METH STRAINS POLICE IN MIDWEST

Authorities See A Drug Epidemic In Rural Counties

HILLSBORO, Mo. -- The detectives were relaxing over fried pork rinds
when they saw a car turn into the driveway of a farmhouse they had
just raided. The car rattled past a Confederate flag, past a skull
and crossbones, and headed for an overgrown yard where several
addicts had been cranking out the illegal drug methamphetamine. The
detectives exchanged glances. They ducked behind a truck.

When the car stopped and the driver got out, they rushed him.
"Randy!" Detective Darin Kerwin exclaimed in mock surprise. "I
thought you were trying to clean up."

"Oh, man," the driver said, sweating. "Oh, man." Rummaging through
the back seat, Kerwin pulled out a bag crammed with decongestant
pills -- a key ingredient for manufacturing meth. "Oh, man," the
driver said again. He banged his head on his car trunk. "I'm dead."
In fact, he would be released within hours, just as he had been the
last time these officers arrested him at a meth lab, and the time
before that. Swamped with meth cases, the crime lab that serves
Jefferson County is six months to a year behind in processing
evidence. That is not unusual. A decade after meth took hold in the
heartland, the inexpensive, highly addictive, home-brewed stimulant
is straining rural law enforcement resources to the breaking point.

The Polk County Jail in central Iowa is so packed with addicts that
the sheriff sends the overflow out of state, at a cost of $5 million
a year. Indiana's state crime lab has such a huge backlog of meth
cases that the governor has appealed for help from chemistry
graduate students.

In central Missouri, almost every case of child abuse involves meth.
Social workers in Franklin County keep a log of parents under
investigation and the circumstances involved; this spring, it read:
Cocaine. Meth. Medical and physical neglect. Meth. Sexual abuse.
Meth. Meth. Manufacturing meth. "It becomes the only work you can
do," said Corporal Jason Grellner of the Franklin County Sheriff's Department.

Meth is not just a Midwestern drug. It is popular among club hoppers
in Miami and gay men in New York City. It poses a challenge for law
enforcement in cities such as Phoenix, Sacramento, and Honolulu,
where two of every five men arrested test positive for meth.

But it is in the Midwest that the drug has most severely tested the
justice system, in part because sheriff's deputies, jail wardens, and
crime lab technicians in rural counties do not have the resources or
the experience to deal with a drug epidemic. Officers struggle to
subdue addicts so high on meth that even a police Taser gun will not
stop them. They complain of a justice system clogged with so many
meth cases that it can take a year after an arrest for prosecutors to
file charges.

About two-thirds of the US meth supply comes from big labs run by
organized crime. In the Midwest, most of the meth is made at home, a
few ounces at a time, in makeshift labs heaped with toxic, highly
flammable chemicals. To enter an active lab, a detective must wear a
hazardous materials suit, a respirator, and a $2,500 self-contained
breathing apparatus. Once the investigative work is done, deputies
must guard the site until cleanup crews arrive. That can take up to 36 hours.

In a rural county with just a few deputies on duty each shift,
baby-sitting a lab overnight -- much less for several nights -- can
paralyze a department. Though the White House acknowledges that meth
presents "a unique problem" for law enforcement, President Bush has
proposed cutting the two main grant programs for rural narcotics
teams, one by 56 percent and the other by 62 percent, according to
John Horton, associate deputy director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy.

The administration plans to focus instead on the big meth labs in
Mexico and along the border. With a "belt-tightening budget," that's
the most efficient way to run the war on drugs, Horton said.

Steve Dalton, who heads a drug unit in southwest Missouri, said: "If
those cuts go through, they're going to wipe us out. Meth is a
totally different drug from everything we've seen. It's extremely
stressful on law enforcement." In the farm country of eastern
Missouri, Commander Gary Higginbotham sometimes longs for the days
when a roadside patch of marijuana was considered a major drug threat.

These days, he commands a squad of 12 detectives, including the men
who raided the farmhouse in Hillsboro, about 40 miles south of St.
Louis. The squad often works double or triple shifts. Last year, they
shut down 313 labs. "I've never seen anything like this drug,"
Higginbotham said. "I don't want to use the word 'overwhelming,' but
it's nonstop."

Higginbotham listened from his Ford Explorer as a woman with pills
pulled up next to an informant at a gas station.

"I got 600 here," she said. "Don't forget about me when you get done,
all right?" "I won't," the man said. He handed her $85 in exchange
for a bag stuffed with cold tablets.

"Be careful," she said. "Be careful yourself," he responded.

At that, five detectives swarmed in, surrounded the woman, and
grabbed the pills. "Someone isn't going to be making meth today,"
Higginbotham said. "At least not with these pills."

"We can't catch them all," said his deputy commander, Detective
Derrick Blankenship. "All we can do is inconvenience them as much as possible."