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66, had become a transfer point to move drugs to Washington and Baltimore.
Last June task forces made up of Drug Enforcement Agents, state police, sheriffs’ investigators and Immigration and Naturalization agents made arrests of seven suspects in Harrisonburg, netting meth valued at $400,000 to $800,000.
News reports said that between January and June of 2003, some 22 pounds of methamphetamine had been seized. An abuser of meth might use an eighth of an ounce per purchase.
What makes methamphetamine so deadly is the ease with which it is made. “The ingredients,” Virginia State Police Special Agent Frank Herrman said in an interview, “can be bought in any farm store or Wal-Mart.”
Nicknamed “crank” or “crystal” or “la glass,” methamphetamine gives the user an immediate rush of euphoria.
The Koch Crime Institute, a private study group in Kansas, said “methamphetamine is generally cheaper than cocaine and— because the body metabolizes it more slowly—it is much longer lasting.” As a result it is known as the “poor man’s cocaine.”
But, for the meth addict, the results are catastrophic often including paranoia, high blood pressure, seizures and nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
Capt. Jeff Brown of the Rappahannock County Sheriff’s Office, who heads the DARE anti-drug program, said in an interview there have been no arrests in Rappahannock for methamphetamine but that does not mean that “it isn’t here.”
Herrman, a member of the Blue Ridge Drug Task Force, said that marijuana, cocaine and heroin are the main dangers in the counties east of the Shenandoah, but that there have been methamphetamine lab discoveries there. Part of the problem of enforcement is “taking down the labs . . . the materials are very explosive, a single spark can set them off.”
He said that meth had first been associated with biker gangs on the West Coast and later became the “drug of choice” of many migrant farm workers who work in California and Washington state and the Virginia apple industry. It was the migrant worker market that probably brought the drug to Virginia, the DEA said in an intelligence report, but now it is manufactured here for sale all over the region and the clientele comes from all ethnic groups and walks of life.
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