Anti-illegal immigration bill won’t go to full House

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Black tar moves in, and death follows

Dealers work systematically, pushing heroin in areas where users are unprepared for its potency.

Reporting from Huntington, W.V. - On a Monday in September 2007, Teddy Johnson went to his son's apartment.

Adam Johnson, 22, was in his first year at Marshall University in Huntington. A history major, he played guitar, drums and bass, loved glam bands like the New York Dolls and hosted "The Oscillating Zoo," an eclectic rock show on the university radio station.

Teddy hadn't heard from his son in three days. Letting himself into the apartment, he found Adam lying lifeless on his bed, in the same shirt he'd seen him wearing three days earlier.

The cause of death: a heroin overdose.

"I had no clue," said the elder Johnson, a plumbing contractor in Huntington. "We're a small town. We weren't prepared."

The death was part of a rash of overdoses, 12 of them fatal, that shook Huntington that fall and winter. All were caused by black-tar heroin, a potent, inexpensive, semi-processed form of the drug that has spread across the United States, driven by the entrepreneurial energy and marketing savvy of immigrants from a tiny farming county in Mexico.

Immigrants from Xalisco, in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit, Mexico, have brought the heroin north over the last decade, and with it a highly effective business model featuring deep discounts and convenient delivery by car. Their success is a major reason why Mexican black tar has seized a growing share of the U.S. heroin market, according to government estimates.

Xalisco networks are decentralized, with no all-powerful boss, and they largely avoid guns and violence. Staying clear of the nation's largest cities, where established organizations control the heroin trade, Xalisco dealers have cultivated markets in the mountain states and parts of the Midwest and Appalachia, often creating demand for heroin in cities and towns where there had been little or none. In many of those places, authorities report a sharp rise in heroin overdoses and deaths.

Before the string of fatal overdoses in 2007, "we didn't even consider heroin an issue," said Huntington Police Chief Skip Holbrook.

Xalisco dealers have been particularly successful in areas where addiction to prescription painkillers like OxyContin was widespread. Many of those addicts, mainly young middle- and working-class whites, switched to black tar, which is cheaper and more powerful.

In York County, S.C., pain-pill addicts became hooked on black tar purchased in Charlotte, N.C., half an hour away. "We used to get maybe one overdose death a year" caused by opiates, said Marvin Brown, commander of the county's drug unit. "We had six in the first six months" of 2009.

In the suburbs south of Salt Lake City, heroin was unheard of until dealers from Xalisco arrived, said Lt. Phil Murphy of the Utah County Major Crimes Task Force. Now, he said, young people looking for an alternative to pain pills drive to Salt Lake to score black-tar heroin.

University towns have been especially fertile markets for Xalisco heroin. Authorities in Boulder and Fort Collins, Colo. -- home to the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, respectively -- report increased overdoses caused by black-tar heroin purchased from dealers in Denver.

Ohio has also become a center of Xalisco networks, and it was through a junkie in Columbus that black tar made its way to Huntington.

Innovative, tireless

Huntington, a struggling former railroad depot and coal distribution center, has long had a flourishing trade in crack cocaine and other drugs. But there was never much heroin until dealers from Xalisco arrived in Columbus, 160 miles north.

They were innovative and tireless. Rather than sell from houses, where they would be sitting ducks for narcotics agents, or on street corners in seedy neighborhoods, they operated like a pizza delivery service. Users called a phone number. A dispatcher relayed the order to a driver, who took the heroin to the customer.

The drivers circulated around the city with doses of heroin in small uninflated balloons, each the size of a pencil eraser, which they kept hidden in their mouths. No sale was too small.

"There's nobody who'll drive across . . . Columbus to bring you one $20 balloon, but they would," Wendy Keller, who became addicted to their heroin, said in a telephone interview from a federal prison in Lexington, Ky., where she is serving a five-year term for conspiracy to distribute heroin.

Competition among Xalisco networks kept prices low. OxyContin pills cost $80 apiece and addicts needed five or six a day. Black-tar heroin was stronger and cost less than $50 for a day's fix.

By 2007, black-tar addiction had spread across Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland and other Ohio cities. At Columbus-based Maryhaven, Ohio's largest drug-treatment center, opiate addicts made up 20% of the center's patients in 1997, and many were addicted to prescription painkillers. Today, 70% are black-tar heroin addicts, said Paul Coleman, Maryhaven's president.

Xalisco heroin also penetrated the well-to-do suburbs of Delaware County, Ohio. Demand for treatment is now so great that Maryhaven recently set up a satellite clinic for heroin users there, Coleman said.

