Meth ‘moonshiners’ on rise

First of two parts

TRACY CITY, Tenn. - Behind the white mobile home sagging in the sun, there is a single-room shack with a tin roof and a dirt floor that 60 years ago would have been the perfect place to distill a batch of moonshine.

But the half-dozen lawmen gathered in these hills aren’t looking for an illegal whiskey still. They are here to raid a methamphetamine “cooker.”

“Moonshiners went from moonshine to marijuana, from marijuana to meth,” said Ricky Smith, a member of the federally funded Southeast Tennessee Meth Task Force who has arrested hundreds of meth manufacturers, many who can trace their lineage to makers of illegal alcohol.

Though small meth labs have been a problem in some areas since the mid-1990s, results of a survey this month by the National Association of Counties show the drug’s staggering national reach. Fifty-eight percent of sheriff’s departments and related agencies polled in 45 states said meth is now the top threat — above marijuana and cocaine — in their areas.

During the past five years, clandestine labs — where the highly addictive drug commonly known as “crank” or “crystal” is concocted from easily obtained products such as cold tablets — have spread from their decades-old anchor along the West Coast to the East, hooking in deepest in the rural Southeast.

“Six years ago, I’d never heard of it,” said Sheriff Fred Newman of Washington County, Va., which led the state in meth lab incidents last year. “Marijuana, yeah. Cocaine, a bit of heroin, obviously your prescription pills — but not meth.”

Law-enforcement officials said the number of “mom-and-pop” labs has grown tenfold in rural parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia and Virginia in the past five years and has taken authorities, especially in the smaller jurisdictions, by surprise.

Meth “has swept the country and invaded the East Coast,” said Karen P. Tandy, administrator of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), who stressed that “despite this movement, there are hopeful signs that we can succeed against this powerful drug.”

But meth’s march across America is exacting a toll on towns and small cities unaccustomed to the costly nature of drug epidemics:

• Researchers say treating one addict costs up to $15,000. The money often is subsidized, if not fully absorbed, by taxpayers. Jail costs also are ballooning in some jurisdictions, which end up paying medical bills of inmates suffering meth-related health problems.

• Meth peels apart families, exacting heavy costs on state child services departments, which are overwhelmed in several states by cases of children seized from parents cooking meth at home. The DEA said children are present at more than 20 percent of meth labs nationwide.

• The labs are highly toxic, and cooks often dump waste into streams, rivers and fields. The DEA estimated cleanup costs at up to $5,000 per dump site, another cost absorbed mainly by local police. Cooking can be explosive, and a growing number of motel and home fires have been linked to meth labs in recent years.

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