By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
CASSOPOLIS - "Choosing Our Battle Plan Wisely" was the bottom line in a wide-ranging discussion Wednesday that ultimately focused on prevention and treatment because there's only so much space in the jails, and Cass County's is full.
By focusing on remedying the problem, citizens hope to halt the problem instead of pushing it around the map.
Methamphetamine already affects the larger community in a variety of ways, from putting children at risk to environmental damage and more crime.
Each pound of meth produced generates five to six pounds of hazardous waste, posing immediate and long-term environmental health risks.
Chemicals used to make meth are toxic, yet lab operators routinely dump waste in streams, rivers, fields, backyards and sewage systems, which can in turn contaminate water resources for humans and animals.
Poisonous vapors produced during cooking permeate halls and carpets of houses and buildings, making them uninhabitable.
Cleaning up sites requires specialized training and costs an average of $2,000 to $4,000 per site in funds from already strained budgets.
The number of foster care children rises rapidly in states hit by the meth scourge. Noxious fumes can cause brain damage. Cooking meth is extremely dangerous. Labs often catch fire and explode.
A child living inside a home professionals access wearing haz-mat suits could overdose from meth left out by parents, suffer from attachment disorders or behavioral problems, be malnourished, physically or sexually abused and/or burned or fatally injured in a fire or explosion.
Meth labs, along with the selling of the drug, can breed crime, including burglaries, thefts and even murder. Prosecutor Victor Fitz said two of the three murder cases going to trial next month concern meth.
So the third meeting of the Cass County Methamphetamine Task Force Sept. 28 debated how best to launch this battle.
At Woodlands Addiction Center, methamphetamine accounted for 10 percent of admissions in April. That's equal to crack cocaine, which has been running that high for about five years.
The 2 1/2-hour meeting at Cass District Library was the first of three strategy planning sessions. The next two will take place at 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, and Wednesday, Nov. 16.
Participants were guided through the prioritizing and decision-making process by a professional facilitator, Judeth Newham of Douglas.
When it comes to meth's reputation as the "drug of despair," Newham said, "You can't discount 'social fabric' issues. Until they start addressing why people are using - to cope with two jobs and rising credit card debt and societal influences - you can't disregard what you're saying in whatever you plan."
Lehman, who has been working in his field for 33 years, added, "In the past several decades, this country has put billions of dollars into supply reduction. Since I got into this business in the '70s, little has changed in terms of putting resources into the demand reduction side."
In fact, Lehman said, "Funding for treatment and prevention is near the lowest I've seen it. We need to prosecute, we need to lock people up and we need to address everything that we target as supply reduction, but resources for demand reduction haven't increased in over a dozen years. It's a complex issue that needs to be addressed from all of the different standpoints we're talking about."
Gore worries about his township's fire department. "Ninety percent of the fire service in our county is provided by volunteers," Gore said. "(Meth) represents a very sizable risk to them and a very sizable increase in training and safety precautions. I'm not at all comfortable that we are adequately addressing that at this time. In downtown Vandalia we had a meth house (blow up), and there's our fire department right in the center of it, and this story is being repeated all over. Ditto on police. They need to be better trained and equipped to deal with what's left behind. Supervision is described as being under the state police, but the actual loading up of debris and where they hauled it to is done by the same people who would haul away an old chicken coop."
Chris Siebenmark, who covers three counties, Cass, Van Buren and Berrien, for state Sen. Ron Jelinek, R-Three Oaks, offered a "three-fold" perspective of education, resources and treatment.
Siebenmark said average citizens read news accounts of labs being broken up and assume the problem is being dealt with without making any connection to how it directly affects them. "They have a stake in it."
On resources, Siebenmark said, "There is, slowly and surely, a tendency in this state to find the dollars, but then again it's trying to change a culture. Going away from instant incarceration to intervention and prevention on the front end. People are finally realizing it's a lot cheaper on the front end and a stronger opportunity for that person, as opposed to waiting until they become involved or an addicted user. In any given county incarceration is the highest piece of your budget. In the state, corrections is No. 3 in our budget. Though the trend is there to pull resources over to the front end, folks need to realize it's a tough battle."
Third, Siebenmark said, "Is trying to find the resources for the unfortunate end of those folks who are addicted. What do we do with them? Where do we put them? Eighty percent go back to using again. Looking at mental health, it was a shock to me in March of 2003 when I first started with Ron, there was a symposium at Western Michigan. They showed funding for mental health over the last 20 years … it was a flat line. If I was looking at someone's heart rate, they would be declared dead."
County Commissioner John Cureton, R-Dowagiac, a former minister, said Americans find themselves in a Catch-22 when "it comes to problems of this nature. I'm talking about the church-state relationship. It's essentially a spiritual problem. I believe in church-state separation, but it puts us in a difficult situation … yet I've seen case after case of persons whose relationship with God has been the cleansing factor for all kinds of practices - and that certainly would include meth use."
Anna Sain of Lewis Cass Intermediate School District said, "I think the problem might be a lot larger than we think. Our staff goes out into homes and see a lot of things, but I don't know that we're educated enough to know what people using meth look like until it's progressed to a certain stage where we recognize it. Children coming from those homes are greatly affected by it, not only from the parents' point of view of neglect and abuse, but living there every day before we clean it up as well as possible, are they pre-addicted from exposure? I'm also concerned for the safety of our workers out in the community."
Individual community members are strongly encouraged to attend, since private citizens always possess some of the best common-sense problem-solving approaches.
For more information about the task force contact Coordinator Jennifer Lester at Woodlands Addictions Center, Vandalia, at 269/476-9781.