Group concludes that "there is strong evidence that [methamphetamine] will
continue to be a problem in West Coast areas and to spread to other areas
of the United States."

"I think you can use the word 'epidemic,' " says Michael Gorman, a drug
epidemiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who has spent
several years studying the methamphetamine problem in the US. "We've seen
increases [in use] on the West Coast on the order of 1000 percent, and the
drug continues to move along."

One reason meth has taken off, Gorman believes, is that the drug is equally
appealing to both suppliers and users. Suppliers like the fact that crank
- -- which, unlike cocaine or heroin, is a purely synthetic drug -- can be
manufactured relatively cheaply from ingredients available over the counter
in a pharmacy or supermarket. Most of today's meth is based on
pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in many cold medications, and
synthesized with acrid combinations of acids, ether, phosphorus, lighter
fluids, and household solvents such as Drano. The process for making meth
is highly volatile and dangerous -- more than a few clandestine labs have
exploded, killing the chemists inside -- but many dealers consider the
payoff worth the risk. A modest batch of methamphetamine that costs several
hundred dollars to make can fetch a street profit in the tens of thousands
of dollars.

As for drug users, they are attracted to methamphetamine for its cheap and
powerful high. A stimulant that affects the central nervous system, today's
methamphetamine is not to be confused with the pill-form amphetamines, such
as "black beauties," that were used by everyone from sweatshop workers to
grad students to disco divas from the late 1960s to the early '80s. The
current versions, which can be snorted, smoked, or injected, are vastly
more powerful. Like cocaine, it's coveted for the euphoric, adrenaline-like
rush it provokes -- but unlike a cocaine high, which will typically last
less than half an hour, a meth high can last several hours. Some people
start using meth thinking it will help them stay awake through a long day
of work, only to encounter side effects that include dramatic weight loss,
sleeplessness, and intense feelings of paranoia. It can also be brutally
addictive, and it's not uncommon for meth addicts to move from snorting or
smoking to injecting, which puts them at risk for HIV and hepatitis
infection. Serious addicts, called "tweakers," will binge to the point
where they do not sleep at all for several days. (Methamphetamine has also
been associated with violence, but that relationship may be exaggerated; a
recent study by the US Department of Justice found that meth users were
actually less likely to commit violent crimes than other drug users, though
that conclusion was roundly rejected by authorities in the field.)

Substance-abuse counselors say they are amazed by methamphetamine's power.
"You see it in the intense paranoia and cravings," says Donald Carson, the
director of Aroostook Mental Health Center, a private nonprofit
organization that operates six outpatient facilities in the county. "That's
the one thing that stands out for me -- the cravings, and the total
devastation that occurs in [users'] lives as they try to keep their supply
going. You have people who run up $10,000 to $15,000 credit-card debts,
they're having these [meth] parties, they're overdosing. They're living
literally right on the edge."

Given the hyperbole and scare tactics that have characterized much of the
federal government's drug policy over the past two decades, it's easy to be
cynical when officials lament an emerging drug trend. The same can be said
of the media's treatment of drugs: it's hard to separate the truth from the
exaggerated fiction. But there's little doubting meth's impact in
Aroostook. "I haven't seen this kind of character disintegration since when
I was in the service in the 1970s, when heroin was a big problem in the
military," says Carson. "You'd see young people coming over at the age of
18 and getting addicted, and then they are sneaking around, stealing things
from other kids . . . when I see young people using meth and moving on and
injecting it, you see a lot of the same character destruction."

And while meth is known to be popular among blue-collar white males,
particularly in the Midwest and California's central valley -- where it is
sometimes referred to as the "poor man's coke" or "white-trash crack" --
studies have shown that the drug's user population now crosses all
demographic lines. ("White-trash crack" is a particularly misguided term,
given that the majority of crack users are themselves poor and white. In
Aroostook County, methamphetamine is being used by people with white-collar
jobs; one local substance-abuse counselor says he's seen a growing number
of male and female nurses trying meth. Use among women in general is up,
too. "And they [women] aren't just snorting it, either -- they're injecting
it," says Mark Nelson, who works out of Aroostook Mental Heath's office in
Houlton. "This one lady was telling me it got to the point where she was
shooting up every day. She was a total physical wreck, and she couldn't do
anything."

Not surprisingly, the drug is also catching on with teenagers. Nelson, who
advises students in several local high schools, says that the teenage user
population in northern Maine is limited to a few kids, but there's plenty
of adolescent curiosity. "If you say `crystal meth' [to kids], they'll know
what you're talking about," he says. "They all know someone who's using it."

Over a couple of days in Houlton, I spent time talking with a number of
teenagers, and though few of them report first-hand experience with meth,
almost all say they've heard of it and know people who've tried it. This
may not point to a teenage meth problem, but it does show how the drug has
become part of the community discourse. If you were to ask a group of
teenagers in Boston, Newton, or Brookline about drugs, for example, almost
all of them could tell you ad infinitum about pot, coke, or heroin, but if
you mentioned crank, most of them would have no idea what you were talking
about. This is clearly not the case in Aroostook.

Karla Davis, who lives several miles from Houlton in the town of
Bridgewater, knows how easy it is to get swept up in the meth scene. Davis,
a mother in her late 30s, became involved a few years ago in what
authorities describe as one of the region's first and biggest
methamphetamine-dealing operations. Busted in 1997, six members of that
operation -- known as the Bridgewater Group -- have pled guilty to various
federal counts of methamphetamine trafficking. Davis's boyfriend, Randall
Hunemuller, got 22 years in a federal prison. Davis, who says she simply
got entangled in her boyfriend's business, was sentenced to 90 days in jail
and 120 days of home confinement.

Now back in Bridgewater, Davis says she is clean and has withdrawn from
Aroostook's drug world. But when she was involved, Davis says, there was no
shortage of people wanting to buy some crank. "It seemed that anyone who
tried it got interested in it," she recalls. "Seemed like it was everyone
- -- a lot of people, not just high-school dropouts. Businesspeople. And I'm
sure there were kids who were getting their hands on it."

Davis is uncomfortable talking about her brush with the illicit-drug trade.
But she perks up for a moment when asked what she liked about meth. "I
always thought it was great," she says matter-of-factly. "Better than
cocaine or any of that other stuff. But my boyfriend had a big problem with
it. And I just got caught up with my boyfriend."

(continued in part 2 of 2)