OFFICIALS TARGETING METHAMPHETAMINE MENACE

Catoosa Forming Task Force; Legislation Proposed To Limit Over-The-Counter Medications Used For Meth

Controlling drugs containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine would give law enforcement a shot-in-the-arm to fight the methamphetamine epidemic, law officials said.

Officers, politicians and area residents met June 30, at the Chattooga County Civic Center in Summerville for a state House study committee meeting to discuss the problem.

"I hope everyone understands we have a paramount problem," said Pat Cook, an agent on the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Drug Task Force.  "We're dealing not with a drug problem, but with an epidemic."

State Rep.  Barbara Massey Reece, D-Menlo, is spearheading the campaign.  Other committee members attending the meeting included Mike Snow, D-Chickamauga, and Howard Mosby, D-Atlanta.  State House Reps.  David Graves, R-Macon, and Curtis Jenkins, D-Forsyth, are also on the five-member committee, but could not attend the meeting.

Ephedrine is the key ingredient in all variants of methamphetamine, also known as meth or crank, Cook said.  The task f Vanita Hullander

orce operates in Catoosa, Walker and Chattooga counties.

Many decongestants and cold medicines, such as Sudafed and Contac, contain ephedrine, he said.

LaFayette Mayor Neal Florence, also a pharmacist at Medi-Thrift Pharmacy, suggested classifying drugs containing ephedrine as Schedule V drugs.  He said medicine containing meth's key ingredients could still be sold over the counter, but health care professionals would provide the medicine to customers, who would be required to sign for the medicine.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, Schedule V drugs have a low potential for abuse, but must be regulated.  An example of a Schedule V drug is cough suppressants containing small amounts of codeine.

"I think all the members of the task force will introduce this in the House," Snow said.  "I think it's something we've got to do.  If you go buy four or five boxes of stuff like that, it's obvious what you're going to do with it."

Phil Price, special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Regional Drug Enforcement Office, said the Oklahoma Legislature recently passed a similar law.  The number of reported meth labs dropped 70 percent in four months.

Price also noted the number of meth labs increased in neighboring Texas and Arkansas during the same period.

"We've got a bigger problem ( in Northwest Georgia ) than Oklahoma has got," Snow said.

A working meth lab can be small enough to fit in a small cooler, and cleanup costs for a lab that small can range from $3,000 to $5,000, Cook said.  During fiscal 2004, the task force has worked 130 labs.

Multiplying the number of cases by those conservative cleanup costs equals about $500,000 spent annually to clean up labs, Cook said.

In addition to the costs associated with the labs, meth abusers find themselves with failing health, Cook said.

Meth addicts typically do not resemble the rich cocaine users of the past; rather, many of them are poor folks who seek indigent medical assistance and further tax an overloaded healthcare system.

Curing A Social Ill

Catoosa County Coroner Vanita Hullander, who is in the process of forming a county methamphetamine task force, said that meth is a problem that threatens everyone's quality of life.

"The methamphetamine epidemic, in my opinion, is a hundred times worse than the HIV epidemic for the plain and simple reason that there's more accessibility to meth; there's more areas and opportunity for exposure," she said.  "We can't put blinders on like we did for years and years with HIV."

The coroner said she fears that dysfunctional families, opposition to the war in Iraq, economy-related depression and other social factors are fueling record numbers of meth users searching for escapism through the drug's "false euphoria that everything in the world is just fine."

"We're worried about the devastation that the war on terrorism is going to cause.  Well, right now we have got a war on methamphetamine," she said.  "If we don't control and try to get ahead of what's going on with this meth epidemic, we're going to doom ourselves as a nation."

Hullander said the meth task force will bring together rehabilitative agencies, members of the community and law enforcement for a multi-faceted approach to tackle the problem.

"The task force is not just about trying to put everyone in jail," she said.  "We've got to have resources because there are a lot of people out there I'm sure who want to get help to get away from methamphetamine.  Right now we're extremely short on resources."

Education efforts, particularly mentoring impressionable middle school-age children, will be especially important, Hullander said.

"You can get through to high school students on an adult level, whereas with middle school children you can't talk to them on an adult level," she said.  "Anytime an adult will show them attention that they're not getting from other adults who need to be their role models, they're going to fall into these things.

"Prevention and education is the key to everything," Hullander said.  "If you're not willing to educate and use preventive methods it's not going to help.  At the same time, the people who have already become involved -- if they don't have resources to fall back on we'll defeat our own purpose."

News editor Chris Zelk contributed to this story.