Crack Brings Crime, Fear and VD to Rural America

Big changes have hit Swainsboro, and Emanuel County Sheriff Tyson Stephens is having a hard time fighting them.

Three years ago, alcohol and marijuana were the biggest drug problems around this southeast Georgia town of 7,850 people; but now, said Stephens, with mixed sadness and rage, crack is “without a doubt the most serious problem we’re facing in law enforcement.”

Use and sale of the highly addictive cocaine derivative are bad enough, but the “spinoff” crimes--burglaries, stickups, prostitution--make the situation much worse. While thumbing through lists of offenders, Stephens said that “85% of everything we touch is either drugs or drug related.”

Across the nation, little towns and rural areas increasingly are being invaded by innovative dealers who set up thriving businesses with fewer handicaps than they face in the big cities: smaller police forces, bigger spaces to deal. As one drug agent put it: “They’re looking for less competition and less heat.”

For example, in York, Pa., Los Angeles drug dealers have been known to move in with poor local residents, enticing them to convert their homes to “safe houses.” The newcomers “infiltrate the community by endearing themselves to the homeowners,” said Dennis Smith, a local detective. “Then they deal drugs, enlisting young kids to do it.”

In Bulloch County, Ga., a father and son recently were convicted of trafficking in cocaine while working as trash men, making their deals during collections.

Around here, officials said, groups ranging from “the Miami Boys” to Jamaicans have come to deal drugs.

The increasing drug problems in small towns mark the passing of an innocence in America, spawning crime fears among law-abiding residents, straining law enforcement agencies and causing sharp increases in venereal diseases as drug addicts trade their bodies for crack. In many small communities previously bypassed by the country’s urban ills, a realization is sinking in that, today, no place is immune.

Said Stephens: “We’re sort of a small, rural conservative area and like to consider ourselves part of the Bible Belt and think we could be skipped over by these dangerous illicit drugs. But that’s not the way it is.”

Indeed, while cities like Los Angeles, New York and Miami writhe in the grip of a highly publicized drug epidemic, smaller towns suffer, too--more quietly, but just as profoundly.

Street commerce now includes sales of crack--$10, $15, $20 for a rock about the size of a match head. Doors that used to remain unlocked now are bolted. Fewer people take walks at night. Strange cars, once regarded as objects of pleasant mystery, now are viewed with suspicion. Crime and fear permeate.

Donna Kirkland, a sales clerk at the Wild Horse Western Wear, was incredulous at the change here over the last couple of years. “People here (smoke crack) you wouldn’t even think do it,” she told a visitor. She said her husband works at night, and she is “scared to death to stay home alone,” now that the drug has a foothold here.

Law enforcement officials hear such fears more and more often these days. Stephens said people, particularly older residents, say: “ ‘Sheriff, I don’t even sit on my porch at night like I used to because I’m afraid (drug addicts) are going to knock me on the head. I don’t leave my house to go to church or go to the store without somebody being left here because I’m afraid they’re going to take everything I got.’ I never heard that sort of thing prior to this epidemic of crack. Never.”

Smith Edenfield, Swainsboro police chief, said that hearing about the fearful change is painful. “I take all that personally,” he said. “It bothers me. I stay awake at night and wonder what is it I should be doing and am not doing.”

In tiny Cuba, Ala., an apparently idyllic community on the state’s western edge, Beth Gray, the postmaster, told a visitor that “no matter where you go, you see people acting weird. They come in here, and they’ll be spaced out, like they’re from another planet.”

Such behavior often erupts into the kind of combat that residents of big cities have come to expect.

In Red Oak, Iowa, Sgt. Dennis Van Scoy said that a recent “outbreak between rival gangs” resulted in an exchange of violence that included a grenade tossed through a window and a shotgun shooting. “That’s not like the Crips and the Bloods,” said Van Scoy, referring to the Los Angeles gangs, but the incidents “really shake up people around here.”

Such incidents do not happen daily. And the amounts of drugs seized during drug busts in small towns almost never equal those in big cities. But law enforcement officials point out that, because their police forces are small, every drug-related crime is magnified.

Running his finger down the jail list for the day, Stephens recited the crimes committed in Emanuel County, whose population is 23,000: burglary to get items that can be sold for cocaine money, sale of crack, breaking into a car. Six of the seven cases he cites are connected to drugs. “Our burglaries, our shoplifting, our armed robberies, our aggravated assaults, are all up,” Stephens said, “and we attribute the increase primarily to cocaine.”

