Pubdate: Tue, 01 Aug 2000
Source: Standard-Examiner (UT)
Copyright: Ogden Publishing Corporation, 2000
Contact:  P.O. Box 951 Ogden, UT 84402
Website: http://www.standard.net/
Forum: http://www1.standard.net/utah_central/forums.asp

SALT LAKE CITY EMERGES AS UNLIKELY BATTLEFIELD IN WAR ON DRUGS

SALT LAKE CITY -- Pioneer Park was named for the clean-living founders of 
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The neatly groomed common 
of shade trees and footpaths is six blocks from Temple Square, world 
headquarters of the Mormon faith.

It is also a prime location for scoring drugs.

"They're here if you want them," said Kathy Kennedy, 48, an admitted 
alcoholic and former heroin addict who has dabbled in cocaine and 
methamphetamine.

Unemployed for years, she was killing the afternoon in the park, as she 
does most days. "There's every kind of drug. This isn't different than any 
other city."

Salt Lake may be the last place one would expect to find a thriving 
narcotics culture. After all, the teachings of the Mormon Church, which 
remains Utah's dominant institution and is the wellspring of its 
law-and-order politics, forbid even coffee and cigarettes.

But the drug scourge has not spared the Utah capital, for reasons that 
Mormon leaders concede may be beyond the church's powers of spiritual 
persuasion. They include the same earthly temptations, family failings and 
youthful rebelliousness that bedevil any community.

"I wish we knew why these things happen," said Harold Brown, management 
director of the church's social services programs. "We have our share of 
problems. We wish we didn't."

Over the past few years, authorities in the greater Salt Lake area have 
reported sharp increases in the trafficking of heroin; cocaine; marijuana; 
methamphetamine, also known as crank or speed; and so-called club drugs 
like ecstasy and GHB. The proliferation of meth laboratories has been 
especially dramatic.

"Meth is all around," said Kennedy, who moved here from Oregon last fall. 
Bone thin and bleary eyed, her face pitted with sores, she pointed toward a 
distant corner framed by maples and elms. "You can buy meth right down 
there. You can buy anything."

Utah ranks among the top 10 states for total meth labs, and No. 1 for 
"speed" cookeries per capita, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration.

In the early 1990s, the DEA and local police agencies raided about a 
half-dozen labs a year in the Beehive State. They busted 266 in 1999 -- 
mainly in the Salt Lake region -- and are on a pace to at least equal that 
number this year.

The typically closet-sized labs are turning up throughout the city and 
county, from downtown hotel rooms to suburban garages to foothill shanties 
along the emerald Wasatch Mountains.

Outside Salt Lake, meth makers favor the deep recesses of Utah's national 
forests. The state has also posted record confiscations of speed smuggled 
into the country by Mexican dealers.

"I didn't think there would be this much of a problem here. All I knew 
about Salt Lake City was the religion and things like that," said Keith, a 
Salt Lake DEA investigator who joined the federal bureau in 1998, after 15 
years as a Dallas police officer. He asked that his last name be withheld 
because he works undercover.

The 38-year-old agent, who was wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, fought off 
a yawn. He had been up since 4 a.m. to kick in the door of a suspected meth 
lab. The target was a small house in a quiet, blue-collar neighborhood 
within a mile of the DEA building.

"There's a lot more meth here than in Dallas," said Keith, taking in the 
building's third-floor view of church spires, the skyline's signature 
feature. "It was surprising."

The magnitude of the meth epidemic also surprised Lisa Jorgensen, a state 
children services worker assigned to the Salt Lake police. Her job is to 
rescue youngsters from drug-infested homes. In Salt Lake County, 65 percent 
of children taken from their parents by the state come from meth dens, 
according to the Utah Department of Human Services.

"They live in just deplorable, chronic, horrible neglect," said Jorgensen, 
who was hunched over a computer at the downtown police station. "We get 20 
to 25 cases a month."

The DEA has expanded its Salt Lake staff to root out the meth labs. Federal 
prosecutors have also cracked down. They are zeroing in on meth peddlers 
who use Utah's sparsely inhabited highway corridors to ship the drug from 
Mexico.

