NORTHERN EXPOSURE

(continued from part 1 of 2)

The top person in charge of tackling Aroostook County's methamphetamine
problem is an MDEA agent named Darrell O. Crandall Jr., the agency's
supervisor for the region. A stocky, soft-spoken 32-year-old, Crandall says
he left the sheriff's department to join MDEA in 1989 because he was
"looking for a challenge." In methamphetamine, he says, he has found that
challenge.

Crandall's MDEA unit is based in Houlton, in an office on the second floor
of the town's old brick county courthouse. Since 1995, he says, MDEA has
arrested close to 50 people on methamphetamine-related charges in
Aroostook. Very few of these busts, he emphasizes, have been for simple
possession. The vast majority have been for distribution, like the arrest
of Richard Leyva, a 27-year-old Presque Isle resident originally from
Texas, who led authorities to the record seven-pound seizure that
flabbergasted local officials in May. "We've never seized seven pounds of
cocaine, I can tell you that," Crandall says.

As is common in the drug-enforcement trade, much of Crandall's intelligence
about the Aroostook meth scene comes from undercover informants and
incarcerated suspects looking to swap information for reductions in prison
time. As a result, most of MDEA's meth cases have been built piecemeal over
a period of months, sometimes years. For example, the case against the
Bridgewater Group began in 1995, when MDEA agents, who were looking for an
indoor marijuana crop, obtained a search warrant for a home in Mars Hill.
Inside the home, agents found about three ounces of a white powder that
they assumed was cocaine, but that turned out to be meth. The MDEA kept the
investigation open, and more than a year later, when reports of increased
methamphetamine began to hit the Mars Hill-Bridgewater-Houlton area, they
began paying attention to individuals from the original pot case and
discovered that some were bringing meth into Aroostook via air mail. In
September 1997, agents arrested Randall Hunemuller at the Mars Hill post
office after he picked up a package from California containing slightly
less than a pound of methamphetamine. The arrest of Hunemuller, who was
from California, led to the arrests of five other people involved in the
operation, including Karla Davis, who was waiting in a car at the
post-office parking lot, and Hunemuller's brother, Richard, the supplier,
in La Mesa, California. Authorities believe that before they were caught,
members of the Bridgewater Group were responsible for distributing more
than six pounds' worth of methamphetamine, an amount with an estimated
street value in the hundreds of thousands.

But since the arrests of the Bridgewater Group, it appears that Aroostook's
meth demand has only increased. Part of the problem is that the
methamphetamine trade, both nationally and in northern Maine, is very
difficult for authorities to tackle: unlike cocaine and heroin, which are
typically dominated by specific crime organizations and international
smugglers, meth is furnished by an extremely diffuse web of distributors
including everyone from mom-and-pop dealers and dorm-room chemists to large
cartels. Darrell Crandall says that Aroostook's meth trade behaves more
like a small business than a major drug-running network, and it's hard to
put a finger on who's doing what. Dealing operations are small, typically
confined to a few individuals who are using as well as selling. There is no
street-level dealing to speak of in Aroostook; exchanges are usually
arranged in advance, and made in homes and cars, away from public view.
(The going rate for meth in Aroostook is $100 a gram, which is consistent
with the national average, and is also the local price for cocaine -- but
again, meth's powerful high makes it a more attractive buy for many users.)

For a tiny law-enforcement team working in an extremely rural area,
stopping a meth wave can be like trying to catch a housefly between two
fingers. Crandall's biggest problem is his lack of personnel. In addition
to himself, there are only two other MDEA agents in Houlton. (Crandall also
oversees Washington County to the south, where another agent is posted.)
Though Crandall and his agents do get assistance from state and local
police, the US Border Patrol, MDEA agents from other jurisdictions, and
even an occasional US DEA agent (and Crandall is quick to praise all these
contacts), he's desperate for help.

"I have the technology," he says. "I have the knowledge base, as do the
people working for me. I have the cooperation of [other law-enforcement
agencies]. I simply need people to get the job done."

It's clear that the drug fascinates Crandall even as it torments him. When
I visit him in his office one day, he goes to an evidence room, takes out a
red toolbox, unlocks it, and pulls out a large plastic bag. Inside is a
thick pile of methamphetamine, most of it in large, irregular crystalline
chunks. It looks like a bag of dirty, oversized rock candy. Crandall opens
the bag and tells me to take a brief whiff. The meth has a putrid,
chemically intense odor, not unlike the rotten-egg scent of burning sulfur.
"Smells terrible, doesn't it?" he says.

I ask Crandall to describe the meth addicts he's encountered. "Well, most
of them have almost uncontrollable movements," he says. "Their head and
arms will flail, they'll pick at particular spots on their arms and face,
they'll sweat and rock back and forth on their feet. And if it's extended
use, they're paranoid."

