METH TASK FORCE FORMULATING A STRATEGY

CASSOPOLIS - "Choosing Our Battle Plan Wisely" was the bottom line in
a wide-ranging discussion Wednesday that ultimately focused on
prevention and treatment because there's only so much space in the
jails, and Cass County's is full.

By focusing on remedying the problem, citizens hope to halt the
problem instead of pushing it around the map.

Methamphetamine already affects the larger community in a variety of
ways, from putting children at risk to environmental damage and more crime.

Each pound of meth produced generates five to six pounds of hazardous
waste, posing immediate and long-term environmental health risks.

Chemicals used to make meth are toxic, yet lab operators routinely
dump waste in streams, rivers, fields, backyards and sewage systems,
which can in turn contaminate water resources for humans and animals.

Poisonous vapors produced during cooking permeate halls and carpets
of houses and buildings, making them uninhabitable.

Cleaning up sites requires specialized training and costs an average
of $2,000 to $4,000 per site in funds from already strained budgets.

The number of foster care children rises rapidly in states hit by the
meth scourge. Noxious fumes can cause brain damage. Cooking meth is
extremely dangerous. Labs often catch fire and explode.

A child living inside a home professionals access wearing haz-mat
suits could overdose from meth left out by parents, suffer from
attachment disorders or behavioral problems, be malnourished,
physically or sexually abused and/or burned or fatally injured in a
fire or explosion.

Meth labs, along with the selling of the drug, can breed crime,
including burglaries, thefts and even murder. Prosecutor Victor Fitz
said two of the three murder cases going to trial next month concern meth.

So the third meeting of the Cass County Methamphetamine Task Force
Sept. 28 debated how best to launch this battle.

At Woodlands Addiction Center, methamphetamine accounted for 10
percent of admissions in April. That's equal to crack cocaine, which
has been running that high for about five years.

The 2 1/2-hour meeting at Cass District Library was the first of
three strategy planning sessions. The next two will take place at 9
a.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, and Wednesday, Nov. 16.

Participants were guided through the prioritizing and decision-making
process by a professional facilitator, Judeth Newham of Douglas.

When it comes to meth's reputation as the "drug of despair," Newham
said, "You can't discount 'social fabric' issues. Until they start
addressing why people are using - to cope with two jobs and rising
credit card debt and societal influences - you can't disregard what
you're saying in whatever you plan."

"Aftercare - long-term follow-up - is a piece of the puzzle that our
society has been missing for 30 years from my perspective," said
Woodlands Addiction Center Program Supervisor Stephen Lehman.

Lehman, who has been working in his field for 33 years, added, "In
the past several decades, this country has put billions of dollars
into supply reduction. Since I got into this business in the '70s,
little has changed in terms of putting resources into the demand
reduction side."

In fact, Lehman said, "Funding for treatment and prevention is near
the lowest I've seen it. We need to prosecute, we need to lock people
up and we need to address everything that we target as supply
reduction, but resources for demand reduction haven't increased in
over a dozen years. It's a complex issue that needs to be addressed
from all of the different standpoints we're talking about."

"An interesting phenomenon I think is going to continue," Lehman
said. "National experts say once methamphetamine settles into an
area, it doesn't go away. Crack cocaine stabilized at about 10
percent. If the same is true of methamphetamine, now we've got 20
percent, and I think it will be higher. But we've got a stable
population that the treatment community in our area's going to have
to deal with as we move forward for I don't know how many years.

"At the same time, we've seen a reduction in primary alcohol
admissions to the lowest level I've ever seen - about 55 percent
right now. The alcohol problem is still there, but meth and cocaine
are overshadowing it. Behind it you see a rise in opiate abuse levels
- - heroin, for example. Cocaine and heroin are almost like a relief.
We hear meth addicts say, 'I finally got off meth, now I'm just doing
crack cocaine.' The other piece of this is prevention. We know what
the risk factors are to do prevention programming, but prevention
resources in Michigan have been reduced over the last decade or more.

"it's a disease of relapse, we've known that a long time," observed
Penn Township Supervisor John K. Gore, "but as a society we refuse to
address that fact."

"There's a piece of the population that is probably going to have
addictive behaviors who, if we didn't have meth, would be using
cocaine or heroin," said Bob Cochrane, executive director of the
county Council on Aging.

"In years past, we tended to see poly-substance users. But meth
addicts just focus on meth," Lehman said. "Reefer Madness portrayed
marijuana as a gateway drug. It's more gateway behavior. It's a
personality type and a genetic makeup that makes one person choose a
speed drug as opposed to a downer drug. If they hit meth, you have a
very rapid escalation of the tendencies."

Gore worries about his township's fire department. "Ninety percent of
the fire service in our county is provided by volunteers," Gore said.
"(Meth) represents a very sizable risk to them and a very sizable
increase in training and safety precautions. I'm not at all
comfortable that we are adequately addressing that at this time. In
downtown Vandalia we had a meth house (blow up), and there's our fire
department right in the center of it, and this story is being
repeated all over. Ditto on police. They need to be better trained
and equipped to deal with what's left behind. Supervision is
described as being under the state police, but the actual loading up
of debris and where they hauled it to is done by the same people who
would haul away an old chicken coop."

Chris Siebenmark, who covers three counties, Cass, Van Buren and
Berrien, for state Sen. Ron Jelinek, R-Three Oaks, offered a
"three-fold" perspective of education, resources and treatment.

"Two of our three counties (Cass and Van Buren) are in the top five
counties in the state," said Siebenmark. He said Van Buren County
Sheriff Dale Gribler estimated that 80 percent of his jail population
related to meth either directly or indirectly.

"Berrien doesn't have as much ag activity," since isolated areas with
farm chemicals to appropriate for their clandestine labs appeal to
criminals manufacturing meth, but (Sheriff) "Paul Bailey has found
some labs in Berrien, too. In the spring they found one in downtown
New Buffalo. Some of these folks aren't even discreet," Siebenmark said.

Siebenmark said average citizens read news accounts of labs being
broken up and assume the problem is being dealt with without making
any connection to how it directly affects them. "They have a stake in it."

On resources, Siebenmark said, "There is, slowly and surely, a
tendency in this state to find the dollars, but then again it's
trying to change a culture. Going away from instant incarceration to
intervention and prevention on the front end. People are finally
realizing it's a lot cheaper on the front end and a stronger
opportunity for that person, as opposed to waiting until they become
involved or an addicted user. In any given county incarceration is
the highest piece of your budget. In the state, corrections is No. 3
in our budget. Though the trend is there to pull resources over to
the front end, folks need to realize it's a tough battle."

"At the federal level, a lot of legislation is being looked at right
now," said Siebenmark, whose wife works for U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph.

"As it gets more traction in Washington, you're also going to see
more resources come down to states having problems. One plus is that
we're not as bad off as states west of here," such as Missouri and
Oklahoma. "We're learning from them. That's where the idea for the
cold medicine legislation came from. That was huge."

Third, Siebenmark said, "Is trying to find the resources for the
unfortunate end of those folks who are addicted. What do we do with
them? Where do we put them? Eighty percent go back to using again.
Looking at mental health, it was a shock to me in March of 2003 when
I first started with Ron, there was a symposium at Western Michigan.
They showed funding for mental health over the last 20 years ... it
was a flat line. If I was looking at someone's heart rate, they would
be declared dead."

"One piece of legislation Ron will get rolling that will speak to
mitigation is an idea born in Cass County," Siebenmark said. "There
were instances when family members in a home would get sick and they
couldn't nail it down. Three months of going to the doctor and not
feeling well, that home or apartment had been a lab. There would be a
requirement to disclose that at point of sale or point of rental. The
one reason it has not moved is state law right now requires DEQ
(Department of Environmental Quality) and Health to declare that
location clean and habitable again, but there were no written
standards. We've been spending a lot of time looking at standards
other states have, so when this legislation is rolled out, those
standards will be in it (spelling out) what 'clean' means."

County Commissioner John Cureton, R-Dowagiac, a former minister, said
Americans find themselves in a Catch-22 when "it comes to problems of
this nature. I'm talking about the church-state relationship. It's
essentially a spiritual problem. I believe in church-state
separation, but it puts us in a difficult situation ... yet I've seen
case after case of persons whose relationship with God has been the
cleansing factor for all kinds of practices - and that certainly
would include meth use."

Anna Sain of Lewis Cass Intermediate School District said, "I think
the problem might be a lot larger than we think. Our staff goes out
into homes and see a lot of things, but I don't know that we're
educated enough to know what people using meth look like until it's
progressed to a certain stage where we recognize it. Children coming
from those homes are greatly affected by it, not only from the
parents' point of view of neglect and abuse, but living there every
day before we clean it up as well as possible, are they pre-addicted
from exposure? I'm also concerned for the safety of our workers out
in the community."

Individual community members are strongly encouraged to attend, since
private citizens always possess some of the best common-sense
problem-solving approaches.

For more information about the task force contact Coordinator
Jennifer Lester at Woodlands Addictions Center, Vandalia, at 269/476-9781.