Faced with escalating crime, little communities constantly find themselves out-gunned, out-manned and out-maneuvered. The sheriff said that 686-square-mile Emanuel County has 1,200 miles of dirt roads. Stephens has 15 officers to patrol the entire county.

Moreover, because police officers in small communities are so well known, they cannot conduct undercover operations. Therefore, officials in these areas increasingly rely on state and federal help.

Officials in small towns complain bitterly that big cities get most of the $450 million in federal grants to state and local law enforcement agencies. In Washington, Donald Hamilton, spokesman for federal drug czar William J. Bennett, said the Bush Administration is aware of the drug problems in small towns and is trying to ensure that states distribute the funds equitably.

As a demonstration of how severe the rural drug problem is, Kansas officials, using federal funds to finance anti-drug task forces, arrested 1,885 suspects in sweeps last year, with about a third of the arrests made in predominantly rural areas.

In Georgia, the state Bureau of Investigation provides investigative assistance, recently conducting a three-month undercover operation in rural south Georgia. According to Bill Butler, a special agent of the bureau, the operation resulted in 389 arrests in 10 of the state’s 159 counties.

But nobody expects those arrests to put a permanent dent in drug trafficking around here.

What they do brings incredible sums of money, of course, made especially attractive to people in small towns where crushing poverty and bleak economies prevail.

In York, Pa., where once-thriving manufacturing industries have fallen on hard times, the Los Angeles infiltrators find it easy to recruit a “dirt-poor family,” said Dennis Smith, the detective. “They say: ‘This is no risk to you. We just want to use your house.’ ”

And they pay well.

In the Southeast, the proximity to cocaine-rich Florida has spawned thriving industries built on highway transport of drugs. Said Butler: “Crack has made cocaine so cheap that anybody with a driver’s license can drive to Florida, buy crack for $400 to $500 an ounce, come back to Georgia and double or triple his money. First thing you know, he’s a fairly large-size dealer.”

Like their big-city counterparts, small-town dealers recruit youngsters to stand on corners and warn dealers when “the man” shows up. Youngsters who, in more innocent times, may have spent hours playing with sticks and balls now have taken up implements of destruction.

The highway routes from Florida up through rural Georgia have been dubbed “Cocaine Alley.” And, as law enforcement officials target the main roads, the traffickers simply veer off onto smaller ones.

Swainsboro sits right between Interstates 95 and 75, two major north-south routes. Two other highways, U.S. 1, which runs north and south, and U.S. 80, an east-west road, intersect in the middle of town, just outside Sheriff Stephens’ office.

Stephens, gesturing at the maze of road signs above the street, said: “We call this Main and Main. We’re beginning to see drug traffic get off the interstates, onto these two-lanes. I think we’re in a bad, bad area right now for drug traffic to be passing through.”

Law enforcement officials are not the only ones worried about the drug epidemic in small towns and rural areas. Health officials have noticed dramatic increases in venereal diseases such as syphilis and fear that rural AIDS cases will follow the same pattern as addicts exchange sex for drugs.

“We are bombarded with syphilis cases,” said Lisa Chester, a nurse in the Emanuel County health department. “We’re having a big outbreak.”

In Augusta, Ga., the state Health Department’s district headquarters for Emanuel County and 12 others, Vera Greeson, principal community epidemiologist, said that syphilis cases in the 1988 fiscal year totaled 150, and 378 in fiscal 1989; but, in just the first four months of fiscal 1990, which began in July, 356 cases were reported. At that rate, more than 1,000 cases would be reported during the year.

“Once people become addicted to cocaine,” Greeson said, “they sell their souls to get more of it.”

Counseling addicts to practice safe sex is futile, she said. “Drugs alter their ability to make sensible decisions. Until the cocaine epidemic is controlled, there is nothing we can do.”

Meanwhile, a new, more addictive drug has just made its first appearance in Clayton County, near Atlanta. It looks like rock candy. It is crystal methamphetamine, or ice.

“I don’t know where it’s going to end,” Stephens said. “We have a generation of kids now who have gone through 10, 12, 14 years of public school education programs trying to encourage them to say no to drugs. I’m sending folks every day to treatment centers. I’m sending more people every day to the penitentiary. Yet, we have the biggest epidemic of drug usage this country’s ever seen.”

What, then, will he do?

“Keep bustin’ folks to let them know we’re still out there,” Stephens said, sighing like a man fighting to hold back a tide. “We’re still looking, and we’re not going to put up with drug sales.”