Meth: A New Drug Crisis Is Growing In Southwest Virginia (2 of 4)

'WE'RE FIGHTING AS HARD AS WE KNOW HOW,' AUTHORITIES SAY

Local Police Say They Need More Resources, Including Drug Investigators
Dedicated To Meth Cases, To Fight Effectively.

In a matter of minutes, everything went horribly wrong. Shawn Michael
Wright of Max Meadows spent last Halloween cooking methamphetamine at
Brandie Marie Martin's apartment in Building 105 of the Meadowview complex
in Pulaski. But the caustic smell emitted by the heated chemicals had
caught a neighbor's attention. "The guy next door, he kept knocking and
asking, 'What's that smell?' They said it was nothing," said Kim Gill,
Meadowview's property manager. But in those few minutes it took to answer
the door and appease a neighbor's question, the chemicals being heated on a
gas stove burner caught fire. Wright and Martin fled without a warning to
anyone, and the flames they left behind burned with a force hot enough to
melt the refrigerator and the cabinets. "It looked like a little miniature
bomb had gone off," Gill said. And the smell was overwhelming. "Like
burning plastic with a little salt thrown in? I don't know how to explain
it," she said. "But once you smell it, you never forget it." The nine other
families living in the building escaped without injury. Police soon caught
up with Wright, 22, and Martin, 23, and charged them each with
manufacturing meth, conspiracy and two counts of child neglect since two
young children were in the apartment as they cooked the drug. Attorneys had
worked out an agreement in which Wright would plead guilty to the drug
charges, but he backed out of the deal last Wednesday 7.21 in Pulaski
County Circuit Court. The agreement would have sent him to prison for two
years and ordered some kind of restitution for the fire damage, Pulaski
County Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Sandy Wright said. Attorneys have
not set a new date for the case to go to trial. Martin's case is scheduled
schedule to go before a grand jury Aug. 4 and to trial Aug. 9. Building 105
has been rebuilt as part of a complex-wide renovation project that was
already under way when the fire occurred.

It is expected to reopen to tenants this week, Gill said. Even so, the fire
served as a stark jolt that meth had arrived in Southwest Virginia - and
that communities were ill-prepared to stamp out its assurgence. "Law
enforcement is constant action-reaction," said Wythe County Chief Deputy
Doug King. "We can't do anything pre-emptive." Wythe County, for example,
has 30 deputies who work patrol, investigations investigators and in the
schools.

Those 30 deputies deal with 29,000 people spread across 480 square miles
and use 105 miles of interstate highway, King said. And meth isn't the only
drug they encounter, although, at the moment at least, it is the worst. It
helps when merchants or citizens can tip off police to customers buying
large quantities of the chemicals used to make meth, including writing down
license plate information and clothing descriptions. The Meadowview fire
spurred Pulaski police to start educating property owners and local
merchants about the dangers of meth and what they can do to help stop its
spread.

Police have since taught two such classes to merchants and landlords, said
drug investigator Lt. John Leeper. Last month, Attorney General Jerry
Kilgore spread the message statewide, announcing the creation of Virginia
Meth Watch, an initiative to train merchants statewide to spot potential
meth cooks as they're buying ingredients. It all helps keep the pressure on
the cooks and dealers, Leeper said. "As long as we can keep them changing
what they're doing, they'll mess up," he said. "And if they mess up, we're
going to catch them." In Smyth County, authorities meet regularly to share
meth intelligence. Smyth County Commonwealth's Attorney Roy Evans has also
convened a special grand jury with the power to subpoena witnesses and
interview them under oath. "We just started putting together information on
people who were, for lack of a better word, targets," Evans said. The last
round of indictments, delivered in late June, helped sheriff's deputies
shut down four active meth labs. No one knows how deeply meth will spread
into Virginia. The drug has spent the last 20 years making its way here
after being popularized by the West Coast Hells Hell's Angels biker gangs
in the mid-1980s. West Coast states are still engaged in their meth battle.
"I guess I'm hoping, in the back of my mind, that it's going to run its
course," Evans said. "We're fighting it as hard as we know how." But local
police say they need more resources, including drug investigators dedicated
to meth cases, to fight effectively. Those dollars just aren't available to
rural law enforcement offices, so they make do with what options they do
have. "The biggest thing we can do is we have our drug programs in the
schools to let them know this is not the life you want to live. The schools
are our primary contact with the future drug users," King said. Meanwhile,
investigators look nervously to neighboring states like Tennessee, where
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration DEA busted 499 meth labs last
year, and West Virginia with its 61 labs found, and wonder what tomorrow
will bring in Virginia. The realty of the meth epidemic, for police, is
that they can only enforce the law. They can't fix the problem alone, King
said. "It's up to society as a whole to find another way," King said.
"There has to be a blend of education, rehabilitation and enforcement.
That's the only way."