Fighting meth from all sides

Published 10:01 am Thursday, October 2, 2008

Last summer, Lisamari Emery tried to help one of the troubled teens living in her Fall City neighborhood. He asked for a place to stay and she set him up with a place to camp in her yard so as not to surprise her live-in grandmother. The teen repaid Emery by sneaking in the window of her house and stealing alcohol and her purse.

“That’s not normal behavior,” Emery said. “It didn’t make any sense to me.”

She suspected that if drugs hadn’t directly affected his behavior, they had at least affected his life. She wanted to do something to inform the community about the danger of methamphetamine, a growing problem in many rural areas of Washington state that contributes to many crimes, such as burglary, identity theft and domestic violence.

Emery was put in contact with a new federally-funded program headed by the nonprofit anti-drug group Partnership for a Drug-Free America. The organization began a methamphetamine-education program this year that partners with local law enforcement and drug treatment officials to educate local community groups about methamphetamine.

The program, called Meth 360, was set up in four places around the nation: two where the drug was already an entrenched problem – Washington and Oklahoma – and two where the drug is beginning to become popular – upstate New York and northern Virginia.

On Tuesday, Nov. 14, the presentation will be given for the first time in Snoqualmie Valley at Fall City Elementary School. The free presentation begins at 7 p.m.

Gary Kinner, a narcotics detective with the Seattle Police Department who lives in Fall City, will be one of the presenters.

For him, the most important thing to convey is an awareness that the drug has infiltrated many rural neighborhoods.

“Maybe we aren’t living in Shangri La,” Kinner said.

Kinner’s portion of the presentation focuses on the drug itself: how it started, its effect on communities and how to identify users and the labs where the drug is manufactured.

Methamphetamine can be made from common ingredients purchased at hardware and grocery stores. However, the combination and the waste products are highly toxic and dangerous, Kinner said.

Laura Edwards, coordinator of King County Community Organizing Program and co-chair of the county’s Meth Action Team, will discuss treatment and prevention aspects for methamphetamine.

“We give sort of a basic Meth 101,” Edwards said. “Rather than just be a scare tactic, we try to give people tools [to identify and stop the spread of methamphetamine.]”

Meth is highly addictive and users can become hooked on just one dose because the drug dramatically changes brain chemistry, Edwards said. The change in brain function makes treatment more difficult than for other drugs, “but not impossible,” she said.

There are clues parents and other community members can look for in users to help identify the problem and start the process of treatment, she said. Even more important is education to prevent people from becoming users, Edwards said. That’s where programs like Meth 360 come in. Not only are individuals presented with information, they’re introduced to local experts and agencies that deal with methamphetamine and other drugs so they can continue to attack the growing methamphetamine problem from all sides, Edwards said.