Methamphetamine Now Races Through the Heart of America

It might seem a supernatural force has seized this remote county of two-lane blacktops and white oak forests. It can be found in the surge in crime. And in the inexplicable behavior:

With terrible suddenness, a flash fire erupts and then a blast shatters a trailer, the flames engulfing one man. A strange scene follows: The victim’s friends dash outside to bury a skillet and a blender as police arrive.

A desperate young thief steals a pickup, a car and a Harley Davidson--all in a single night.

Over the course of a month, rampaging teens burn a church, a machine shed and railroad crossing signs and rip through ravines, ditches and a golf course, with the damage reaching nearly $1 million.

Odd and terrifying, these episodes are not the work of the occult. Authorities have a more prosaic explanation: methamphetamine.

A potent and popular, destructive and sometimes deadly synthetic drug, long a scourge in the West, methamphetamine has invaded America’s heartland.

Users can become walking zombies, fueled by paranoid fantasies as they go days without sleep or food, only craving more of the drug.

Methamphetamine has ruined lives, filled jails, flooded courts and frustrated police.

“Years ago, I predicted it would be the biggest problem we had . . . but I still didn’t realize what it would turn out to be,” says Scott County Sheriff Bill Ferrell, who has reigned over this corner of southeast Missouri for 20 years. “It snowballs, but it’s underground and you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s too late.”

Methamphetamine, also known as meth, crank, ice or crystal, has cut a wide swath through middle America, surpassing the popularity of crack and other drugs in many communities.

Its tentacles reach from backwoods barns in southeast Missouri’s Bootheel to desolate Indian reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota to caravans of illegal immigrants who blend in with others who come looking for work in meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa.

“We’re in the middle of a meth epidemic,” says Ken Carter, director of the Iowa Division of Narcotics Enforcement. “This state has a tremendous appetite for that stuff. . . . It’s from high school all the way up to the age people should know better.”

Meth Arrests Are Skyrocketing

Iowa’s meth arrests--based on reports covering most of the state--accounted for 47% of drug activity in 1995, compared with less than 5% four years earlier. And Nebraska police recently seized the largest shipment of the drug ever in the state, recovering 34 pounds, worth $1.5 million, in February.

These increases are part of a broader trend.

Officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration region that covers five Midwest states and southern Illinois say meth arrests skyrocketed in a five-year period ending in 1996--from 47 to 424. Those numbers don’t include hundreds of people nabbed by local and state authorities.

And in fiscal 1996, the DEA seized 303 meth labs in the Midwest, compared with just six four years earlier. The bulk of them--250--were here in Missouri.

“We, in effect, have become the source country in the Midwest for meth,” says Stephen Hill, the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, whose office has been overwhelmed by these cases.

Long a problem in the West and Southwest--especially California, where 799 meth labs were seized in 1996--the drug has spread to the heartland partly because it’s so easy to make, partly because there’s so much money to be made.

“You don’t have to go to Mexico,” says Ferrell, the Scott County sheriff. “You don’t have to transport it from Colombia. This is something you can make with stuff you can buy from the local hardware store.”

Methamphetamine, which can be smoked, snorted, swallowed or injected, normally contains ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, found in over-the-counter cold medications. Depending on the recipe, other ingredients used in the cooking are the stuff of skull-and-crossbones labels: lye, rat killer, battery parts and various chemicals.

It’s a highly volatile mix. Police blotters are filled with horror stories of meth “cooks” who have severely burned themselves--or even died--from explosions or caustic fumes.

Many meth labs are mom-and-pop operations, modern-day versions of the moonshine still. The drug can be made with a skillet and stove, in a bathtub, even a car trunk with a plastic drinking cup. And the recipe is just a click away on the Internet.

It’s lucrative too: A $1,000 investment, police say, can reap a $20,000 profit.

But its consequences often are tragic.

In South Dakota, a man awakened by his girlfriend from a binge grabbed his handgun, wounded her and killed two people before turning the weapon on himself. In Missouri, a 17-year-old was convicted of murdering another teen in what prosecutors called a meth deal gone bad. And in Nebraska, a teen died after collapsing at his high school prom; toxicology reports indicate he had taken meth.

Still, many remain unfazed.

“It’s a cheap man’s high,” explains Robin Mesey, 40, who admits to using the drug but denies charges he faces in Missouri that he attempted to manufacture it. “It’s longer-lasting. Price-wise, it’s the best.”

Police say $100 can buy a cocaine user a 20-minute high; the same amount can keep a meth user buzzed for a day or two.

“You learn to depend on it. It becomes more important than everything in life,” says Mesey, tattooed arms crossed casually as he sits in the Butler County Jail, calmly describing how meth has ruined him.

“I try to keep my sense of humor,” he says, a smile underneath a scraggly mustache. “That’s the only thing I have left. I’ve given away everything else.”

Still, Mesey adds, chances are good he’ll use it again if he remains in the county.

“It takes five minutes to have all the dope I want,” he says, “and it doesn’t cost me a dime because I know so many people.”

Their Families, Bodies Fall Apart

That doesn’t surprise Kevin Glaser, a narcotics officer for the Missouri State Highway Patrol, who arrived at a house trailer fire last year as some of the burn victim’s buddies were scrambling to bury cooking utensils commonly used to manufacture meth.

“It’s hard to imagine a drug controlling you the way it does,” Glaser says. “They see their family falling apart, their bodies falling apart, but the only thing that matters to them is the dope.”

Methamphetamine trafficking in the Midwest once was almost the exclusive business of biker gangs.

Now, it’s everywhere.

“The meth trade is probably different from any other drug trade,” says Sgt. Russ Underwood of the Des Moines Police. “Instead of going to some dark corner of the city, you might be able to get some from your co-worker or the person next door in the suburbs. You don’t have to put your life in peril to go into the inner city . . . where someone might shoot you.”

Unlike Missouri, most of the drug is imported to Iowa; some has been transported by illegal immigrants.

Since June 1995, a federal drug task force has seized 60 pounds of meth and arrested 45 illegal aliens in Iowa and Nebraska, says Jerry Heinauer, Omaha district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“Illegals are coming up and selling this stuff, melting within the community where there are meatpacking plants,” Heinauer says.

In another twist on smuggling, North Dakota authorities recently arrested six people--three of whom already have been convicted--for participating in a sophisticated ring that used illegal aliens as “mules” to haul meth on Greyhound buses from the Southwest to North Dakota and South Dakota. It was then carted off to safe houses rented on remote Indian reservations, where there’s little police scrutiny.

All this activity has taxed the courts.

In western Missouri, which includes Kansas City, federal prosecutor Hill says 80% of narcotics cases his office saw three years ago involved crack or powder cocaine; now, 90% are methamphetamine.

He speculates 400 to 500 clandestine labs may be seized in Missouri this year and worries, too, about the aftermath: Carcinogenic cooking residue is sometimes dumped in streams or along roadsides.

“We’re talking about people trashing the environment, trashing themselves and eventually putting poison out on the streets,” he says.

Glaser, the narcotics officer, says he shuts down a lab every week or so. But others open up.

“It’s like the Dutchman sticking his finger in the dike,” he says. “You plug one hole, then another hole pops up somewhere else. We’re as busy today as we were a year ago. I don’t see any letup in the near future. We’ve just got too many people trying to do it.”