Pubdate: Thu, 29 Sep 2005
Source: Dowagiac Daily News (MI)
Copyright: 2005 Dowagiac Daily News
Contact:  http://www.dowagiacnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1554
Author: John Eby, Dowagiac Daily News

METH TASK FORCE FORMULATING A STRATEGY

CASSOPOLIS - "Choosing Our Battle Plan Wisely" was the bottom line in 
a wide-ranging discussion Wednesday that ultimately focused on 
prevention and treatment because there's only so much space in the 
jails, and Cass County's is full.

By focusing on remedying the problem, citizens hope to halt the 
problem instead of pushing it around the map.

Methamphetamine already affects the larger community in a variety of 
ways, from putting children at risk to environmental damage and more crime.

Each pound of meth produced generates five to six pounds of hazardous 
waste, posing immediate and long-term environmental health risks.

Chemicals used to make meth are toxic, yet lab operators routinely 
dump waste in streams, rivers, fields, backyards and sewage systems, 
which can in turn contaminate water resources for humans and animals.

Poisonous vapors produced during cooking permeate halls and carpets 
of houses and buildings, making them uninhabitable.

Cleaning up sites requires specialized training and costs an average 
of $2,000 to $4,000 per site in funds from already strained budgets.

The number of foster care children rises rapidly in states hit by the 
meth scourge. Noxious fumes can cause brain damage. Cooking meth is 
extremely dangerous. Labs often catch fire and explode.

A child living inside a home professionals access wearing haz-mat 
suits could overdose from meth left out by parents, suffer from 
attachment disorders or behavioral problems, be malnourished, 
physically or sexually abused and/or burned or fatally injured in a 
fire or explosion.

Meth labs, along with the selling of the drug, can breed crime, 
including burglaries, thefts and even murder. Prosecutor Victor Fitz 
said two of the three murder cases going to trial next month concern meth.

So the third meeting of the Cass County Methamphetamine Task Force 
Sept. 28 debated how best to launch this battle.

At Woodlands Addiction Center, methamphetamine accounted for 10 
percent of admissions in April. That's equal to crack cocaine, which 
has been running that high for about five years.

The 2 1/2-hour meeting at Cass District Library was the first of 
three strategy planning sessions. The next two will take place at 9 
a.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, and Wednesday, Nov. 16.

Participants were guided through the prioritizing and decision-making 
process by a professional facilitator, Judeth Newham of Douglas.

When it comes to meth's reputation as the "drug of despair," Newham 
said, "You can't discount 'social fabric' issues. Until they start 
addressing why people are using - to cope with two jobs and rising 
credit card debt and societal influences - you can't disregard what 
you're saying in whatever you plan."

"Aftercare - long-term follow-up - is a piece of the puzzle that our 
society has been missing for 30 years from my perspective," said 
Woodlands Addiction Center Program Supervisor Stephen Lehman.

Lehman, who has been working in his field for 33 years, added, "In 
the past several decades, this country has put billions of dollars 
into supply reduction. Since I got into this business in the '70s, 
little has changed in terms of putting resources into the demand 
reduction side."

In fact, Lehman said, "Funding for treatment and prevention is near 
the lowest I've seen it. We need to prosecute, we need to lock people 
up and we need to address everything that we target as supply 
reduction, but resources for demand reduction haven't increased in 
over a dozen years. It's a complex issue that needs to be addressed 
from all of the different standpoints we're talking about."

"An interesting phenomenon I think is going to continue," Lehman 
said. "National experts say once methamphetamine settles into an 
area, it doesn't go away. Crack cocaine stabilized at about 10 
percent. If the same is true of methamphetamine, now we've got 20 
percent, and I think it will be higher. But we've got a stable 
population that the treatment community in our area's going to have 
to deal with as we move forward for I don't know how many years.

"At the same time, we've seen a reduction in primary alcohol 
admissions to the lowest level I've ever seen - about 55 percent 
right now. The alcohol problem is still there, but meth and cocaine 
are overshadowing it. Behind it you see a rise in opiate abuse levels 
- - heroin, for example. Cocaine and heroin are almost like a relief. 
We hear meth addicts say, 'I finally got off meth, now I'm just doing 
crack cocaine.' The other piece of this is prevention. We know what 
the risk factors are to do prevention programming, but prevention 
resources in Michigan have been reduced over the last decade or more.

"it's a disease of relapse, we've known that a long time," observed 
Penn Township Supervisor John K. Gore, "but as a society we refuse to 
address that fact."

"There's a piece of the population that is probably going to have 
addictive behaviors who, if we didn't have meth, would be using 
cocaine or heroin," said Bob Cochrane, executive director of the 
county Council on Aging.

"In years past, we tended to see poly-substance users. But meth 
addicts just focus on meth," Lehman said. "Reefer Madness portrayed 
marijuana as a gateway drug. It's more gateway behavior. It's a 
personality type and a genetic makeup that makes one person choose a 
speed drug as opposed to a downer drug. If they hit meth, you have a 
very rapid escalation of the tendencies."

