Pubdate: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 Source: Topeka Capital-Journal (KS) Copyright: 2001 The Topeka Capital-Journal Contact: 616 S.E. Jefferson, Topeka, Kansas 66607 Website: http://cjonline.com/ Author: David L. Greene, The Baltimore Sun METH INVADES RURAL TOWNS LEXINGTON, Neb. -- Here in the heart of America's Heartland, healthy corn crops, juicy steaks, amiable neighbors and winning Cornhusker football teams are the pleasures that have long kept people happy. But recently, folks have experimented with a different pleasure. This one is illegal. Methamphetamine, a stimulant long prevalent on the East and West coasts, has become a new pastime. Take a population admired for rural innocence, mix in a powerful, available drug that breeds violence, and the results are stunning. Here in Lexington, population 9,000, gang violence is on the rise as members of Mexican cartels descend to meet the drug demand. Meth traffickers have been arrested in tiny towns such as Dannebrog, with just 320 residents. And in equally small places, police are stumbling upon makeshift labs where people have tried to combine household and agricultural chemicals -- often in dangerously toxic mixtures -- to manufacture methamphetamine. "It has overwhelmed us," says Glenn Kemp, an investigator with a Nebraska drug task force. "It wasn't hard to believe when Iowa got a methamphetamine problem. Or Kansas or Missouri. But Nebraska? South Dakota? Here's wholesomeness. Well, come to our communities. We're no different from anywhere else, even if we're less populated." It may seem like the nation's most unlikely drug war, but authorities have an explanation for the rise of methamphetamine. Over the past decade, low-skill meat-packing plants have sprouted in small towns, drawing outsiders seeking jobs. Police say their arrival has allowed drug-peddling gangs from Mexico and California to infiltrate farm towns where, a decade ago, they would have stood out. At the same time, recipes for homemade meth have become accessible on the Internet. An important ingredient -- anhydrous ammonia -- is used by farmers in irrigation and is widely available. Users can steal anhydrous ammonia from farm storage tanks, pick up other ingredients (such as cold medication and lithium batteries) at a convenience store, and cook meth for themselves. "It was curiosity that made me start," says May, a 36-year-old Nebraska native and recovering user from Lexington who asked that her last name not be used. She says she used to buy meth from a pig farmer who manufactured it himself. Friends were using meth, and May couldn't resist. "They had energy and company all the time," she says. "They were happy and always laughing." A mother of five, May quit using last January. In February, she was served with a federal indictment on charges of drug distribution. Months earlier, she had put a relative who wanted to sell meth in touch with a buyer in Lexington, not realizing her actions opened her to charges of drug distribution. She expects to escape jail time because she has cooperated with prosecutors. "I know I've taken a lot of drugs off the street," she says with an air of pride. "But Lexington is probably the meth capital of Nebraska. It's in the schools. It's everywhere." Meth has spread to Spalding, a Greeley County community of 582 residents in the Sandhills region of central Nebraska. In October, Spalding's part-time police officer and a sheriff's deputy recovered chemicals used to make methamphetamine in a farmhouse. Excited by their discovery -- and unaware that trained drug officers use body suits and oxygen masks when handling such materials -- the officers put the chemicals in their patrol car, took them to the village hall and spread them out on a table. When a special drug enforcement team reached Spalding the next day, they shut down the hall and the town's main street for 14 hours, disposed of the contaminated table, ordered the carpeting scrubbed and told the county attorney to throw away his clothing because he was standing in the room for too long. "There are only three officers in our county," says Paul Asche, the sheriff in Greeley County. "We sometimes struggle to get the day-to-day stuff done. We don't have resources to spend manpower on drug investigations." In 1997, authorities in Nebraska uncovered two meth labs in the state. In 1999, they found 38, and they discovered 35 last year. They look at neighboring states and see how the problems can multiply. Iowa officials found 85 labs in 1997, and then 500 in 1999. In Kansas, the number of discovered labs jumped from 99 to 492 in the same span. The Nebraska Crime Commission reports