Pubdate: Mon, 28 Apr 2003
Source: Erie Times-News (PA)
Copyright: 2003 Erie Times-News
Contact:  http://www.goerie.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1347
Author: Lisa Thompson and Gerry Weiss

POWDERED MADNESS

TITUSVILLE -- The battle against methamphetamine is not fought only by 
police in midnight raids or undercover drug buys. It's fought also by 
clerks at the counter of Bryan's True Value Hardware.

This sprawling, 125-year-old hardware store sells everything from spinach 
salad at the lunch counter to toilet seats and copper pipe. But don't bring 
a telltale armload of household cleaners and chemicals such as naphtha, red 
devil lye and plastic tubing to the till.

Clara Bell and her staff know a meth cook's shopping list when they see 
one. And they're not selling.

Bell is an unlikely warrior in the struggle to stamp out meth in the 
Titusville area. With her twinkling eyes and pert bouffant, Bell is the 
assistant to the store's chief executive and the star of the store's 
popular radio ads. She holds court behind a cluttered desk in a busy 
backroom office crammed with pending orders, rolls of colored ribbon and 
stacks of boxes. A cutout wooden chicken hangs in the air above her desk.

"This chick's busy. Take a number," it warns.

Bell's approach to the meth trade in her community is equally no-nonsense.

"Anytime the girls get anybody with stuff like that, we just say we can't 
sell these things to you," Bell said. "We've had some rebuttals. But we 
don't have to sell anything to anyone."

At Bryan's True Value, there's a meth embargo.

Cooks manufacture methamphetamine in secret shacks in the forests and 
fields or behind locked doors in private kitchens, bathrooms and corners of 
basements.

But the drug's presence does not remain secret for long. It announces 
itself quietly in the uptick of petty crimes such as shoplifting and car 
ransackings. It appears in thick, heartbreaking case files as family ties 
collapse under the weight of addiction and give way to abuse and neglect.

Other times the social consequences of meth abuse flare up in the sudden 
violence of a lab explosion and blast lasting holes in a community's 
fabric. The drug not only ravages its users. It poisons children and the 
ground they live on. It corrodes family life and exacts a toll on business 
owners and residents alike.

Just ask the people of Titusville.

Since the drug first surfaced in this southern Crawford County city of 
5,800 in the late 1990s, it has caused fires, assaults, child neglect and 
theft.

But the city is not alone. The problem is everywhere, Titusville Mayor 
Brian Sanford said. What's happened in Titusville has happened in hundreds 
of other communities nationwide.

Most recently, meth labs have mushroomed into the nearby communities of Oil 
City and Franklin that lie to the south of Titusville in Venango County. 
Leaders there now find themselves in the same spot those in Titusville did 
a few years ago - huddled with police, taking crash courses in the meth 
trade. Residents, meanwhile, are learning to say words like "cook" in 
conjunction with deadly criminal activity.

Police say Erie should expect the same.

"The Erie community has something to worry about. This drug is of epidemic 
proportion," said Capt. Erby Conley, commanding officer for six state 
police barracks in Erie, Crawford, Venango and Warren counties.

Titusville leaders say the only solution, if there is one, is cooperation 
and honesty.

"We need to open our eyes, admit it is universal and start taking positive 
steps to deal with the problem everybody knows is there," Sanford said.

He is backed up not only by a police force taking aim at this problem, but 
also by fed-up citizens such as Clara Bell. She fights along the supply 
lines. Others tend meth's casualties, principally the children.

A crazed teenager standing at the top of a stairwell offered Titusville 
police their first clue that meth was back. When they responded to a call 
about the disturbance, the teen leapt at them - just dove from the top of 
the stairs.

Sometime later police found themselves chasing another crazed man through 
the city streets. This one was naked. Who acts like that? they wondered.

Someone on meth.

The return of the drug in the late 1990s left older cops scratching their 
heads. They had not seen it since the 1970s. Its re-emergence sent rookie 
cops back to their textbooks.

"We didn't know what they were talking about when they said they were 
'cooking meth,'" said 32-year-old Titusville police officer Kerrick Caldwell.

For Caldwell, those anecdotes now seem almost quaint. He now gives Power 
Point presentations on meth to middle-schoolers and Rotarians. He can talk 
about its origins like a college professor and sketch out the principles of 
a meth lab on a chalkboard in seconds flat.

A few years after meth announced its return to the Titusville area, police 
arrested the man they say brought it here - Roger Coulter.

Shocked residents expressed relief at the roundup of Coulter's ring. But 
privately, police worried the problem was far from over. Meth cooks trained 
by Coulter and his cronies were still out there, and the meth they made was 
creating more addicts every day.

That shows in District Justice Amy Nicols' court docket.

Nicols tends the gateway to the criminal justice system in the Titusville 
area. She has watched year by year as strange, inexplicable crime ratcheted 
up in close concert with methamphetamine use in the region.

Meth can induce intense paranoia, even psychosis. The user might hear 
voices and believe he is being followed or watched. Sometimes it remains a 
private nightmare inside the user's own head. Other times, the drug-soaked 
users act out their delusions with extreme violence.

Months after the Coulter ring was broken up in April 2001, there was a 
shooting and an hours-long standoff police suspect was meth-related. It 
happened in front of Doug Peterson's house in Titusville.

Police said they seized meth-making supplies from Peterson's car and house 
in November. It was Peterson police were looking for when they found a 
suspected meth lab in an Erie Heights housing project apartment in Erie in 
December.

Citing other examples, Nicols said that based on the defendants' bizarre 
behavior, she suspects meth played a role in both a recent stabbing and 
fatal shooting. She pointed to a man arraigned earlier this month on 
charges of severely beating his wife. The woman might need facial surgery.

"I'm used to seeing remorse. I'm not seeing remorse," she said.

"I don't think people are taking this problem as seriously as they should," 
she said. "It is the most serious problem we're dealing with."

Police say not many children apparently buy and use meth in the Titusville 
area. But they still seem to pay the highest price for it.

Titusville Middle School Assistant Principal Rob Buchan and high school 
Principal Amanda Hetrick said they usually know if there has been a bust in 
the area by looking at their students' faces. The names printed in the 
local paper's police briefs are sometimes those of a student's mom or dad 
or brother or uncle.

"We see more the emotional impact," Hetrick said.

The schools work with children who might be relatives of meth users to help 
them forge their own identities, separate from meth.

"We just encourage them to go and build their own lives," Hetrick said.

Sometimes they succeed. She cited a student who graduated in 2002 and 
started a successful business.

Other times, they fail.

Hetrick lost a 10th-grader to meth. He just quit coming to school when 
meth-related problems at home overwhelmed him.

"It changed his whole life," she said.

Sometimes family members might be literally poisoning their children. The 
number of children seized nationwide at meth labs more than doubled from 
1999 to 2002, Caldwell said, citing information from the National Drug 
Intelligence Center in Johnstown. In 2001, approximately 35 percent of the 
children found at such lab sites tested positive for toxins in their bodies.

Caldwell said that at a recent meth bust, Titusville police found the 
poisonous and explosive materials used to make meth sitting inches off a 
bathroom floor. A 10-year-old girl lived there.

"It makes you sick," he said. "They have a child in the home and they know 
full well (the danger) and they don't care."

Caldwell also has been to sites where children are living on ground that 
has tested positive for the toxic byproducts of meth production. In 
California, they test children found at such sites to see if they have been 
poisoned. He believes that should happen here.

Ann Waychoff, Jennifer Rodgers and Jodie Lavery of Genesis Family Services 
in Titusville might be the first outsiders to connect with a family broken 
by meth.

Rodgers jokingly refers to the group as a kind of social services vice 
squad. They deliver help to distressed families. They say meth is 
increasingly to blame.

"It encompasses everything in an addict's life. The children suffer most," 
said Lavery.

Waychoff recalled a recent home visit. She was scheduled simply to deliver 
a welcome basket to a newborn baby.

She had hand-knit baby blankets and pamphlets for the new mother. Waychoff 
thought the visit would give her a chance to meet with the family and see 
if they needed any help.

It did. But not in the ways she expected.

Waychoff entered the home to find the family in the midst of a meth-fueled 
meltdown. The baby's mother was coming down off a high and was desperate.

"She is running around screaming and crying and yelling," Waychoff said. "I 
just kept talking to her in a calm voice and tried just to get her to look 
at me."

Eventually, she persuaded the woman to go outside with her and have a 
cigarette. They walked and walked up and down the snowy streets.

"She admitted she had been using. She had been up for two or three days," 
Waychoff said.

"She wanted to get help. I think it was literally driving her crazy."

Meth has poisoned even the local economy.

"We see a great deal of retail theft. The cooks get somebody hooked on 
meth, then they send out people into the community to steal items they need 
to make it," Titusville Police Chief Don Owens said.

The clerks at Bryan's know what to look for. They say that sometimes users 
steal the supplies by the boxload, right off the shelf.

"We get an awful lot of theft," Bell said.

Meth has forced a change in policy at another Titusville institution, E.K. 
Thompson and Son, a 138-year-old tin-ceilinged pharmacy where you can still 
take a seat at the lunch counter.

Meth cooks use a key ingredient in cold medicine, pseudoephedrine, to 
concoct what one user called devil's dandruff. The cold medicine at 
Thompson's lies on shelves in a direct line of sight from the pharmacy counter.

The store won't sell large quantities of cold medicines containing 
pseudoephedrine. If someone comes in trying to buy such merchandise in 
bulk, the store alerts police, said pharmacist Loretta Weis.

Some would-be customers become pretty insistent. Weis doesn't budge.

"In fact, we get downright rude sometimes," she said.

There is a sense here that residents such as Weis and leaders such as Mayor 
Sanford have had enough.

Some might shudder at making public pronouncements about a meth problem in 
their area. That is not the case with Sanford and Owens and Titusville City 
Manager Mary Ann Knau.

Perception is reality, Knau said.

People perceive a meth problem in the Titusville area because there is one. 
But the city's leaders say they are working to change that.

"What we wish to be perceived to be is what we wish to be - a safe area 
where you don't dare operate a meth lab," Knau said.

Titusville, Oil City and Franklin share a proud history that springs from 
an earlier boom. The region touts itself as "The Valley That Changed the 
World."

Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first commercially successful oil well on the 
banks of Oil Creek just outside Titusville in 1859. A handful of the great 
fortunes born in that era or from the industries it spawned still linger 
and quietly shore up programs to help the poor or support the arts. 
Theaters and office buildings and block after block of ornate Victorian 
mansions built with the money that flowed like the oil during that boom 
still remain.

But the region is for the most part several steps removed from its 
prosperous past.

Industries that once anchored the area's economy have largely fled. Leaders 
celebrate smaller victories, a new restaurant or office for the downtown, 
while they slowly work to lay the infrastructure to attract future development.

They are not about to cede anything to the drug dealers. There is still too 
much good in their communities that they want to protect and promote.

"We'd like to let the world know if you are going to operate a meth lab in 
Titusville, you're going to get caught," Sanford said.

They believe they can solve the problem through education and regional 
cooperation.

The success local police have had so far has come with the help of the 
state attorney general's drug task force. It pays for the local officers' 
overtime and allows the officers to carry their investigations outside the 
city limits.

Titusville's leaders would like to see more of that kind of police work. 
They want their neighbors to help.

Sanford calls his city an "accident of geography." Titusville lies close to 
the borders of three counties - Warren, Crawford and Venango. It lies far 
from the state police stations, which patrol the sprawling, thinly 
populated municipalities that surround Titusville.

There are meth labs in Titusville. But city leaders believe most production 
occurs outside the city limits.

Either way, the city is left to cope with the fallout. City police are 
often asked to respond to incidents outside their borders.

In one such case, a man police believe was under the influence of meth 
attacked two Titusville officers. One of the officers ended up on workers' 
compensation, which affected the city's premiums for the next three years, 
Knau said.

The leaders want to cooperate with some of the surrounding municipalities 
to get grants to assign police officers to full-time drug investigations.

"Until people realize we've got to work together for the common good of the 
region, it is not going to happen," Owens said.
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