The Polk County Meth War, Part One

The Parable of the Snake

In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Six I’ll have good reason to remember a lesson from my grandfather. When I was a boy a copperhead ambushed me from a cornrow and he shoved me out of the way and lit after it. It fled under a stone and he cursed it and kicked the stone away and crushed its skull under his bootheel. He toed it to make sure it was dead and then gave me a long, thoughtful look, but he didn’t have to explain a thing.

“Addiction is one of the biggest secrets in our area,” Dr. Linda Wells tells me. “No one wants to say that ‘my mom or my dad is an addict.’” Her practice, Action Counseling in Cleveland, treats hundreds of addicts from East Tennessee but she’s especially worried about Polk County, where the explosion of substance abuse and the scant access to addiction treatment are problems decent folk don’t discuss—like a chancre on a pretty girl’s face or a snake under a stone.

Others…boot-shod cops and judges and prosecuting attorneys…shake their heads and mutter disease-words like “plague” and “cancer.” They talk about stomping it out, crushing its skull before it poisons anyone else.

Trouble is: how?

On December 7th I sat in Judge Billy Baliles’ monthly drug court in Benton as he ordered more than fifty people—sullen-eyed moms, dads in orange jumpsuits and leg shackles, petrified teenagers—into a new state-funded substance abuse program at Action Counseling. The day before he’d done the same with twenty from Ducktown, making December’s tally approximately seventy people who’d run afoul of state drug laws and been ordered into treatment as a consequence.

And a mere seventy people would be bad enough, but if December was an average month—and Dr. Wells thinks it may ultimately be proven to have been below average—by next Christmas one out of every seventeen men, women, and children in Polk County will have been court-ordered to attend treatment for substance abuse …most on methamphetamine-related charges. What’s more, that one-in-seventeen only counts those “unlucky” enough to have been arrested—not active users or those struggling to get clean on their own. So what’s the true scale of the meth problem in Polk County?

God only knows. “[The addicts’] family members are coming, and they’re not mandated to be here,” says Dr. Wells. “And the first thing they’ve said, is ‘I’m gonna get off of meth.’”

One recovering addict tells me crystal meth is cheaper than liquor, and like the moonshine of yore, fairly easy to cook. But the Meth-Free Tennessee Act of 2005 has made it tougher for personal-use and small-scale manufacturers to lay hands on sufficient quantities of the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine-containing cold medicines that are its main precursor, and indeed, South/East Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force statistics show the number of Polk County lab seizures in 2005 is one-third what it was in 2004—implying labs are fewer and further between.

So…what’s up? I applaud the Act’s accomplishments—any hole in a tornado, right?—but if meth’s ingredients are harder to procure these days, why does clinical experience suggest an increase in addiction rates? Where are users getting it now? District Attorney General Jerry Estes’ office has made cases on Mexican methamphetamine coming up from Atlanta and Dalton—I’ll leave the reader to connect the dots on that one—and I hear stories of meth from neighboring counties, telling me many users are simply sending next door for what they used to make themselves…which makes me wonder: what else are their new delivery boys selling them?

Dr. Wells’ eyes flash when I ask her this. “We’ve got more addiction right now from meth, and now we’re picking up cocaine,” she says. “We’ve not had that much heroin in this area, and I’m beginning to see that.”

Judge Baliles is worried too. The users he gets are often haggard and poverty-ridden, with little access to proper medical or psychological care. They’re self-medicating with anything that comes to hand…grass, oxy, crack, and especially crystal meth…perpetuating a lifestyle based solely on day-to-day survival. All they know how to do is use. It’s a poor-man’s solution to a poor-man’s problem—addiction as both cause and effect.

As a pharmacist by trade Judge Baliles has a scientific perspective on the subject, and he tells me his extensive study of substance abuse—thirty-eight books, at last count—has convinced him the best long-term solutions are twelve-step programs, like Action Counseling’s, that intercept users in the early stages before they become too dysfunctional, too entangled in the court systems, and that get them clean so they can care for themselves and their kids.

Which brings me to the Sharpest Fang, as it were…viz, that meth trouble has caused dozens of Polk County kids to wind up in the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services or in juvenile corrections. On July 26th, 2005 a DCS case manager—Betsy Dunn of the Upper Cumberland Region, an area not so different from Polk County—testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources on meth’s effects on children’s lives. You want chilling prose, forget Stephen King…have some of this instead:

“The adults who are supposed to be these children’s caretakers have become totally consumed by this drug and have turned their backs on these youngsters.

“These children’s worlds have been totally destroyed. They breathe toxic fumes. They endure physical and sexual abuse. We see children that are actually participating in the manufacture of methamphetamine.”

“I’ve had children say to me, ‘Miss Betsy, my mom’s making that rock candy on the stove and it caught fire and we had to leave the house.’

“When a child is taken out of a meth environment, this child loses everything that is familiar. They lose their clothes. Their toys. Everything. Because it is all contaminated. That is what makes this so tragic. These children lose everything. They’ve lost their parents. They have to start over.

“What do you say when the parents tell you, ‘I can give up my children, but I can’t give up the drug?’”

