METH TAKES ROOT IN WESTERN N.C.

Folks Trying To Beat Spread Of Drug Use Hidden In Hills, Hollows

BOONE - Mark Shook says he's fighting a war in this mountain town -
complete with explosions, abandoned children and an enemy that will
not give up.

Mark Shook is Watauga County's sheriff, and for the past year, he and
others have tried to beat back the spread of methamphetamine through
the hills and hollows of western North Carolina.

"Meth is choking this town," Sheriff Shook said recently, moments
before taking a call about yet another raid on a possible meth lab.
"We are fighting a war - and it's going to spread. I've never seen
anything like it."

Meth is a highly addictive and potent powder "cooked" from such common
ingredients as ammonia, lithium from car batteries and pseudoephedrine
from cold tablets. After snorting, eating or injecting the drug, users
experience rushes of energy and euphoria.

"You feel like Superman," said David Mclemore, a former addict who now
counsels substance abusers here. "You can get addicted the first time.
And then it takes more and more and more to get high."

Popularized by bikers and truckers in the late 1980s, meth and its
makers have migrated eastward from California and other Western states.

They've increasingly taken root in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the
border between North Carolina and Tennessee. The latter state led the
South with more than 1,150 of the nation's roughly 8,000 meth lab
seizures last year.

Boone, a town of 13,500 that is home to Appalachian State University,
is surrounded by rugged terrain that offers meth makers the kind of
protection it once provided to moonshiners. The open, isolated spaces
diffuse the pungent, nauseating odors that are the meth labs' giveaway.

"You can't cook when you're living on top of each other in a city,"
Sheriff Shook said.

Last year, 34 meth labs were seized here, and social workers removed
17 children from homes where the chemicals saturated the walls,
furniture and carpet.

Because these so-called "meth orphans" often were covered in dangerous
toxins, emergency room doctors had to decontaminate them. Their toys,
books and clothes had to be burned.

"The kids didn't always understand why they couldn't take their Barbie
with them," said social worker Chad Slagle.

Children sometimes unwittingly caused their parents' arrest. A
first-grader told her teacher how to cook meth. An older student
included meth cooking in a "How I Spent My Summer" essay.

"We call Watauga County ground zero," said State Bureau of
Investigation Director Robin Pendergraft, who is urging North Carolina
lawmakers to increase penalties for operating meth labs.

The list of problems presented by the meth boom is long.

Meth-making, with its combustible ingredients and "cooks" who often
are strung out, comes with the ever-present possibility of explosions.

Meth makers dump poisonous byproducts into sewage systems, streams and
fields. And their labs render houses uninhabitable and depress
property values in surrounding neighborhoods.

With every meth lab bust, taxpayers must spend $2,000 to $4,000 to
have hazardous materials teams and other specially trained workers
clean up the toxic mess, which includes phosphine gas, a chemical
weapons component.

The human cost also is high. Some 3,300 "meth orphans" were removed
from homes nationwide last year, authorities said.

Many have ingested meth, said industrial hygiene expert John Martyny.
"Kids crawl on the carpet, put their fingers in their mouths. They
might as well have been taking it directly."

Mr. Martyny recently led a study of meth labs at the National Jewish
Medical and Research Center in Denver. It found that meth and its
ingredients drifted down hallways and seeped under closed doors. They
saturated walls, carpeting, sofas and ventilation ducts. Even tests on
clothing fibers and the interiors of microwave ovens came back positive.

Many of the ingredients of methamphetimine are linked to cancer,
kidney and liver damage and respiratory failure.

What leads people to this dangerous drug? Boredom as much as anything,
said one recovering North Carolina addict, who spoke on condition of
anonymity.

"There's nothing to do here," said the woman, recalling how she
snorted meth for the first time at her kitchen table. She and her
husband lost all their savings and isolated themselves in their
mountain home.

She only recently regained custody of their three children after
satisfying a judge that she had been drug-free for a year.

Dr. Andrew Mason, a Boone forensic toxicologist, said the woman is a
rarity. Efforts to get meth users off the drug fail at a rate of 94
percent, he said.

"This thing is worse than heroin. It's worse than crack. And it's
going up and down highways," said Sheriff Shook, predicting its
spread, like moonshine's, to bigger cities. "That's why we're
attacking it here, now."