Since 1996, the U.S Attorney's Office in Salt Lake has prosecuted nearly 
1,000 Mexican nationals for drug crimes, most involving meth.

"We're the crossroads of the West (for) Mexican meth," said U.S. Attorney 
Paul Warner.

Meth aside, Utah is not afflicted with the level of drug-related offenses 
found in much of the metropolitan West. Its violent crime rate is roughly 
35 percent below that of Western states and the nation as a whole. 
Nevertheless, the Utah trend for all drugs has been troubling.

Seizures of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and GHB are up by 
substantial margins, the DEA says. Ecstasy and GHB top the list, soaring 
from 3,034 doses two years ago to 13,586 in 1999 and 120,827 in the first 
five months of this year.

"We hate to see it," said Salt Lake police Capt. Roger Winkler. He was 
standing in a windowless file room at the police station. The wall was 
plastered with mug shots of drug suspects arrested in Pioneer Park. "Utah 
has always been above this. It hits home."

Ecstasy and GHB have exploded despite a Salt Lake club scene that is 
virtually dormant by non-Utah standards. The Mormon influence translates 
into tough limits on alcohol sales. Most bars require customers to buy 
memberships before imbibing. They are often restricted to serving 
low-alcohol beer.

But there is a sprinkling of nightspots in and around Salt Lake's hotel 
district, where construction is booming in anticipation of the 2002 Winter 
Olympics. The blue laws apparently have done little to keep ecstasy and GHB 
out of the hands of young revelers.

"People can always find a connection," said Jan Hansen, a 20- year-old 
college student who was sipping a latte at Cup of Joe, a downtown 
coffeehouse. A jazz band was playing.

"Lots of things are frowned on here, but people still use them," said 
Hansen, a Salt Lake native. He sported a silver stud in his lower lip and a 
pair of earrings. "I've tried "ex."'

His buddy and fellow student, Garrett Smith, 21, also told of sampling 
ecstasy. "At my high school here, there were only 20 good Mormons," Smith 
said, speaking above a saxophone wail. "The rest were, like, jocks who just 
wanted to get stoned."

Salt Lake's drug counselors know the type. They have seen the demand for 
treatment spike 20 percent since the mid-1990s, driven largely by meth 
users under age 35. Clinic operators say that while most speed addicts are 
lower-income white people, the meth plague has cut across the 
socio-economic spectrum.

"I don't know why we're seeing proportionately more meth here than other 
places," said Dr. Bruce Jacobson, director of the Cornerstone clinic near 
downtown. "We wonder about that ourselves.

"Obviously, we live in a more conservative area. But I can't say with any 
confidence or certainty what the influence of the Mormon Church is on the 
drug problem here."

Barbara Hardy, who heads Salt Lake County's drug abuse programs, considers 
the church a mixed blessing in her mission. Its anti-drug strictures, she 
says, have undoubtedly steered countless young people away from narcotics.

Then again, Hardy added, the church's preeminence may have fostered a false 
sense of security. Utah's population of 2.1 million is 70 percent Mormon, a 
figure that has been fairly constant for four decades. About 60 percent of 
the Salt Lake region's 1.2 million residents belong to the church.

"It's easier here to look the other way and say the drug problem doesn't 
happen," said Hardy. "Denial is a wonderful thing."

Church spokesman Dale Bills sat down to discuss drugs in a paneled 
conference room at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, a Renaissance 
Revival monument to the religion's patriarch. The gem of marbled columns 
and stained-glass ceilings was once the Hotel Utah. It is across Main 
Street from Temple Square, whose six-spired worship hall is Salt Lake's 
tangible heart and soul. Tourists strolled the grounds behind high iron gates.

"Our message is the same, the doctrine is the same, the principles are the 
same," said Bills, referring to the church's stance on drugs. "We set a 
high standard, but not all kids are perfect."

The church offers its own drug treatment programs, including 57 weekly 
group-counseling sessions in Utah. "It's sort of our take on AA," said 
James Goodrich, the church's welfare director for northern Utah.

Attendance is modest, however; 15 to 20 people turn out at each meeting. 
Brown, the Mormon social services executive, said the church has yet to see 
a marked upswing in demand for help.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart