The migration of meth

The drug labeled 'hillbilly heroin' is settling down in the rural South

By Holly Hickman ~ The Associated Press

BOONE, N.C. -- Mark Shook says he's fighting a war in this mountain town -- complete with explosions, abandoned children and an enemy that will not give up.

Shook is Watauga County's sheriff, and for the past year he and others have tried to beat back the parasitic spread of methamphetamine through the hills and hollows of western North Carolina.

"Meth is choking this town," Shook said recently, moments before taking a call about yet another raid on a possible meth lab. "We are fighting a war -- and it's going to spread. I've never seen anything like it."

Meth is a highly addictive and potent powder "cooked" from such common ingredients as ammonia, lithium from car batteries and pseudoephedrine from cold tablets. After snorting, eating or injecting the drug, users experience rushes of energy and euphoria that can last 12 hours.

"You feel like Superman," said David Mclemore, a former addict who now counsels other substance abusers here. "You can get addicted the first time. And then it takes more and more and more to get high."

Popularized by bikers and truckers in the late 1980s, meth and its makers have migrated eastward from California and other Western states.

They've increasingly taken root in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, the state that led the South with more than 1,150 of the nation's roughly 8,000 meth lab seizures last year.

Place in the mountains

Boone, a town of 13,500 best known as the home of Appalachian State University, is surrounded by rugged, sometimes-inaccessible terrain that offers meth makers the same kind of protection it once provided to moonshiners. And the open, isolated spaces diffuse the pungent, nauseating odors that are the meth labs' dead giveaway.

"You can't cook when you're living on top of each other in a city," Shook said.

Last year, 34 meth labs -- about 20 percent of the statewide total -- were seized here and social workers removed 17 children from homes where the chemicals saturated the walls, furniture and carpet.

Because these so-called "meth orphans" were often covered in dangerous toxins, emergency room doctors had to devise methods for decontaminating them. All their toys, books and clothes had to be taken and burned.

"The kids didn't always understand why they couldn't take their Barbie with them," said social worker Chad Slagle.

Children sometimes unwittingly caused their parents' arrest. A first-grader told her teacher how to cook meth. An older student included meth cooking in a "How I Spent My Summer" essay.

Last year, Shook, county commissioner Keith Honeycutt and a cross-section of city and county workers volunteered thousands of hours analyzing the constant flow of new problems presented by the meth boom.

Meth-making, with its combustible ingredients and "cooks" who are often strung out, comes with the ever-present possibility of explosions.

"These people, they'll cook on a hotplate in the woods or drive around with it," Shook said, equating that to carrying a "bomb in the back of your car."

And with every meth lab bust, taxpayers must spend between $2,000 and $4,000 to have hazardous materials teams and other specially trained workers clean up the toxic mess, which includes phosphine gas, a chemical weapons component.

Meth makers also dump poisonous byproducts into sewage systems, streams and fields. And their labs render houses uninhabitable and depress property values in surrounding neighborhoods.

"We call Watauga County ground zero," said State Bureau of Investigation director Robin Pendergraft, who is pushing North Carolina lawmakers to increase the penalties for operating meth labs.

The young "meth orphans" -- 3,300 of which were removed from homes with meth labs nationwide last year -- have become a particularly acute health concern.

"My guess is that 100 percent of the kids we find in meth labs are on meth," said industrial hygiene expert Richard Martyny. "Kids crawl on the carpet, put their fingers in their mouths. They might as well have been taking it directly."

First study of labs

Martyny recently led the first scientific study of meth labs at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. His study found that meth and its ingredients drifted down hallways and seeped under closed doors. They saturated walls, carpeting, sofas and ventilation ducts. Even tests on clothing fibers and the interiors of microwave ovens came back positive.

Many of the ingredients of methamphetimine are linked to cancer, kidney and liver damage and respiratory failure, and as meth's use has widened in recent years, more and more longtime drug agents have been diagnosed with those kind of ailments.

Leslie Presnell lost custody of her three children after her husband, who was a meth user and cook, got her addicted.

Presnell, who requested the use of pseudonym, said boredom had as much to do with her addiction as anything.

"There's nothing to do here," she said, recalling how she snorted meth for the first time at her kitchen table. She and her husband lost all their savings and isolated themselves in their mountain home, socializing only with other meth users.

Presnell is now separated from her husband, who is awaiting trial for manufacturing meth. In late January, after proving she had been clean for a year, a judge gave her the children back.

Dr. Andrew Mason, a Boone forensic toxicologist, said Presnell is a rarity. Efforts to get meth users off the drug fail at a rate of 94 percent.

Shook believes Boone is only a way station on meth's spread across North Carolina. It's just a matter of time, he predicted, before meth catches on in the big cities, like the moonshine that once came from these hills was taken by highway to Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham and other urban centers.

"This thing is worse than heroin. It's worse than crack. And it's going up and down highways," Shook said. "That's why we're attacking it here, now."