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.