Rural Athens, Vinton, Meigs and Hawking counties have seen a tenfold increase in heroin addicts seeking treatment over the last four years, and almost all were black-tar users, said Joe Gay, director of Health Recovery Services, a drug-rehabilitation center serving those Ohio counties.

"When you see these increases, you ask why," Gay said. "The answer is availability and price. Heroin was never available in these rural counties, and now it's cheap and plentiful."

Hitting on addicts

Rick Jordan was an addict living in Columbus and, like many West Virginians, he kept close ties to his hometown, Huntington.

Family members say he and his wife Kandace met Xalisco dealers in Columbus in 1998. The couple were trying to kick an addiction to prescription opiates and had sought help at a drug-treatment center.

"The Mexicans would sit out in the parking lot, getting guys who were trying to kick," said Jordan's daughter, Tesina Ventola.

Soon the Jordans were hooked again, on cheap black tar. Rick began calling the Mexicans every day. His toddler grandchildren came to believe that the dealers were doctors, because Jordan and his wife seemed to feel better after their visits, said Ventola, the children's mother.

Around 2004, friends from Huntington began calling Jordan, hearing that he had a connection to cheap heroin. Jordan would call the Xalisco dealers. In Huntington, heroin then cost $50 per tenth of a gram and was usually diluted Colombian white powder.

Jordan would buy three balloons for $50 and keep one for himself. He'd sell the other two to a friend from Huntington for $50. The friend would return to Huntington, sell one of the balloons for $50 and keep the other for himself.

"That's where it all began," Ventola said.

Word spread through Huntington. By mid-2007, addicts were making pilgrimages to Jordan's wood-frame house west of downtown Columbus, sometimes carrying thousands of dollars in cash.

One of them was Michelle Byars, who had gotten hooked on pain pills after a back injury and switched to black-tar heroin.

"I'd show up and other people from Huntington would already be there," Byars, 34, recalled in a telephone interview from a federal prison in Connecticut.

One of the alleged Xalisco dealers in Columbus was a young man whom junkies called Carlos and whom police later identified as Juan Hernandez-Salazar (one of many aliases he has used).

His heroin was 70% pure, said Bobby Melrose, who described himself as a longtime drug user.

"I'd use two or three bags of dope to just get well, and not even reach the same high as one bag of Carlos'," Melrose said in an interview at a federal prison in Kentucky.

Via Jordan, this potent heroin got to Huntington, where addicts had little tolerance for it. Users began overdosing, and some of them died.

The same weekend Adam Johnson died, the Byars shot up together. Michelle woke up. Patrick didn't.

Nor did Teddy Mays. A former tire shop owner, Mays had grown addicted to OxyContin prescribed for back and knee pain. Then black tar came along. He had both in his system when he died, said Cindy Mays, his widow.

Dana Helmondollar Jr., 32, an electrical company lineman, made the same switch and met the same end, said his father.

"We were getting almost one [911 call] a day," said Gordon Merry, director of emergency medical services for Cabell County. "It taxed everyone: the EMS system, hospitals, law enforcement."

The media reported that black-tar heroin was sweeping through town, killing users. That "made people want it more," said Paul Hunter, a Huntington police narcotics officer. "Addicts are always looking for the best high."

A drug task force traced the heroin to Jordan, Carlos and his network in Columbus. In the spring and summer of 2008, authorities arrested 19 Huntington addicts -- Jordan's best customers.

Michelle Byars pleaded guilty to supplying her husband with the heroin that killed him. She is scheduled to be released from prison in 2014.

Melrose is serving a five-year term for heroin distribution. Doctors amputated his right leg because of gangrene and abscesses caused by shooting black tar into the leg.

Jordan died in a Huntington jail in July 2008.

Carlos spent a year on the run, then was arrested in Columbus last June after running a stop sign. He is awaiting trial, charged as Joel Borjas-Hernandez with conspiracy to distribute heroin that resulted in the deaths of others. If convicted, he faces 20 years to life in prison.

Unabated horror

Adam Johnson's childhood bedroom is still filled with his belongings: guitars, basses and a sound mixer; T-shirts of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and the New York Dolls; a Winnie the Pooh doll in which he hid his heroin.

Teddy Johnson buried his son across a hilltop cemetery lane from Huntington's most hallowed spot, a memorial to Marshall University football team members who were killed in a plane crash in 1970.

Johnson had a concrete bench installed and he visits three times a week to sit on the bench and think of his son.

Not long after Carlos' network was busted, a new group of Xalisco dealers went into business in Columbus. Federal officials say the trade in Xalisco heroin remains robust.

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The good life in Xalisco can mean death in the United States

The poorest of Mexico's poor can step up to the middle class when they go north to sell black tar.


