POWDERED MADNESS

TITUSVILLE -- The battle against methamphetamine is not fought only by
police in midnight raids or undercover drug buys. It's fought also by
clerks at the counter of Bryan's True Value Hardware.

This sprawling, 125-year-old hardware store sells everything from spinach
salad at the lunch counter to toilet seats and copper pipe. But don't bring
a telltale armload of household cleaners and chemicals such as naphtha, red
devil lye and plastic tubing to the till.

Clara Bell and her staff know a meth cook's shopping list when they see
one. And they're not selling.

Bell is an unlikely warrior in the struggle to stamp out meth in the
Titusville area. With her twinkling eyes and pert bouffant, Bell is the
assistant to the store's chief executive and the star of the store's
popular radio ads. She holds court behind a cluttered desk in a busy
backroom office crammed with pending orders, rolls of colored ribbon and
stacks of boxes. A cutout wooden chicken hangs in the air above her desk.

"This chick's busy. Take a number," it warns.

Bell's approach to the meth trade in her community is equally no-nonsense.

"Anytime the girls get anybody with stuff like that, we just say we can't
sell these things to you," Bell said. "We've had some rebuttals. But we
don't have to sell anything to anyone."

At Bryan's True Value, there's a meth embargo.

Cooks manufacture methamphetamine in secret shacks in the forests and
fields or behind locked doors in private kitchens, bathrooms and corners of
basements.

But the drug's presence does not remain secret for long. It announces
itself quietly in the uptick of petty crimes such as shoplifting and car
ransackings. It appears in thick, heartbreaking case files as family ties
collapse under the weight of addiction and give way to abuse and neglect.

Other times the social consequences of meth abuse flare up in the sudden
violence of a lab explosion and blast lasting holes in a community's
fabric. The drug not only ravages its users. It poisons children and the
ground they live on. It corrodes family life and exacts a toll on business
owners and residents alike.

Just ask the people of Titusville.

Since the drug first surfaced in this southern Crawford County city of
5,800 in the late 1990s, it has caused fires, assaults, child neglect and
theft.

But the city is not alone. The problem is everywhere, Titusville Mayor
Brian Sanford said. What's happened in Titusville has happened in hundreds
of other communities nationwide.

Most recently, meth labs have mushroomed into the nearby communities of Oil
City and Franklin that lie to the south of Titusville in Venango County.
Leaders there now find themselves in the same spot those in Titusville did
a few years ago - huddled with police, taking crash courses in the meth
trade. Residents, meanwhile, are learning to say words like "cook" in
conjunction with deadly criminal activity.

Police say Erie should expect the same.

"The Erie community has something to worry about. This drug is of epidemic
proportion," said Capt. Erby Conley, commanding officer for six state
police barracks in Erie, Crawford, Venango and Warren counties.

Titusville leaders say the only solution, if there is one, is cooperation
and honesty.

"We need to open our eyes, admit it is universal and start taking positive
steps to deal with the problem everybody knows is there," Sanford said.

He is backed up not only by a police force taking aim at this problem, but
also by fed-up citizens such as Clara Bell. She fights along the supply
lines. Others tend meth's casualties, principally the children.

A crazed teenager standing at the top of a stairwell offered Titusville
police their first clue that meth was back. When they responded to a call
about the disturbance, the teen leapt at them - just dove from the top of
the stairs.

Sometime later police found themselves chasing another crazed man through
the city streets. This one was naked. Who acts like that? they wondered.

Someone on meth.

The return of the drug in the late 1990s left older cops scratching their
heads. They had not seen it since the 1970s. Its re-emergence sent rookie
cops back to their textbooks.

"We didn't know what they were talking about when they said they were
'cooking meth,'" said 32-year-old Titusville police officer Kerrick Caldwell.

For Caldwell, those anecdotes now seem almost quaint. He now gives Power
Point presentations on meth to middle-schoolers and Rotarians. He can talk
about its origins like a college professor and sketch out the principles of
a meth lab on a chalkboard in seconds flat.

