ACROSS THE RURAL MIDWEST, DRUG CASTS A GRIM SHADOW

LOVELL, Wyo. a " Tucked under the snowcapped wall of the Big Horn
Mountains, with its cattle and horse ranches and large Mormon church, this
could be "that sleepy little town everyone wants," said Nick Lewis, the
police chief. Except for one thing. Lovell, population 2,264, and two
nearby towns have become infested by methamphetamine.

In the past two years, about 70 people from this small slice of
northwestern Wyoming have been convicted of buying or selling
methamphetamine, with more arrests and convictions expected soon, the
authorities say. Methamphetamine-related crimes now consume half the time
of Chief Lewis's seven-officer force. Burglaries have mushroomed, one
suspected witness's house was firebombed and the State Department of Family
Services has taken children away from parents so incapacitated by
methamphetamine that they forgot to feed them. Many people have simply quit
work and ended up selling drugs to pay for methamphetamine, a powerful
manufactured stimulant that produces bursts of energy and euphoria but can
lead to depression, violent paranoia and brain damage. Methamphetamine is
also draining precious money out of Lovell, which has already lost three of
its four groceries, its Sears, its movie theater and two of its few factories.

What is happening in Lovell is happening across much of Wyoming, the least
populated state in the country, where methamphetamine use is now more than
twice the national average, according to the federal Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration.

Methamphetamine use and crime are also overrunning rural counties in Iowa,
Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota and the Texas Panhandle, law
enforcement officials say.

In Iowa, rapidly growing methamphetamine use is behind a surge in thefts of
tractors and other heavy farm equipment, as well as burglaries in vacant
farmsteads, said Todd Johnson, the Audubon County sheriff. The
methamphetamine trade has thrived in Audubon County for a number of
reasons. Methamphetamine is easy to cook locally, Sheriff Johnson said,
because his county of 450 square miles has only 10 law enforcement
officers, and one of the drug's main ingredients a " anhydrous ammonia a "
is an agricultural fertilizer that lies about in abundant supply in bags on
isolated farm fields, almost waiting to be stolen.

Home-cooked methamphetamine is now so common in Iowa, and so toxic, that
the Legislature has made manufacturing it around children a form of child
abuse. In its first count, the Iowa Department of Human Services found
almost 500 children who were exposed to cooking methamphetamine in 2002.
Similarly, in Colorado, police officers and firefighters in rural
communities often scrub down young children who have been crawling on the
floor in houses where their parents have been cooking methamphetamine, said
Susan Dreisbach, a research anthropologist at the University of Colorado at
Denver. In Nebraska, crime has increased fourfold since methamphetamine
became a serious problem in the mid-1990's, as migrant workers brought in
to work in the meatpacking plants began dealing the drug, said Glenn Kemp,
the drug investigator for the Adams County Sheriff's office in central
Nebraska. "We never had a big crime problem in Nebraska till meth," Mr.
Kemp said. "But now we have a lot of stabbings and shootings in our little
towns and every homicide goes back to meth." Law enforcement officials in
North Dakota tell a similar story. "Meth is the single most serious law
enforcement issue that North Dakota is facing, and has ever faced," said
Wayne Stenehjem, the state attorney general. The number of methamphetamine
labs seized in North Dakota jumped to 97 in 2002 from zero in 1998 and will
be higher again when the 2003 numbers are tabulated, according to the Drug
Enforcement Administration. Tim Gillespie, the police chief in Emerado,
N.D., a town of 500, said he had to draw his gun more last year alone than
in his previous 20 years in law enforcement because of
methamphetamine-related arrests in which suspects pulled weapons. To the
experts, methamphetamine is both a symptom of rural decline, as people give
up on faltering farms and factories, and a cause that makes the decline
worse. In this dual role, methamphetamine acts much like crack did in big
cities in the 1980's, said Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at
the University of California at Los Angeles.

But on Main Street in Lovell, people do not talk about the ravages of
methamphetamine.