By Sam Quinones, Last Of Three Parts

February 16, 2010

Reporting from Xalisco, Mexico - As a boy, Esteban Avila had only a skinny old horse and two pairs of pants, and he lived in a swampy neighborhood called The Toad. He felt stranded across a river from the rest of the world and wondered about life on the other side.

He saw merchants pay bands to serenade them in the village plaza and dreamed of doing the same.

He had a girlfriend but no hope of marrying her because her father was the village butcher and expected a good life for his daughter.

Then Avila found an elixir and took it with him when, at 19, he went to the United States. It was black-tar heroin, and selling it turned his nightmare into a fairy tale.

Avila was part of a migration of impoverished Mexican sugar cane farm workers that has had profound repercussions for cities and towns across America. Over the last decade and a half, immigrants from the county of Xalisco (population 44,000), in the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, have developed a vast and highly profitable business selling black-tar heroin, a cheap, potent, semi-processed form of the drug.

Their success stems from a business model that combines discount pricing, aggressive marketing and customer convenience. Addicts phone in their orders, and drivers take the heroin to them. Crew bosses sometimes make follow-up calls to make sure addicts received good service.

The heroin networks need workers, and the downtrodden villages of Xalisco County have provided a seemingly endless supply of young men eager to earn as much money as possible and take it back home.

As black-tar heroin ruined lives in the United States, it pulled the poorest out of poverty in Xalisco. Drug earnings paid for decent houses and sometimes businesses, and it made dealers' families the social equals of landowners. By addicting the children of others, they could support their own.

"I'd be lying if I said I was sorry," Avila said. "I did it out of necessity. I was tired of birthdays without gifts, of my mother wondering where the food was going to come from."

Boom times

Xalisco County begins a couple of miles south of the state capital of Tepic and spreads across 185 square miles of lush, hilly terrain. A highway curves through it to the tourist resort of Puerto Vallarta to the south.

The county seat, also named Xalisco, is a town of narrow cobblestone streets and 29,000 people. For many years, dependence on the sugar cane harvest kept the county poor. Houses had tin roofs, and few had proper plumbing.

Xalisco ostensibly still depends on sugar cane. But it is now among the top 5% of Mexican counties in terms of wealth, according to a government report.

Enormous houses with tile roofs and marble floors have gone up everywhere. In immigrant villages across Mexico, people build the first stories of houses and leave iron reinforcing bars protruding skyward until they save the money to add second stories. Often the wait is measured in years. In Xalisco, homes go up all at once.

Off Xalisco's central plaza are swanky women's clothing stores and law offices. Young men drive new Dodge Rams, Ford F-150s and an occasional Cadillac Escalade. Outside town are new subdivisions with names like Bonaventura and Puerta del Sol.

Xalisco's Corn Fair, held every August, is another measure of the town's newfound wealth. Twenty years ago, the fair's basketball tournament was a modest affair. Teams from surrounding villages competed against one another in ragged uniforms.

Then "the boys began going north and getting into the business," said one farmer. "The town just began to come up."

The tournament purse grew so fat that semi-pro teams began competing. Last year, with first prize worth close to $3,000, semi-pro squads from Mazatlan, Monterrey and Puerto Vallarta competed, each with American ringers. One local village sponsored a team made up entirely of hired players, reputedly paid for by a heroin trafficker.

Sharing in this wealth to varying degrees are 20 villages scattered across the hills south of the town of Xalisco. Esteban Avila was born in one of them, a place named for the Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata.

Avila, now 35, is in a federal prison in Texas, serving a 15-year term for conspiracy to distribute heroin. He described his odyssey in interviews with The Times on the condition that he would not talk about anyone else in the drug business.

When he was a boy, the village of Emiliano Zapata was poor and notorious for its violence. In The Toad, where Avila's family lived, roofs leaked and the hills were the bathroom. When Avila and his friends went to the village basketball court, other boys ran them off with rocks and insults.

Later, Avila wanted to join the Mexican Navy or highway patrol, but only sons of well-connected fathers were admitted, he said.

"In the United States, there's no need to be a criminal to live well," he said. "But in Mexico, they throw you into a dead end."

At 14, Avila traveled to Tijuana, then slipped across the border and made his way to the San Fernando Valley.

"I wanted to look for some new way to live, something with a future," he said. "I wasn't going to find it in the village."

But he didn't want to go to school and he was too young to work. So he returned to Emiliano Zapata and bided his time working in the sugar cane fields.

In the mid-1990s, men from Xalisco began selling black-tar heroin across America. A friend who ran a heroin network recruited Avila to work as a driver in Phoenix.