I think that question would kindle holy fire in my granddaddy. He’d mull things over for a while and then he’d fix me with his stern eye and rise up and get to stompin’. I miss that old man; he’d be ninety this year. The lesson he taught me the day he trampled that snake was that there are bad things in the world, and those who can have a duty to protect those who can’t—meaning kids of course, but also meaning addicts powerless to protect themselves.

And in weeks to come I’ll write more about how Polk County is struggling to do that. Meanwhile, I have to go hug my daughter.

Jeff West

(Originally published in Polk County News, December 14, 2005)

Bean Mountain will crumble before Steve McNair scrimmages at Davis Field or John Smoltz flings a split-finger fastball at Copper Basin High. But any day on the Ocoee you’re likely to see Joe Jacobi, Eric Jackson, Marc Lyle, or eleventy-odd other world-class athletes; whitewater pros who are here because this is where the game is, and what’s more, this is where the players can make a living.

So why does it seem like they’re the only ones doing so? It’s not like there’s a lack of opportunity along the 64 corridor. I’m sitting with one such pro—Jeff West, owner of Ace Ocoee Funyaks—at his cabin on Old Federal Road, and we’re talking about Polk County’s weird duality; the gulf between the “locals” and the “river hippies.” In short, about why a Polk County teenager, if given the choice between a paddle and a spatula, will likely be flipping burgers inside of a week.

Jeff, like me, grew up kayaking the Ocoee and he’s as puzzled by this as I am. He contrasts our situation with West Virginia’s Gauley River...a big brawling run with rapids like “Hungry Mother” and “Pure Screaming Hell.”

“Most of the raft guides [there] are big old local boys. Full-on local guys. The rafting community was really integrated into the local community, and they were much more rural than Polk County, Tennessee. And they were so proud of that river. Here...out of twenty-four companies, only one or two are owned by true local families.”

“I don’t think there’s any river that has, as far as location, proximity to your market, and everything else...I couldn’t think of a more ideal place to own a business. There’s just no place as good as the Ocoee.”

Jeff knows whereof he speaks; he grew up in Dahlonega and since graduating from Georgia Southern in 1994 he’s paddled all over the world. He explains the limits of rivers: access, remoteness, scant rainfall, water release constraints. The Ocoee suffers from none of these problems; making it his first choice.

He’s run Ace Ocoee Funyaks for nine years now, offering personalized whitewater instruction to paddlers of all skill levels. Maybe it’s someone who’s been on a few raft trips and wants to push the envelope a little by running the Ocoee in an inflatable open boat, AKA a “funyak,” or maybe it’s a moderately-skilled kayaker who wants to run the hairy stuff and needs a little preparation.

Whatever his customers’ skill level, Jeff’s love of the sport shines through when he tells me about their reactions. “I deal with about five hundred people a year. For the most part, my customers walk away going ‘That was the greatest thing I did this year.’ There’s somebody sitting around right now probably going ‘Gosh, I had so much fun at the Ocoee that day.’ Every day that I’m on the river, I see somebody out there who’s kayaking, and they’re kayaking well, and they’re somebody that either I’ve taught how to paddle or did a funyak trip or they came to me as an intermediate boater and I made them better.”

“And I guess the most rewarding thing is I’ve actually got folks, where, they did a funyak trip because it looked like something fun to do. And then they learned how to kayak, and they became avid kayakers, then they became great kayakers, and then they moved to this area and they kayak all the time. They still have professional jobs, but they bought homes in the area and they go paddling all the time.”

When’s the last time you heard the lettuce-washer at a fast food joint talk about his job in those terms? Not to run down people’s choice of occupation, but whitewater is magnetic, a “hungry mother” that gets hold of you and doesn’t let go. Jeff, who can’t imagine a career in any other setting, tries to sum it up. “Kayaking is wonderful...it’s so rewarding, fulfilling. And of course there’s fear involved, and the chance of danger and getting injured...but it’s still a wonderful experience. It improves people’s lives. That’s my whole gig. That’s what I facilitate.”

He starts telling me about the Faithful, as it were, and their potential to Polk County. “There’s thirty thousand private boaters that use this area every year—thirty thousand private boaters—and almost all of ‘em want to camp out. You could have a restaurant that...had some type of atmosphere that would draw the private boater. They all drive really nice SUVs, they all make a lot of money, they’re all single, they all come up here and they spend money, and nobody’s really capitalizing on that.” He goes on to describe the successes of two local lodging establishments, and how he plans to build cabins on his own property.

The opportunities feed on each other. Most of Jeff’s customers stay over for a couple of days; he sends them to Rock/Creek Outfitters, to area grocery stores and restaurants, to local cabins. They burn washtubs of gas getting here in those SUVs. They buy parking permits and guidebooks. And as he’s mentioned, some of them decide to stay.

I joke with Jeff that I’m going to entitle this column “Liquid Crack.”

“My biggest fear,” he says, “is all of a sudden I’m selling them, not just on improving their skill and becoming a better boater, but on the lifestyle, too. I feel bad, because then this person has to go back to their...well, when they first came to me, they were just looking for some fun, and then they leave going ‘Gosh, maybe my choices haven’t been...’”

Jeff breaks into embarrassed laughter, imagining the poor yuppie pining away for river life, but it’s as concise a statement of his passion as I’ve heard him make. The difference between him and that yuppie is that he’s got the confidence of his conviction that he’s in the right place. Most of the Ocoee pros will tell you the same thing. And so will I.