"We lie to ourselves," said Pat Crank, Wyoming's attorney general. "We say
Wyoming is God's country. We have that big sky, and those mountains. We
can't have meth."

Becky Hultgren, a 43-year-old optical assistant in Lovell, knows the bitter
truth. She still remembers the day her children came home from high school
and said their classmates had told them, "Your aunt is the coolest person
in town." To Mrs. Hultgren, that was not a compliment. She said that her
sister, Colet Dover, 41, was a methamphetamine addict who had been giving
drugs to her teenage sons and selling it to other students.

Ms. Dover had been fired from her job as a nurse for stealing painkillers.
In early October, she was sentenced to seven years in federal prison as
part of a joint federal, state and local investigation that has resulted in
the dozens of convictions here.

Statistics on drugs in rural areas are sketchy, because law enforcement is
spread thin across these vast parts of the nation. But the available
figures do tell a story.

From 1995 to 2002, drug abuse arrests fell 23 percent in cities with a
population of 250,000 or more, but rose 21 percent in rural counties,
according to a study by James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at
Northeastern University, using F.B.I. data. Similarly, for youths 12 to 17,
the highest level of drug abuse is in rural counties, according to a 2002
household survey done for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration. There is also relatively little research on why
methamphetamine has become the drug of choice in the rural West and why it
is continuing to surge in popularity.

Bruce Mendelson, a researcher with the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division of
the Colorado Department of Human Services, thinks part of the reason is
that the wide open spaces in the West make it easier to set up underground
labs to cook methamphetamine, a chemical stew.

Methamphetamine is also cheaper than cocaine, Mr. Mendelson said, and its
high lasts 8 to 16 hours, compared with a couple of hours for cocaine. "For
people in rural areas, doing hard-working blue collar jobs in a bad economy
trying to earn a few extra bucks, meth helps you stay up longer and work
longer," he said. Federal surveys have consistently shown that
methamphetamine is largely a drug of whites, the less affluent, and those
living in rural areas and west of the Mississippi, said Professor Kleiman
of U.C.L.A.

Methamphetamine's appeal to the less affluent makes towns like Lovell
particularly vulnerable, because of the profound demographic changes that
Wyoming is undergoing. The state is growing older faster than any other
state, said Jonathan Schecter, executive director of the Charture Institute
in Jackson, Wyo. "Basically, Wyoming is in a demographic death spiral," Mr.
Schecter said. "For the first time, Wyoming now has more people 35 and
older than there are 34 and younger."

As the number of school-age children has plummeted, four high schools from
smaller towns around Lovell have been consolidated into one. And the
decline is continuing. The number of students in the remaining high school
in Lovell shrank to 160 this year from 194 in 1999.

The result of this change, Mr. Schecter said, is that people in their 20's
and 30's left behind in places like Lovell tend to be less educated, often
high school dropouts, and work at low-paying jobs or not at all. Most of
those convicted from the Lovell area fit this description, said Kurt Dobbs,
the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation of the Wyoming
Attorney General's office.

Another similarity between the methamphetamine problem in Lovell and in
states like Nebraska and Colorado, law enforcement officials say, is that
the dealers are often Mexican migrant workers, many of them illegal
immigrants, who came to work for low wages on farms or in meatpacking
plants or mines. In Lovell, violent crime has not jumped with the advent of
methamphetamine, as happened in many cities with crack. But property crime
has skyrocketed, as addicts commit burglaries or break into cars.

Ms. Dover wrote bad checks, ran up the debt on her credit cards to $60,000
and spent a $90,000 settlement she received after her husband died in an
industrial accident, said her sister, Mrs. Hultgren. Then there is the
personal toll. Ms. Dover's two sons, now in their early 20's, have their
own addiction problems to overcome, Mrs. Hultgren said.

Last year the sisters went back to the small town in southern Utah where
they were born into a Mormon family for their grandmother's funeral.
"Relatives kept asking me, where's Colet?" Mrs. Hultgren said.

"I said, 'This is Colet, right here,' " Mrs. Hultgren said. "But they
couldn't recognize her; the drugs had aged her so much."