Oklahoma
Meth
Mess
2/16/01
"We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," sang country music legend Merle Haggard in his Vietnam-era poke at the counterculture, "Okie from Muskogee." They may not have been tokin' in Oklahoma City back then, but they were tweekin' in Tulsa. Although law enforcement officials treat the current methamphetamine vogue as if it were a new menace, Oklahoma was the scene of one of the nation's earliest amphetamine subcultures more than thirty years ago. Back when Haggard was extolling the virtues of traditional values, Oklahoma truck drivers, farm boys and oil patch workers were speeding merrily down the path from "poppin' little white pills" to injecting crystal meth. And they never went away. Amphetamines may have been eclipsed by the more glamorous cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s, and even today they are used by only a fraction of the population. According to the 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, however, 9.4 million Americans have used methamphetamine, up from 3.8 million in 1994. Speed is definitely back, and its revival has been driven by two factors. First, Mexican entrepreneurs have supplanted the biker gangs -- the Bandidos, the Hell's Angels, the Outlaws, and others -- who dominated the trade in the 1970s and 1980s. The Mexicans, led by the Amezcua brothers of Guadalajara, rationalized the industry by bringing modern, large-scale techniques to the production process and tapping into already existing smuggling networks. Second, the widespread availability of recipes for manufacturing meth in print and on the Internet have enabled kitchen-sink chemists across the land to do it themselves. Oklahoma is one of the places where they like to do it the most. Oklahoma authorities dismantled 897 clandestine labs in FY 2000, more than any other state except California, according to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI). The state medical examiner reports that meth has passed cocaine as the leading cause of fatal drug overdoses. The state has been fighting back with draconian new laws that could send a meth user to prison for 20 years for stealing $5 worth of anhydrous ammonia and by the creation of specialized task forces aimed at meth users and producers. Such responses have caused the state's methamphetamine arrest rate to increase a shocking 8,000% since 1994. And therein lies the problem. "In Oklahoma, we have stronger penalties than anyplace else in the country for manufacturing drugs," OSBI spokesman John Duncan told the Daily Oklahoman, "but in 1998, with 300 labs busted, we only had 42 people convicted. The courts are swamped with cases. If we're lucky, we're maybe getting one out of ten." OSBI isn't the only one complaining. Eastern Oklahoma prosecutors can't get their cases processed because of pile-ups in the courts and in the OSBI's state crime labs, a situation the Tulsa World called "an incredible expanding black hole of backlogged cases." OSBI's Tahlequah crime lab, which serves Eastern Oklahoma, has more than 1,200 meth cases pending. The logjam at the crime labs has led to long court delays and dismissals, Sequoyah County Assistant District Attorney told the World. "I have cases here that are sometimes 2 1/2 years old, and I have no lab report back from the OSBI," he complained. "I've had the judge throw out cases right and left because OSBI cannot process the drugs in a timely fashion." In rural Adair County alone, the number of backlogged drug cases includes two from 1997, five from 1998, 44 from 1999, and 53 from last year. The District 27 Task Force deserves some credit for the morass; its members made 577 drug arrests in 1999, more than 350 of them for methamphetamine offenses. In Adair county, prosecutors have charged more than 400 people with drug offenses over the past ten years, but only one case has gone to trial. District Judge John Garrett, who presides over the Adair County cases has vowed to remove the backlog, but remains hampered by the crime labs' inability to return test results. "On some of the cases, we're waiting to get results back from the state labs before we schedule a preliminary hearing," he told the Tulsa World. OSBI officials say they are hiring more chemists and "rushing" certain cases at prosecutors' requests, but are making little headway. "For every case we rush, we're pushing another one back on the shelf," said OSBI spokeswoman Kim Koch. US Attorneys are taking up some of the slack by prosecuting some offenders on federal charges. "We've welcomed the feds' involvement in Adair County," said District Attorney Diane Barker Harrold, who presides over the District 27 Task Force's four-county domain. "Because of their involvement, repeat drug offenders get more time." But when all the finger-pointing is done, Oklahoma law enforcement circles all agree that the answer is... a drumroll, please... more money. But while law enforcement's appetite is insatiable, the citizens of Oklahoma are not an endless well of cash. According to Trent Baggett, assistant executive coordinator for the state District Attorneys' Council, the legislature may balk at more spending increases. "There's a concern by the public, as well as the legislature, that government is too big," he told the Tulsa World. Ron DuBois, a co-founder of the Drug Policy Forum of Oklahoma (http://members.aol.com/dpfok/) told DRCNet that throwing more money at methamphetamine enforcement was not the answer. "Meth is the bathtub gin of our time," DuBois argued, "only in Prohibition, they didn't go after the users like they are now. We are on a monumentally wrong course here; any attempt to cure addiction through punishment is worthless." "The root of the problem is the culture itself," DuBois said, "people are so miserable they'll do anything to alter their mood. "Society is trying to escape its own illness by scapegoating those sick people, which is precisely the wrong thing to do. You have to do something to help people, and throwing them in prison for 20 years is not the answer." DuBois told DRCNet that Oklahoma drug reformers are working to educate the public and the legislature. "We've got to make legislators part of our circle of friends," he said. "Let them know the war on drugs is insane folly, that punishment for use or addiction is useless, that the use and abuse of drugs is a public health issue, not a criminal one." DuBois, a Unitarian, told DRCNet that in Oklahoma, Unitarians are an important element of the drug reform movement. "The Unitarians are going great guns in Tulsa, where we have one of the largest congregations in the country," he said, "and are in the midst of a national review of drug policy." Visit Unitarian Universalists for Drug Policy Reform at http://www.uudpr.org online.
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