Pubdate: Fri, 21 Jan 2005
Source: Duluth News-Tribune (MN)
Copyright: 2005 Duluth News-Tribune
Contact:  http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthtribune/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/553
Author: Chuck Haga, Minneapolis Star Tribune

RURAL KANABEC COUNTY BATTLES METH USE

Communities: Officials Believe About One-Quarter of the Area's High
Schoolers Have Used the Damaging Drug.

MORA, MINN. - In a social worker's office, a young mother's nervous
jitters subside as she cradles her 2-year-old, a daughter who tested
positive for methamphetamine at birth. The social worker watches,
sympathetic but wary.

Across town, another mother gives the sheriff permission to go into
local schools and show pictures of her dead son.

At the Kanabec County Courthouse, a man accused of turning his rural
home into a heavily defended meth lab accepts a plea agreement that
will send him to prison for almost seven years -- for possession.

The same day, at Kanabec Hospital: The sheriff and the school
superintendent meet for a weekly strategy session with doctors, nurses,
prosecutors and others: a coalition of the angry.

Little more than an hour's drive north of the Twin Cities, Kanabec
County is a mostly rural sanctuary of lakes, woods, isolated cabins
and sometimes vacant farmhouses. It is a place where independence is
admired, privacy is respected and the clandestine production of meth
is a growth industry.

But the fight is on.

At Mora High School, Superintendent Keith Lester looks into the faces
of 10 students and wonders which two or three may have inhaled the
toxic concoction brewed from cold tablets, Drano, battery acid and the
phosphorous scraped from the tips of stick matches.

Authorities "have reason to believe it's 20 to 25 percent of our
students" who have used meth, Lester said. "A social worker was told
by a student that he could walk down the hall and point out 50 kids
who are using.

"We don't want our kids drinking and we don't want them smoking
marijuana, but this is worse. We've never mounted such a response
before, but meth is so available, so much more addictive than anything
we've seen before."

At the grocery store, managers control access to Sudafed and other
cold remedies, key ingredients in meth. They have been kept behind
glass since someone left dozens of emptied packages in a shopping cart
outside last year.

Ask for five packages of Sudafed now and someone will call the
sheriff.

Just about any rural county in Minnesota could tell a similar story of
deepening frustration: sheriffs who lack the tools to stem the meth
tide, health officials who plead for treatment options, educators
alarmed by rising use of the viciously addictive drug among "good,
active kids" trying to balance sports, music, school and work.

Kanabec County Sheriff Steve Schulz, who laments that training,
tracking and testifying related to meth "is 80 percent of what I do,"
keeps a sharp eye on people who move into farmhouses, cabins and
town-edge homes where the caustic vapors of a meth lab might go undetected.

In Kanabec County's mobilization against meth, Luke Estes serves on
the front lines, volunteered by his mother and deployed by the sheriff.

A recent graduate of Mora High School, Luke has appeared before every
class in grades 7 through 12. In pictures displayed on a screen, he is
a big, beefy kid with a shock of brown hair, and he is dead.

His bare chest shows the scars of his autopsy, his arms the purpling
of skin where blood settled as he lay on a slab at the morgue. The
coroner said meth made his heart explode.

Students scribble later on comment cards: "I knew Luke," or "How do I
help a friend who's using meth?"

Wendy Thompson, the county director of public health, said that
pregnant women come through the county's Women, Infants and Children
program on meth. Babies are born with the drug in their systems and at
least one has been born addicted.

A recent community forum on meth drew 550 people in Mora, a town of
about 3,200. "When the pictures of Luke came up, all you could hear
was heartbeats," said Frank Forster, youth ministries director at
Grace Lutheran Church, which hosted the forum. "You could see shirts
moving from the heartbeats."

Meth is a driving factor in a controversial proposal to build a new
$15 million jail in Mora, tripling capacity to 78, Schulz said. The
county now sends half of its prisoners to other counties at a daily
cost of $50 each. Schulz had to hire a jail nurse because many
prisoners arrive with meth burns, sores, dental disasters and bad
hearts. Some need a psychiatrist. Some must be catheterized to urinate.

They are nervous, agitated, delusional, paranoid and violent. They
suffer from rashes, convulsions, seizures, hallucinations, chest
pains, organ failure, bone loss, impotence and brain damage, yet many
declare that the first thing they'll do upon release is score some
meth.

Children from meth homes show higher rates of attention-deficit
disorder, hyperactivity, IQ and language defects, learning
disabilities and behavior disorders, the jail nurse, Clare Jones,
said. "These are not easy children for addicts to take care of. That's
going to lead to neglect and abuse."
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