Pubdate: Sat, 08 Oct 2005
Source: Summit Daily News (CO)
Copyright: 2005 Summit Daily News
Contact:  http://www.summitdaily.com/home.php
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/587
Author: Patrick Farrell

METH FUELS THE wEST'S OIL AND GAS BOOM

CRAIG - Sheriff Buddy Grinstead, a solidly built cop's cop who benches
300 pounds, is only beginning to wrap his ham-hock-sized arms around
the drug problem that he says is swallowing his county.

As he drives his unmarked white SUV down Craig's main drag, Grinstead
points out a low-slung motel, where Craig police recently busted
dealers with methamphetamine, the cheap, synthetically produced
stimulant known for its long-lasting high.

Not a block farther, he nods at a run-down apartment, a well-known
crash pad for addicts. Up the hill, behind the main street, he pauses
at a well-kept ranch-style home, where a few years ago a local
developer was busted for cooking and selling the highly addictive
drug, which traces its chemical lineage back to the stamina or "pep"
pills given to both Allied and Axis soldiers during World War II.

Over the years, methamphetamine has claimed victims from across the
socio-economic spectrum, but according to Grinstead and energy
industry insiders, it has recently become epidemic on the oil and gas
rigs sprouting in the dusty expanses around Craig, a small town of
roughly 10,000 in the northwest corner of Colorado.

Grinstead busted his first meth lab in 1987, but says he didn't think
much about it; the "cook" was from California, and the whole operation
seemed out of place in his area.

Then, around 2000, about the same time as the natural gas boom took
off, he noticed an increase in meth use and related crimes. It was
like a "light switch went on," said one of Grinstead' s deputies, a
drug investigator who asked to remain anonymous. "It was like a
disease; everyone had it."

Grinstead says he's spoken with law enforcement officers from around
the West who say the drug has engulfed their small communities. Meth
recipes abound on the internet, and most of the ingredients -
over-the-counter cold pills, propane, drain cleaner, iodine and
ammonia - are easily procured in rural areas.

A survey from the National Association of Counties released in July
found that methamphetamine is the No. 1 drug problem for 57 percent of
suburban and rural counties. Half of the counties estimated that
one-fifth of their inmates were in jail for meth-related crimes.

Of the 82 inmates in Grinstead' s jail in early August, seven were
there for meth possession. But dig a little deeper, Grinstead says,
and most of the check forgeries, domestic violence cases and
burglaries trace back to crank.

So early this year, Grinstead, a solid Republican with friends and
family in the energy business, made a radical suggestion. At a
February county commissioners' meeting, he called for random drug
testing of all oil and gas workers. With that request, he publicly
declared that the county s oil and gas industry -one of its main
economic engines - has a drug problem that it can't or won't control.

"I'm not saying everyone in oil and gas is a druggie," said Grinstead,
"but these traveling drill crews seem to have a problem."

You're wired or you're fired

To confirm that meth use is widespread in the oil and gas fields, go
no further than Grinstead' s jail, and ask Tony Peck, a wiry,
shaggy-haired inmate currently doing six months for violating
probation for meth possession.

In recent years, Peck has found steady work as a roughneck. It's a
tough job, and to get him through the 12-hour days of drilling, he has
often turned to meth. Known as "poor man's cocaine," the drug delivers
a similar euphoric high. A hit of meth can keep a user awake for
hours, even days - at least at first.

"You work long hours, you thought the meth was keeping you awake, but
after a while it didn't do much, you have to keep taking more," said
37-year-old Peck. At the height of his use, he said he was eating or
smoking more than a gram of methamphetamine in a day, at a cost of
$200 to $300.

In denial

Sheriff Grinstead isn't the only public official to make the
connection between the meth problem and the oil and gas industry. At a
coalbed methane industry conference in May, Wyoming Gov. Dave
Freudenthal called on industry leaders to consider the effects of meth
on their workforce, and to pressure the Legislature for meth treatment
programs. But industry management has only recently begun to wrestle
with the problem.

"There's a lot of meth out there," said Dyan Piscopo, a human
resources employee with EnCana, a Canadian energy company that is
drilling in Colorado's Piceance Basin and Wyoming's Jonah Field.

Two years ago, she said, after finding hypodermic needles, crank pipes
and other drug paraphernalia at one of its worksites, EnCana began
working with Shell and Stone Energy to collect and share drug tests
from every employee seeking work with the hundreds of sub-contractors
that do the digging, drilling and maintenance.

The results are somewhat heartening, according to Colin Woods,
director of sales for Houston-based Data, Integrity, Security,
Administration Inc.

In 2003, Woods helped set up the test database for Shell and EnCana.
Back then, he said, drug positives among oil and gas workers in the
Rockies were hovering around 8 percent to 10 percent.

Today, positives have dropped to roughly 4 percent. In contrast, about
8 percent of the nation' s full-time workers tested positive for
illegal drugs in 2004, according to the U. S. Department of Health and
Human Services.

But some local drug testers say the industry's drug problem is much
bigger than the numbers suggest. Many oil and gas workers refuse to
give urine samples for drug tests because they know they'll fail, said
Rick Schneider, treasurer of Sideline Collections, a company based in
Rock Springs, Wyo. Factor in the refusals, and as many as one in six
of the more than 15,000 tests his company collects each year are
failures, he said. Many more may be slipping through the cracks; Peck
claims to have cheated five or six random urine analysis tests by
chugging an herbal detox drink beforehand.

Schneider said he has found entire rig crews unable to pass a drug
test. Some energy companies have asked him to test only on certain
days, so workers have plenty of time to back off the drug, which stays
in the system for only one to three days.

Locals left holding the bag

The recent survey from the National Association of Counties shed stark
light on the meth problem. Shortly after it was released, U.S.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urged a national drug policy shift
from marijuana to methamphetamine.

A number of bills aimed at stemming the problem are floating around
Congress, including the "Combat Meth Act" sponsored by Sen. Ken
Salazar, D-Colo. The bill could provide as much as $16 million for law
enforcement and rehabilitation, especially in rural areas, but it is
languishing on the congressional calendar.

As for Sheriff Grinstead's original request that oil and gas companies
be required to randomly test their workers, it's unlikely to come to
fruition. But companies such as Entraga and El Paso, which are both
building pipelines through Craig this fall, are listening. Both
require drug tests before they will hand out applications for the 600
temporary positions they need to fill.

That's music to Grinstead's ears. He just wants "everybody to get
involved with testing so that there is no place for these guys (doing
meth) to work." 
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MAP posted-by: Matt Elrod