AS DRUG USE DROPS IN BIG CITIES, SMALL TOWNS CONFRONT UPSURGE

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 Mercedes or two in the driveway.

In the affluent suburbs of Boston, New York or Dallas, these fake chateaus
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, methamphetamine, 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 nation, from Maine to Oregon and from
Georgia to Texas, even as drug use in most 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 or New Orleans, cities
that regularly have 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 Federal
Bureau of Investigation.

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.

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, with
heavy concentrations of certain drugs in some counties.

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, Sheriff
Tibbetts said.

In Dawson County in western 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. He repeated two local
sayings: "You're either stealing or dealing" and "If you're not using,
you're a cop."

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," Mr. 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 methamphetamine and marijuana. Drug use and
trafficking now account for 80 percent of all crime in the county,
including killings, Lieutenant 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. "It's happening all
around the United States, as the dealers and gangs go deeper into rural areas."

In Jefferson Davis County in Mississippi, Sheriff Henry McCullum said:
"It's gotten so bad, drugs have become our major industry. Almost every
person living in this community is profiting from the escalating drugs,
directly or indirectly."

Drug money, Sheriff McCullum explained, is helping contractors, building
supply stores and grocery stores stay in business.

By his estimate about half the young men in the county have been to prison
by the time they reach the age of 21, with almost all their crimes related
to drugs.

Even Sheriff McCullum's brother-in-law, Billy Ray Barnes, is in the
sheriff's jail, charged with robbing a bank to get money for crack. In an
interview in the sheriff's office, Mr. Barnes, 34, said it would take him
only five minutes after walking out of jail to find more crack.

"It's everywhere," he said. "The county is infested."

To spend a day with the sheriff is to hear the toll drugs are taking in
Jefferson Davis County. A high school teacher calls, warning that
drug-dealing students are threatening to shoot each other in a classroom.
An elderly woman reports that a drug dealer is coming to her home to shoot
her crack-addicted son.

Sheriff McCullum takes these calls seriously. Last year a 13-year-old,
Brendan McCullum (no relation to the sheriff), was fatally shot as he stood
inside his house when a drug dealer drove by looking for Brendan's older
brother, with whom the dealer had had a quarrel.

"Brendan was a good boy, an honor roll student, a kid who went to Sunday
school," said his older sister, Ressie Davis. At the time of the shooting,
Ms. Davis was in state prison for shoplifting, something she admitted doing
to support her crack addiction. She was later released but is now back in
the local jail for not reporting to her parole officer.

As bad as the drug problem is here, "It is pretty typical for all of rural
Mississippi," said Charlie Brown Jr., the assistant special agent in charge
of Mississippi for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"You've got counties where there are no jobs and the income is below
poverty level, so you have groups trafficking in drugs who take advantage
of that, and you have local sheriffs and small-town police chiefs who have
very limited resources," Mr. Brown said. "Everybody in the community knows
who is dealing, but because of their limited manpower, there is very little
law enforcement can do."

Experts in rural crime agree that the reasons Mr. Brown cited are some of
the basic causes of the growth in rural drug use and crime.

"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."

Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration
and a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Arkansas, said the
movement of drug dealers to rural areas was "absolutely something I am
aware of."

Mr. Hutchinson said the problem was difficult to combat because of a gap in
law enforcement. Federal drug prosecutions have tended to focus on the
largest dealers, usually in cities, and county sheriffs and small-town
police forces lack the manpower or experience to combat them.

One other theory was offered by Henry Donaldson, Brendan McCullum's
stepfather. Mr. Donaldson attributes the spread of drugs in part to the
number of young people who have moved to Mississippi from Chicago, many of
them sent by parents, originally from the state, to escape the urban drug
problems.

The lack of law enforcement resources is glaring in Jefferson Davis County.
Sheriff McCullum has five deputies to patrol a county of almost 600 square
miles. In practice, this means that he normally has only one deputy on duty
at a time. The budget of Sheriff McCullum's office is so meager that when
he was elected two years ago, he did not have a fingerprint kit, a camera
to photograph suspects or a video camera. Nor do his deputies have
bulletproof vests or computer terminals for their patrol cars, which are
common in big-city police cruisers to call up information on suspects.

"How are we going to do an undercover operation?" Sheriff McCullum asked.
"We can't. Everybody here knows everybody else. Besides, we don't have the
money to make a buy."

Three men awaiting trial for murder in Jefferson Davis County recently
escaped from the county jail.

On a drive around the county's back roads, the sheriff pointed to new house
after new house, some with mansard roofs, some with Palladian windows, that
he said were built with drug profits. Some dealers, Sheriff McCullum said,
truck drugs from El Paso on the Mexican border to the county, hiding the
drug-loaded trucks in barns before selling the narcotics to other dealers.

The sheriff pointed to one house, a new gray stone structure with twin
brick gates, a high black wrought-iron fence and security cameras. It
belongs to Glenn Russell, Sheriff McCullum said, adding that Mr. Russell is
awaiting trial on federal drug charges after being arrested in Texas with
$150,000 worth of drugs.

It may be impossible to compare the ravages of the new wave of rural drugs
with the crack epidemic in big cities in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
But experts say the small populations of rural counties often magnify the
impact, making it more personal.

On Dec. 26, in Prentiss, Officer Ron Jones, 29, called his father, Ronald
N. Jones, the police chief, for permission to get a search warrant for an
apartment where an informer had told him there was crack. An hour later, as
Officer Jones led a team into the apartment, he was shot in the abdomen.
The suspect in the shooting, Cory Maye, has been charged with capital murder.

"The hardest thing for me is that I'm the one who gave him the approval,"
Chief Jones said.

His son had been taking classes in drug enforcement and was the town's K-9
officer.

"He thought he could clean Prentiss up," Chief Jones said. "He honestly
gave his life trying to make a difference."