DEA DIRECTOR TO STOP IN KNOXVILLE ON HIS NATIONAL 'METH IN AMERICA' TOUR

Drug Enforcement Agency Director Asa Hutchinson will be in Knoxville on
Thursday as part of his national "Meth in America: Not in Our Town" tour.

The tour is aimed at increasing awareness about the devastating effects of
methamphetamine. During the next several months, Hutchinson will stop in
over 30 states to talk about how vital community involvement is to
lessening the nation's rate of meth addiction and production.

Hutchinson will hold a news conference with Harry S. "Sandy" Mattice Jr.,
United States attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, to address
the dangers of methamphetamine in America and, specifically, Tennessee. The
news conference will take place at 12:30 p.m. in the conference room of
Cherokee Aviation at McGhee Tyson Airport.

According to information from a press release from the Department of
Justice, methamphetamine use can be found throughout the United States. It
is not just a big-city problem. Meth cooks and traffickers find the smaller
towns perfect havens to make and sell their drug. They use remote fields
and forests as dump sites for their toxic chemicals, harming the
environment. For those reasons, the release states, methamphetamine is
Tennessee's greatest drug challenge.

A man was in critical condition and on life support today following a
Friday explosion from chemicals used to make methamphetamine in a mobile
home in Bulls Gap in Hawkins County. The explosion killed two other men.
The man in critical condition is in a Kingsport hospital. He was
contaminated by toxic fumes and chemicals. DEA officials decontaminated the
site on Monday.

Last year, state and local law enforcement agencies in conjunction with the
DEA seized more than 460 labs in Tennessee, an over 150-percent increase
from 2000. With an average cleanup cost of $3,00O, meth labs are putting a
huge financial strain on Tennessee's resources, the press release said.

Hutchinson will address these challenges as well as discuss local
cooperative efforts to combat meth abuse in the state.