Gore worries about his township's fire department. "Ninety percent of 
the fire service in our county is provided by volunteers," Gore said. 
"(Meth) represents a very sizable risk to them and a very sizable 
increase in training and safety precautions. I'm not at all 
comfortable that we are adequately addressing that at this time. In 
downtown Vandalia we had a meth house (blow up), and there's our fire 
department right in the center of it, and this story is being 
repeated all over. Ditto on police. They need to be better trained 
and equipped to deal with what's left behind. Supervision is 
described as being under the state police, but the actual loading up 
of debris and where they hauled it to is done by the same people who 
would haul away an old chicken coop."

Chris Siebenmark, who covers three counties, Cass, Van Buren and 
Berrien, for state Sen. Ron Jelinek, R-Three Oaks, offered a 
"three-fold" perspective of education, resources and treatment.

"Two of our three counties (Cass and Van Buren) are in the top five 
counties in the state," said Siebenmark. He said Van Buren County 
Sheriff Dale Gribler estimated that 80 percent of his jail population 
related to meth either directly or indirectly.

"Berrien doesn't have as much ag activity," since isolated areas with 
farm chemicals to appropriate for their clandestine labs appeal to 
criminals manufacturing meth, but (Sheriff) "Paul Bailey has found 
some labs in Berrien, too. In the spring they found one in downtown 
New Buffalo. Some of these folks aren't even discreet," Siebenmark said.

Siebenmark said average citizens read news accounts of labs being 
broken up and assume the problem is being dealt with without making 
any connection to how it directly affects them. "They have a stake in it."

On resources, Siebenmark said, "There is, slowly and surely, a 
tendency in this state to find the dollars, but then again it's 
trying to change a culture. Going away from instant incarceration to 
intervention and prevention on the front end. People are finally 
realizing it's a lot cheaper on the front end and a stronger 
opportunity for that person, as opposed to waiting until they become 
involved or an addicted user. In any given county incarceration is 
the highest piece of your budget. In the state, corrections is No. 3 
in our budget. Though the trend is there to pull resources over to 
the front end, folks need to realize it's a tough battle."

"At the federal level, a lot of legislation is being looked at right 
now," said Siebenmark, whose wife works for U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph.

"As it gets more traction in Washington, you're also going to see 
more resources come down to states having problems. One plus is that 
we're not as bad off as states west of here," such as Missouri and 
Oklahoma. "We're learning from them. That's where the idea for the 
cold medicine legislation came from. That was huge."

Third, Siebenmark said, "Is trying to find the resources for the 
unfortunate end of those folks who are addicted. What do we do with 
them? Where do we put them? Eighty percent go back to using again. 
Looking at mental health, it was a shock to me in March of 2003 when 
I first started with Ron, there was a symposium at Western Michigan. 
They showed funding for mental health over the last 20 years ... it 
was a flat line. If I was looking at someone's heart rate, they would 
be declared dead."

"One piece of legislation Ron will get rolling that will speak to 
mitigation is an idea born in Cass County," Siebenmark said. "There 
were instances when family members in a home would get sick and they 
couldn't nail it down. Three months of going to the doctor and not 
feeling well, that home or apartment had been a lab. There would be a 
requirement to disclose that at point of sale or point of rental. The 
one reason it has not moved is state law right now requires DEQ 
(Department of Environmental Quality) and Health to declare that 
location clean and habitable again, but there were no written 
standards. We've been spending a lot of time looking at standards 
other states have, so when this legislation is rolled out, those 
standards will be in it (spelling out) what 'clean' means."

County Commissioner John Cureton, R-Dowagiac, a former minister, said 
Americans find themselves in a Catch-22 when "it comes to problems of 
this nature. I'm talking about the church-state relationship. It's 
essentially a spiritual problem. I believe in church-state 
separation, but it puts us in a difficult situation ... yet I've seen 
case after case of persons whose relationship with God has been the 
cleansing factor for all kinds of practices - and that certainly 
would include meth use."

Anna Sain of Lewis Cass Intermediate School District said, "I think 
the problem might be a lot larger than we think. Our staff goes out 
into homes and see a lot of things, but I don't know that we're 
educated enough to know what people using meth look like until it's 
progressed to a certain stage where we recognize it. Children coming 
from those homes are greatly affected by it, not only from the 
parents' point of view of neglect and abuse, but living there every 
day before we clean it up as well as possible, are they pre-addicted 
from exposure? I'm also concerned for the safety of our workers out 
in the community."

Individual community members are strongly encouraged to attend, since 
private citizens always possess some of the best common-sense 
problem-solving approaches.

For more information about the task force contact Coordinator 
Jennifer Lester at Woodlands Addictions Center, Vandalia, at 269/476-9781.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman