MIGRATING SCOURGE OF METH TAKES ROOT IN N.C.'S RUGGED HILLS

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.

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," 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," 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" were often 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 are often
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 is also 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."

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 Shook, predicting its spread, like moonshine's, to
bigger cities. "That's why we're attacking it here, now."