that meth-related arrests by state drug task forces shot up by 160 percent between 1996 and 1999, from 278 to 720. County attorneys throughout Nebraska say they are being forced to ignore lesser offenses -- such as growing marijuana -- that may have brought stiff sentences and made headlines a decade ago. Crime labs across the state are struggling with a backlog of meth to examine. In 1996, Congress labeled portions of the Midwest a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) and began funneling $8 million a year to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and the Dakotas to combat meth. But the money is spread thin. Nebraska's share, $1.1 million, has been enough to launch a successful awareness campaign and hire a handful of drug experts who crisscross the state. But many county sheriff's departments -- some amount to a single sheriff -- and the Nebraska State Patrol are often alone in dealing with meth. "This is a whole new drug, with a whole new type of people," says Nancy Martinez, who coordinates Nebraska's arm of HIDTA from the U.S. attorney's office in Omaha. "Most of our deputies didn't go to the FBI academy. They aren't trained. They didn't know what to do with it." There are towns in Nebraska that have been wholly transformed by the meth problem, farm communities with streets now home to gangs, jails full of users and county attorneys flooded with drug cases. Lexington sits along Interstate 80, which has become an artery for smuggling meth across Nebraska. The sheriff's department made 102 meth-related arrests in 1999 and 67 through September of last year. But meth, which can cause fits of paranoia or violence, has been linked to other crimes, including seven homicides since 1994. Residents of Lexington have been caught selling meth in bars, farm fields or the parking lot at Wal-Mart. There are now four confirmed street gangs in town, all connected with documented gangs from California, Mexico or Guatemala. The last homicide in Lexington, in November, was gang-related. Elizabeth Waterman, the county prosecutor in Lexington, says her office is overloaded with meth cases and she wants to hire two more lawyers. But applicants are turned off when they find out about the workload. "In the pre-meth days, you saw investigations into things that don't seem serious now -- like marijuana distribution," Waterman says. "I don't want to give the impression that it's OK. But it used to be that it was a real big deal if someone was found to be in possession of a pound of marijuana." Nebraska authorities have seen widespread meth use in high schools and are concerned it is spreading to pupils as young as 12 or 13. At Lexington High School and Lexington Middle School, counselors are planning to show a video called "Methamphetamines: The Icy Death." Throughout the state, though, meth is described as an ill that can be cured. Law enforcement authorities like to point out that, despite an apparent lack of narcotics experience, they were able to handle a milder outbreak of cocaine use in the 1980s. Randy Morehead, a criminal investigator with the Nebraska State Patrol, says he has seen small-town cops go up against drug traffickers, and actually likes their chances. For example, Morehead recalls how it took old-fashioned policing to nab a meth trafficker in St. Paul, Neb., (population 2,009) last year. A box containing 80 needles, tiny bags with meth residue and an envelope with a ZIP code scrawled on it was found in a field. An officer in the St. Paul Police Department traced it to a house -- with help from his father, who works at the post office. "Working a small town has its advantages," Morehead says. "We just called Dad." In Lexington, Fernando Barranco, a substance-abuse counselor, says many of his clients are employees at the meat-packing plant. They used the drug -- innocently, they assumed -- for energy to work extra hours and gain overtime pay. Barranco also has treated housewives on farms who heard meth was an "upper" and took it to impress demanding husbands, lose weight or stay alert to care for children. Within months, they became so dependent they were trafficking to make money to buy more, he said. Still some Nebraskans pretend that the meth problem isn't there. At the Coney Island Cafe, three blocks from the county jail in Grand Island -- with a population of 42,000, one of Nebraska's larger cities -- owner Gus Katrouzos prefers to talk about the five generations of children who have come for his famous hot dogs and malts than to discuss any drug problem. "Good people still ignore it," he says. "You don't talk about it. You just go to church and pray a lot." - --- MAP posted-by: GD