Crandall shakes his head. After nearly five years of fighting meth, he's
not about to give up, but he knows that interdiction alone won't solve
anything. He expresses concern that the new drug problem isn't getting
enough attention, and that there aren't enough rehabilitation outlets for
Aroostook residents. And most of all, he worries that the locals who try
meth don't know what they're getting into. "There are people who use this
drug who believe their intentions are genuine," Crandall says. "There are
people who take [meth] thinking it will make them work harder -- laborers
who figure they can squeeze out four to five extra hours a day don't think
twice. They may be right in the short term, but they are terribly
misinformed about the eventual consequences."

But why Aroostook? After all, the rest of New England has largely been
spared from the national meth epidemic. Even Crandall is puzzled. "I get
that question all the time from law enforcement, from members of the
media," he says, "and I don't have an answer."

It's true that Aroostook County possesses many of the same characteristics
as meth-saturated regions elsewhere in the country, particularly the
midwestern states. It is rural, economically deprived, almost exclusively
white, and home to a sizable blue-collar population. Like people in the
Ozarks or on the Nebraska plains, people in Aroostook can suffer from
loneliness and isolation (what Mark Nelson describes as the "nothin' to do"
problem), which can contribute to substance abuse. And meth is no ordinary
substance; users share an almost cult-like devotion to the drug. "These
people hang together, despite extraordinary crises going on, in order to be
close to the drug," says Donald Carson of Aroostook Mental Health. "It's a
very intense network of dealers and users that is very difficult to break
apart. It's just as intense as the drug itself, and it's a very seductive
lifestyle that is difficult to extract yourself from."

But how did the drug get there in the first place? There are plenty of
theories. Some believe that Aroostook's current meth wave started with
itinerant truckers, who brought the drug up Route 1 and turned locals on to
it. Crandall agrees that some methamphetamine came into the county with
truckers, but he thinks that they weren't the main suppliers and certainly
aren't nowadays. "We know that in the past, meth has been brought here by
commercial transport -- trucks -- and I'm sure that continues," he says.
"But the vast amount of seizures are not coming in by [that method]."
Others suspect that methamphetamine is coming into the area through Canada,
with which Aroostook shares a border hundreds of miles long. Smugglers have
often brought illicit drugs, especially marijuana, from Canada into this
country (and vice versa), and though the US Border Patrol maintains a
presence in the region, nearly everybody I speak to in Aroostook claims to
know a place -- a lake, a wooded patch, a dirt road -- where it is easy to
sneak across the international line. One afternoon, Crandall drives me to a
bumpy dirt road on the outskirts of Houlton, less than a mile away from the
official border checkpoint at the end of Interstate 95. Stopping his car,
Crandall points to a small opening between an overgrown thicket of trees.
"See that clearing?" he asks. "That's Canada."

To date, however, no border smugglers have been caught with methamphetamine
in Aroostook. Neither is there any clear evidence that the drug is being
manufactured locally; the last meth-lab seizure in Maine was in 1990, when
agents raided one in Washington County.

This doesn't mean that local production isn't happening, however. It is no
secret that methamphetamine chemists favor rural locations, not only for
their low levels of law enforcement, but also because it is easier to hide
the drug's telltale odor. (For dealers, this problem is not insignificant:
in other parts of the country, drug-enforcement agents are training
everyone from cable-television installers to Avon salespeople to recognize
what a clandestine meth lab smells like.) Crandall, in fact, was part of a
Maine contingent that recently attended a DEA workshop on clandestine lab
detection in Quantico, Virginia. When I ask Crandall what he would say if
he had to bet whether there's a lab somewhere in Aroostook, he doesn't
hesitate: "Yes."

"We can't preclude the fact that someone might get the idea to make this
illegal substance, given the fact that all the chemicals are available at
your neighborhood Wal-Mart," says Roy McKinney, the MDEA director.

Still, authorities believe that most of the methamphetamine arriving in
Aroostook is coming by air mail, as in the Bridgewater Group case. (Citing
its ongoing investigation into the recent Richard Leyva case, the MDEA
declines to say where the seven pounds of meth it seized in May came from.
They won't even specify where the meth was found, saying only that Leyva
"led" them to it.) Though sending drugs through the mail has its risks --
shipments can't be especially large, and packages must be carefully sealed
and disguised to avoid detection -- it's relatively easy for a West Coast
or Midwest supplier to send a shipment to Maine.

If most of Aroostook's methamphetamine supply is coming by mail, it
undermines the theory that the region was somehow predisposed to a problem
for reasons of geography or economy. After all, every community has access
to air mail. Every community, blue-collar or white-collar, has potential
meth addicts. The reality is that chance -- random bad luck -- may have had
as much to do with meth's invasion of Aroostook as any other factor. For
example, the leader of the Bridgewater Group came from California. He knew
about meth, his brother sent it to him, he got hooked, other people got
hooked, and the drug took off. The same chain of events could have happened
anywhere, and as the national experience has shown, it does happen almost
anywhere. In evaluating the methamphetamine problem in northern Maine, the
proper question to ask isn't "Why?" It's "Why not?"

That said, it is still uncertain whether Aroostook's methamphetamine trade
is an aberration or a sign that the drug will work its way into the rest of
New England. Certainly, some experts see it as a danger sign. "It's still a
locally based problem, but as the Midwest has found out, it didn't take
very long to spread across the country from California to Iowa and
Missouri," says Jay McCloskey, the Maine US Attorney. Pamela Mersky-Hay of
the DEA says that federal agents are keeping close watch on developments in
northern Maine, as well as in the rest of New England. "We don't want to
get hit like we've gotten hit in the West and Midwest," she says. "We don't
want to see the human wreckage we've seen elsewhere in the country."

But authorities are concerned that many residents don't realize how
devastating meth's spread could be -- and sometimes, people aren't aware of
the problem at all. When I call the Maine Office of Substance Abuse, I talk
to a researcher who is intimately familiar with other drug trends but
positively surprised by the news of Aroostook's meth crisis. Even in
Aroostook, crank has yet to achieve critical mass as a public-health issue.
Almost everyone I speak to in the county is aware of the recent meth
seizures and arrests, but many of them seem to think that the drug is just
a fad, that the current trouble will be short-lived. A number of people
attribute the drug's rise in the area to transients -- and postulate that
when the out-of-towners are gone, methamphetamine will go too.

"There's some denial that it isn't as bad as they've heard," says Mark
Nelson, the Houlton counselor. "There are some people who think [users] are
just weekend warriors, stuff like that. But it's bad. It's all bad."

Just ask Scott Hafford, the man who tried to rob the supermarket in Fort
Kent nearly two years ago. Before he started using meth, Hafford says, he
was married with three children and gainfully employed as a construction
worker, skilled in everything from carpentry to roofing to steel work.
Drugs were not a part of his life. "My idea of a good time was renting
movies and staying home with the kids," he says. "Of course, I drank my
beer, but I was kind of a homebody."

Hafford says he was working one day when someone introduced him to
methamphetamine. The person told him that if he just took a little snort of
crank, he could "work 18 hours a day, drink all night, and go right back to
work the next morning," Hafford recalls. At first, he got some meth for
free, but soon, he started paying. Within weeks, Hafford says, he found
himself hooked. He plunged into Aroostook's burgeoning methamphetamine
scene -- a netherworld he recalls as "paranoid and gun-toting, with
everyone suspicious of everyone," and marked by weekend crank parties where
"90 out of 100 people were using."

Barely six months after he first tried meth, Hafford attempted his botched
armed robbery in Fort Kent. After bingeing on crank for five days, he says,
he went up to the northern town after abandoning an attempt to settle a
score with a drug dealer in Bangor. To this day, Hafford says he intended
simply to go get beer, but wound up trying to rob the place instead.
Details are still sketchy to him -- "I was on autopilot," he says -- but he
remembers telling the employees to open the safe, and then waving his gun
around when they couldn't. He even remembers the young store employee who
told him he shouldn't leave empty-handed. "I'm on my way out the door, and
the kid says, 'You didn't get nothing -- you should at least get some
beer,' " Hafford says. "I admire that kid."

Hafford practically chuckles at his lack of skill as a robber. "It was as
poorly planned as a project could have happened," he says. But he doesn't
attempt to minimize his crime or its impact on the people in the market
that night. "I scared the hell out of them people," he says. "And I'm very
sorry about that."

Hafford pled guilty to robbery, use of a firearm during the commission of a
federal crime of violence, and possession of an unregistered short-barreled
shotgun. His pastor, his boss, an aunt, and a town official all testified
at his sentencing hearing in Bangor, and Hafford wrote letters apologizing
to all the workers in the market, but it didn't help much: he got 10 years.
People familiar with the case are disturbed by what they describe as an
honest life that spiraled out of control because of drugs. "I've been doing
this work for 12 years," says Bangor attorney Terence Harrigan, who
represented Hafford. "And of all the cases I've tried, this one bothers me
the most." Says US Attorney McCloskey: "He wasn't necessarily a choirboy,
but he had a life."

Scott Hafford, born and raised in northern Maine, is now a resident of the
Federal Correctional Institution in Fairton, New Jersey. He has eight years
left on his sentence, with no chance of parole. His wife has divorced him,
and his contact with his three teenage children is sporadic. He says he
doesn't think about what he's going to do when he gets out of prison,
because that time is too far away. Right now, Scott Hafford says he can't
think about freedom. But he does think about methamphetamine. "In total
honesty, I still miss that stuff," he says. "It gets that kind of hold on
you."