METH AT 'EPIDEMIC' LEVELS SAYS SPEAKER

Jack Stump, a Vancouver emergency doctor who works on the front lines
of the methamphetamine war, said on Friday that the use of meth has
reached epidemic levels.

Deschutes County Sheriff Les Stiles observed that the meth problem in
the county has accelerated.

"What's happening in less than a decade is literally an explosion in
the quantity of meth that is available," Stiles said.

Stump was a keynote speaker at the first methamphetamine summit in
Deschutes County on Friday at St. Charles Medical Center-Bend. Stiles
comments came during a panel discussion at the conference.

The dangers of the drug, Stump said, are enveloping more than just the
lives of those who are using it.

He recounted the case of Becca Harkin, a high school student
kidnapped, raped and murdered by a meth user; and the case of an
80-year-old couple, broadsided in their car by a man driving high on
meth.

"He didn't even know he had been driving a car that day when we told
him he had been in a car accident," Stump said.

For rural counties like Deschutes, meth is a pervasive and difficult
problem to combat. Most labs are small scale "mom and pop" operations
that use store-bought products and pots and jars found around the
home, said Liz Lawrence, a lab site safety officer for the Central
Oregon Drug Enforcement (CODE) team.

That's why Tammy Baney, chairwoman of the Deschutes County Commission
on Children and Families, along with three others representing the
National Guard, the Deschutes County Prevention Office and the La Pine
Community Action Team, decided to convene the summit.

"It really was, 'Hey, we should do this,'" Baney said.

The county's meth problem was further complicated by the passage of
the North American Free Trade Act, or NAFTA, Lawrence said. It has
allowed meth and other drugs to be freely shipped across borders and
along the interstate highway system, she said.

Meth costs to society are high. Lawrence estimated that 90 percent of
all crimes in Deschutes County are somehow connected to drugs, and a
large number of those are connected to the use and sale of meth.

Steve Gunnels, a Deschutes County deputy district attorney, said 50
percent of the cases prosecuted by his office are drug related.

The costs don't end there, Lawrence said. Meth labs leave costly -- and
dangerous -- destruction in their wake.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has a clean-up fund to pay
the bills for the dismantling of meth labs. But it only takes four
months for that federal money to dry up, she said. After that, state
tax dollars fill in the gap.

Discovered in 1886, meth was first used by doctors at the turn of the
century to treat multiple illnesses, including depression.

In the 1930s and 1940s, German scientists began experimenting with
different variations of the drug, exploring its potential to make
soldiers stronger and more resilient.

United States and Japanese military units also used the drug during
World War II, Stump said. U.S. bomber pilots took it to stay awake on
long missions. Some Japanese Kamakazi pilots took it for its psychotic
effect before they crashed planes into enemy targets.

Through the 1960s, some Stanford and Berkley Ph.D. chemists began
cooking meth in their labs, said Stump, the Vancouver emergency
doctor. By the 1970s, motorcycle gangs were the chief cookers, and in
the 1980s, Hispanic gangs.

Over time, Stump said, it became easier to make. What used to be a
three-day process is now a 30-minutes process.

More than 50 recipes for meth can be found by simply punching in the
word on Internet search engines, he said. And nearly all of them are
recipes for disaster. Most produce a highly toxic sludge rather than a
drug.

Stump has seen meth, which is also a prescription drug called Desoxyn,
create severe hypertension, or high blood pressure, causing blood
vessels in patients' brains to pop, or their hearts to wear out.

Between January and August of this year in Deschutes County, four meth
labs were raided, 8.6 pounds of meth were seized and 66 people were
arrested for meth-related crimes, according to the CODE team.

In 1999, Deschutes County joined the ranks of six other Oregon
counties -- and 408 counties nationwide -- designated by the Office of
National Drug Control Policy as a high-intensity drug trafficking
area. That means the county is a center of drug production,
manufacturing, importation or distribution.

With that designation comes $326,000 a year in federal money designed
to help combat the problem, said Charles Karl, Oregon's director of
the program. About $100,000 of that is funneled to the District
Attorney's Office for prosecution, and the rest goes to CODE for
enforcement.

Karl said the Office of National Drug Control Policy sunsets this
year. If Congress continues to fund the agency, high-intensity
designated counties will be reviewed in 2004-05 to determine whether
they should continue to receive federal funding.