Pubdate: Mon, 26 Jul 2004
Source: Roanoke Times (VA)
Copyright: 2004 Roanoke Times
Contact:  http://www.roanoke.com/roatimes/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/368
Author: Shay Wessol, The Roanoke Times

Meth: A New Drug Crisis Is Growing In Southwest Virginia (2 of 4)

'WE'RE FIGHTING AS HARD AS WE KNOW HOW,' AUTHORITIES SAY

Local Police Say They Need More Resources, Including Drug Investigators 
Dedicated To Meth Cases, To Fight Effectively.

In a matter of minutes, everything went horribly wrong. Shawn Michael 
Wright of Max Meadows spent last Halloween cooking methamphetamine at 
Brandie Marie Martin's apartment in Building 105 of the Meadowview complex 
in Pulaski. But the caustic smell emitted by the heated chemicals had 
caught a neighbor's attention. "The guy next door, he kept knocking and 
asking, 'What's that smell?' They said it was nothing," said Kim Gill, 
Meadowview's property manager. But in those few minutes it took to answer 
the door and appease a neighbor's question, the chemicals being heated on a 
gas stove burner caught fire. Wright and Martin fled without a warning to 
anyone, and the flames they left behind burned with a force hot enough to 
melt the refrigerator and the cabinets. "It looked like a little miniature 
bomb had gone off," Gill said. And the smell was overwhelming. "Like 
burning plastic with a little salt thrown in? I don't know how to explain 
it," she said. "But once you smell it, you never forget it." The nine other 
families living in the building escaped without injury. Police soon caught 
up with Wright, 22, and Martin, 23, and charged them each with 
manufacturing meth, conspiracy and two counts of child neglect since two 
young children were in the apartment as they cooked the drug. Attorneys had 
worked out an agreement in which Wright would plead guilty to the drug 
charges, but he backed out of the deal last Wednesday 7.21 in Pulaski 
County Circuit Court. The agreement would have sent him to prison for two 
years and ordered some kind of restitution for the fire damage, Pulaski 
County Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Sandy Wright said. Attorneys have 
not set a new date for the case to go to trial. Martin's case is scheduled 
schedule to go before a grand jury Aug. 4 and to trial Aug. 9. Building 105 
has been rebuilt as part of a complex-wide renovation project that was 
already under way when the fire occurred.

It is expected to reopen to tenants this week, Gill said. Even so, the fire 
served as a stark jolt that meth had arrived in Southwest Virginia - and 
that communities were ill-prepared to stamp out its assurgence. "Law 
enforcement is constant action-reaction," said Wythe County Chief Deputy 
Doug King. "We can't do anything pre-emptive." Wythe County, for example, 
has 30 deputies who work patrol, investigations investigators and in the 
schools.

Those 30 deputies deal with 29,000 people spread across 480 square miles 
and use 105 miles of interstate highway, King said. And meth isn't the only 
drug they encounter, although, at the moment at least, it is the worst. It 
helps when merchants or citizens can tip off police to customers buying 
large quantities of the chemicals used to make meth, including writing down 
license plate information and clothing descriptions. The Meadowview fire 
spurred Pulaski police to start educating property owners and local 
merchants about the dangers of meth and what they can do to help stop its 
spread.

Police have since taught two such classes to merchants and landlords, said 
drug investigator Lt. John Leeper. Last month, Attorney General Jerry 
Kilgore spread the message statewide, announcing the creation of Virginia 
Meth Watch, an initiative to train merchants statewide to spot potential 
meth cooks as they're buying ingredients. It all helps keep the pressure on 
the cooks and dealers, Leeper said. "As long as we can keep them changing 
what they're doing, they'll mess up," he said. "And if they mess up, we're 
going to catch them." In Smyth County, authorities meet regularly to share 
meth intelligence. Smyth County Commonwealth's Attorney Roy Evans has also 
convened a special grand jury with the power to subpoena witnesses and 
interview them under oath. "We just started putting together information on 
people who were, for lack of a better word, targets," Evans said. The last 
round of indictments, delivered in late June, helped sheriff's deputies 
shut down four active meth labs. No one knows how deeply meth will spread 
into Virginia. The drug has spent the last 20 years making its way here 
after being popularized by the West Coast Hells Hell's Angels biker gangs 
in the mid-1980s. West Coast states are still engaged in their meth battle. 
"I guess I'm hoping, in the back of my mind, that it's going to run its 
course," Evans said. "We're fighting it as hard as we know how." But local 
police say they need more resources, including drug investigators dedicated 
to meth cases, to fight effectively. Those dollars just aren't available to 
rural law enforcement offices, so they make do with what options they do 
have. "The biggest thing we can do is we have our drug programs in the 
schools to let them know this is not the life you want to live. The schools 
are our primary contact with the future drug users," King said. Meanwhile, 
investigators look nervously to neighboring states like Tennessee, where 
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration DEA busted 499 meth labs last 
year, and West Virginia with its 61 labs found, and wonder what tomorrow 
will bring in Virginia. The realty of the meth epidemic, for police, is 
that they can only enforce the law. They can't fix the problem alone, King 
said. "It's up to society as a whole to find another way," King said. 
"There has to be a blend of education, rehabilitation and enforcement. 
That's the only way." 
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