DRUG PROBLEM SURGES IN RURAL U.S.

Dealers Flee Cities For Safer Business In Isolated Towns

PRENTISS, Miss. -- The trophy houses, with wrought-iron gates and
grand-columned entryways, keep popping up on little country roads here, in
clearings in the piney woods and near doublewide trailers. Sometimes there
is a luxury car or two in the driveway.

In the affluent suburbs of Boston, New York or Dallas, these homes might
belong to successful doctors, lawyers or software company owners. But
Prentiss, a small town in south-central Mississippi, has no industry or
affluent professional class in the conventional sense. The last sizable
factory moved to Mexico three years ago, leaving an unemployment rate of 25
percent.

Instead, the police say, many of these houses belong to drug dealers, made
rich by a flourishing business in crack cocaine, methamphetamines,
marijuana and OxyContin, the prescription painkiller. They are the most
visible manifestation of an explosion of rural drugs and crime that is
overwhelming local law-enforcement agencies and bringing the sort of
violence normally associated with poor neighborhoods of big cities. The
upsurge has been felt across the United States from Maine to Oregon and
from Georgia to Texas, even as drug use in most large cities has been
declining.

In December, for example, Ron Jones, one of five members of the Prentiss
Police Department and the son of the police chief, was shot to death as he
entered an apartment to serve a search warrant for drugs. It was the most
recent of 14 homicides in the last two years in Jefferson Davis County,
which has 14,000 residents, giving the county a homicide rate of 50 per
100,000. That is higher than the rates of Detroit, Washington and New
Orleans, cities that regularly rank among the highest homicide rates in the
nation.

Nationwide, while the rate of arrests in drug crimes has fallen 11.2
percent in cities with more than 250,000 residents over the last five
years, it has risen 10.5 percent in rural areas, according to the FBI.

Even more striking, from 1990 to 1999, the last year for which figures are
available, the percentage of drug-related homicides tripled in rural areas
but fell by almost half in big cities.

More rural children using

To measure the problem another way, a continuing survey of drug use among
junior high and high school students by the University of Michigan has
found that crack is now more widely used among 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders
in rural areas than among those in metropolitan areas. Methamphetamine use
is now highest in rural areas among all three grades and heroin use is
about equal in urban and rural areas, the survey found.

The spread of drugs in the countryside is uneven, the experts say.

In Washington County, for instance, at the far northeastern corner of
Maine, prosecutions in crimes involving OxyContin are 10 times what they
were in 1998, say law-enforcement officials, who estimate that at least
1,000 of the county's 35,000 residents are addicts.

"It's gone beyond the epidemic stage," Sheriff Joe Tibbetts said. "I can't
think of a family in Washington County that hasn't been scathed by it in
some way."

His officers' families are among those who have been affected, Tibbetts said.

In Dawson County in central Nebraska, the problem is methamphetamine. "The
percentage of meth-related crimes is through the roof," said Paul Schwarz,
an investigator with the county sheriff's office.

In the state as a whole, officials discovered 38 methamphetamine
laboratories in 1999; last year they discovered 179.

"If there is a battle going on out there," Schwarz said, "we're honestly
not winning it."

Similarly, in Douglas County, a vast timber, farming and fishing area in
southwestern Oregon, Lt. Mike Nores of the sheriff's department estimates
that 12 percent to 14 percent of the 103,000 residents are making, selling
or using drugs, particularly methamphetamines and marijuana. Drug use and
trafficking account for 80 percent of all crime in the county, including
killings, Nores said.

One reason for the growth in rural drug problems, federal officials say, is
that aggressive prosecution in cities has led dealers to seek safety in the
farms and forests of rural counties, which have far fewer law-enforcement
officers.

"We've seen drugs and crime migrate to the rural areas in the past several
years to get away from law enforcement," said Tony Soto, director of the
Gulf Coast High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area in New Orleans, a task
force of federal, state and local law-enforcement authorities established
by the White House Office of Drug Policy Control.

Poverty in `rural ghettos'

Observers site the poverty and isolation of rural areas as keys to their
growing drug trade.

"You have many rural areas that are persistent poverty areas, in essence
rural ghettos," said Joseph Donnermeyer, professor of rural sociology at
Ohio State University. "They were once isolated and were protected by that,
with lower crime, but now better communications have broken down that
buffer so they begin to resemble poor neighborhoods of big cities, where
people are segregated by poverty."