A few years after meth announced its return to the Titusville area, police
arrested the man they say brought it here - Roger Coulter.

Shocked residents expressed relief at the roundup of Coulter's ring. But
privately, police worried the problem was far from over. Meth cooks trained
by Coulter and his cronies were still out there, and the meth they made was
creating more addicts every day.

That shows in District Justice Amy Nicols' court docket.

Nicols tends the gateway to the criminal justice system in the Titusville
area. She has watched year by year as strange, inexplicable crime ratcheted
up in close concert with methamphetamine use in the region.

Meth can induce intense paranoia, even psychosis. The user might hear
voices and believe he is being followed or watched. Sometimes it remains a
private nightmare inside the user's own head. Other times, the drug-soaked
users act out their delusions with extreme violence.

Months after the Coulter ring was broken up in April 2001, there was a
shooting and an hours-long standoff police suspect was meth-related. It
happened in front of Doug Peterson's house in Titusville.

Police said they seized meth-making supplies from Peterson's car and house
in November. It was Peterson police were looking for when they found a
suspected meth lab in an Erie Heights housing project apartment in Erie in
December.

Citing other examples, Nicols said that based on the defendants' bizarre
behavior, she suspects meth played a role in both a recent stabbing and
fatal shooting. She pointed to a man arraigned earlier this month on
charges of severely beating his wife. The woman might need facial surgery.

"I'm used to seeing remorse. I'm not seeing remorse," she said.

"I don't think people are taking this problem as seriously as they should,"
she said. "It is the most serious problem we're dealing with."

Police say not many children apparently buy and use meth in the Titusville
area. But they still seem to pay the highest price for it.

Titusville Middle School Assistant Principal Rob Buchan and high school
Principal Amanda Hetrick said they usually know if there has been a bust in
the area by looking at their students' faces. The names printed in the
local paper's police briefs are sometimes those of a student's mom or dad
or brother or uncle.

"We see more the emotional impact," Hetrick said.

The schools work with children who might be relatives of meth users to help
them forge their own identities, separate from meth.

"We just encourage them to go and build their own lives," Hetrick said.

Sometimes they succeed. She cited a student who graduated in 2002 and
started a successful business.

Other times, they fail.

Hetrick lost a 10th-grader to meth. He just quit coming to school when
meth-related problems at home overwhelmed him.

"It changed his whole life," she said.

Sometimes family members might be literally poisoning their children. The
number of children seized nationwide at meth labs more than doubled from
1999 to 2002, Caldwell said, citing information from the National Drug
Intelligence Center in Johnstown. In 2001, approximately 35 percent of the
children found at such lab sites tested positive for toxins in their bodies.

Caldwell said that at a recent meth bust, Titusville police found the
poisonous and explosive materials used to make meth sitting inches off a
bathroom floor. A 10-year-old girl lived there.

"It makes you sick," he said. "They have a child in the home and they know
full well (the danger) and they don't care."

Caldwell also has been to sites where children are living on ground that
has tested positive for the toxic byproducts of meth production. In
California, they test children found at such sites to see if they have been
poisoned. He believes that should happen here.

Ann Waychoff, Jennifer Rodgers and Jodie Lavery of Genesis Family Services
in Titusville might be the first outsiders to connect with a family broken
by meth.

Rodgers jokingly refers to the group as a kind of social services vice
squad. They deliver help to distressed families. They say meth is
increasingly to blame.

"It encompasses everything in an addict's life. The children suffer most,"
said Lavery.

Waychoff recalled a recent home visit. She was scheduled simply to deliver
a welcome basket to a newborn baby.

She had hand-knit baby blankets and pamphlets for the new mother. Waychoff
thought the visit would give her a chance to meet with the family and see
if they needed any help.

It did. But not in the ways she expected.

Waychoff entered the home to find the family in the midst of a meth-fueled
meltdown. The baby's mother was coming down off a high and was desperate.

"She is running around screaming and crying and yelling," Waychoff said. "I
just kept talking to her in a calm voice and tried just to get her to look
at me."

Eventually, she persuaded the woman to go outside with her and have a
cigarette. They walked and walked up and down the snowy streets.

"She admitted she had been using. She had been up for two or three days,"
Waychoff said.

"She wanted to get help. I think it was literally driving her crazy."

Meth has poisoned even the local economy.

"We see a great deal of retail theft. The cooks get somebody hooked on
meth, then they send out people into the community to steal items they need
to make it," Titusville Police Chief Don Owens said.

The clerks at Bryan's know what to look for. They say that sometimes users
steal the supplies by the boxload, right off the shelf.

"We get an awful lot of theft," Bell said.

Meth has forced a change in policy at another Titusville institution, E.K.
Thompson and Son, a 138-year-old tin-ceilinged pharmacy where you can still
take a seat at the lunch counter.

Meth cooks use a key ingredient in cold medicine, pseudoephedrine, to
concoct what one user called devil's dandruff. The cold medicine at
Thompson's lies on shelves in a direct line of sight from the pharmacy counter.

The store won't sell large quantities of cold medicines containing
pseudoephedrine. If someone comes in trying to buy such merchandise in
bulk, the store alerts police, said pharmacist Loretta Weis.

Some would-be customers become pretty insistent. Weis doesn't budge.

"In fact, we get downright rude sometimes," she said.

There is a sense here that residents such as Weis and leaders such as Mayor
Sanford have had enough.

Some might shudder at making public pronouncements about a meth problem in
their area. That is not the case with Sanford and Owens and Titusville City
Manager Mary Ann Knau.

Perception is reality, Knau said.

People perceive a meth problem in the Titusville area because there is one.
But the city's leaders say they are working to change that.

"What we wish to be perceived to be is what we wish to be - a safe area
where you don't dare operate a meth lab," Knau said.

Titusville, Oil City and Franklin share a proud history that springs from
an earlier boom. The region touts itself as "The Valley That Changed the
World."

Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first commercially successful oil well on the
banks of Oil Creek just outside Titusville in 1859. A handful of the great
fortunes born in that era or from the industries it spawned still linger
and quietly shore up programs to help the poor or support the arts.
Theaters and office buildings and block after block of ornate Victorian
mansions built with the money that flowed like the oil during that boom
still remain.

But the region is for the most part several steps removed from its
prosperous past.

Industries that once anchored the area's economy have largely fled. Leaders
celebrate smaller victories, a new restaurant or office for the downtown,
while they slowly work to lay the infrastructure to attract future development.

They are not about to cede anything to the drug dealers. There is still too
much good in their communities that they want to protect and promote.

"We'd like to let the world know if you are going to operate a meth lab in
Titusville, you're going to get caught," Sanford said.

They believe they can solve the problem through education and regional
cooperation.

The success local police have had so far has come with the help of the
state attorney general's drug task force. It pays for the local officers'
overtime and allows the officers to carry their investigations outside the
city limits.

Titusville's leaders would like to see more of that kind of police work.
They want their neighbors to help.

Sanford calls his city an "accident of geography." Titusville lies close to
the borders of three counties - Warren, Crawford and Venango. It lies far
from the state police stations, which patrol the sprawling, thinly
populated municipalities that surround Titusville.

There are meth labs in Titusville. But city leaders believe most production
occurs outside the city limits.

Either way, the city is left to cope with the fallout. City police are
often asked to respond to incidents outside their borders.

In one such case, a man police believe was under the influence of meth
attacked two Titusville officers. One of the officers ended up on workers'
compensation, which affected the city's premiums for the next three years,
Knau said.

The leaders want to cooperate with some of the surrounding municipalities
to get grants to assign police officers to full-time drug investigations.

"Until people realize we've got to work together for the common good of the
region, it is not going to happen," Owens said.