Avila, then 19, accepted. Every day, he drove around the city, his mouth full of tiny, uninflated balloons, each filled with a tenth of a gram of heroin. Addicts phoned in orders. A dispatcher relayed them to Avila, who delivered the drugs to customers and collected payment.

Five months later, he took a bus back to Xalisco with $15,000 in his pocket. He was wearing new Levi's 501s -- a prized garment in many Mexican villages.

"That night was the first time we had more than enough to eat," Avila said.

His parents never asked how he made the money.

In the Xalisco system, drivers commonly strike out on their own after a few years and set up delivery operations. In 1997, Avila told his boss that he was going to seek his own heroin market in New Mexico.

A friend told Avila about addicts in Santa Fe, so he went there. He found those addicts and through them many more, including dozens in Taos, Xalisco's sister city. A half hour away, he discovered the town of Chimayo, in the verdant Espanola Valley, with one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the country. Soon, Avila's cheap, powerful black tar drove out the powder heroin that addicts had been using.

Avila declined to reveal where he got his heroin, other than to say that Nayarit's mountains are filled with small poppy farms and that black tar is easily made.

In Albuquerque, he bought a counterfeit birth certificate and driver's license; he crossed the border posing as an American from then on. Back in Xalisco, he hired drivers from villages near his own, paying smugglers to bring them across the border.

"Some drivers just wanted enough to build a decent house or buy a new truck. Then they were coming back home," he said. "Some wanted to fly, like I did."

He returned to Emiliano Zapata and for three years managed the business from Mexico, returning to the United States only occasionally. At home, families asked him for loans; some paid him back. Poor young men asked him for work up north.

He took his family to fine restaurants in Tepic, where they nervously rubbed elbows with the city's middle class.

"Our life changed entirely," he said. "It gave me more self-assuredness. If you have a peso in your pocket, you feel lighter of spirit. The weight of life is easier to carry."

At a fiesta in Xalisco's plaza one night, Avila and a friend paid for 11 hours of banda music, plus alcohol: a $3,000 tab.

He paid for one sister's quinceañera and another's wedding. He paid for a sister to attend college in Tepic, the first in her family to go.

Now he could give his girlfriend the life her parents expected. He stole her away to a Puerto Vallarta hotel for a weekend -- which in the village meant they were married.

Avila hired workers to build a house for his parents and men to help his father in the field. He hired a maid to help his mother. He moved his wife and children away from Emiliano Zapata and its violence and low expectations.

His father was greeted on village streets by those better off than he. He drank less, yelled less. One day, seeing his son with some cocaine, Avila's father took him aside and counseled him not to use drugs and to avoid bad habits.

"For the first time, I felt he spoke to me the way a father should speak to a son," Avila said.

Heroin opened vistas for other sugar cane cutters' sons as well. The village's moneyed classes no longer could talk down to farmers.

"We were all equal now," Avila said.

Over the next decade, networks of Xalisco dealers moved across the country, often competing with one another in such cities as Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Ore.; and Nashville.

Much of the money they earned flooded south, reaching the poorest of Xalisco County, people used to cutting cane for $8 a day.

So as quickly as dealers were arrested, they were replaced by others from Xalisco betting they could elude capture long enough to return with money for a house, truck or other mark of success.

One heroin driver from the village of Aquiles Serdan built a house with an electric garage-door opener, awing his neighbors.

Another former sugar cane worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the impression made by the device. "Everybody watched while the door went up by itself," he said. "People would walk by and look at it."

Seeing young men his age return from the United States with money, this man decided he wanted some too. He became a heroin driver in a southeastern U.S. city.

"I had a wife and son and I couldn't support them," he said. "I thought I'd buy land, and build us a house." He said half the young men in Aquiles Serdan left to try their luck as drivers.

In his first six weeks last year, he earned $7,000, more than he'd ever had at one time. Then he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to distributing heroin and faces up to 10 years in prison.

Back in Aquiles Serdan, 20 new houses have gone up, several with electric garage doors.

Operation Tar Pit

In 2000, Esteban Avila's fairy tale ended. He was among nearly 200 people arrested in a dozen cities in a federal investigation dubbed Operation Tar Pit. The case began in Chimayo after a rash of overdoses -- 85 deaths in three years, representing 2% of the town's population.

The arrests marked the first time the Drug Enforcement Administration had pieced together the national reach of Xalisco dealers. In Xalisco, the busts had an almost recessionary effect. "The fiesta was dead. Nobody was coming to the plaza," said a man who lived there at the time, speaking on the condition that he not be identified.

The easy money Avila made turned out to be the hardest of his life. His children are growing up without him.

Still, heroin lifted his family's horizons. Avila believes that poor people get no breaks they don't make for themselves. Had he been able to achieve anything by legal means, he would have, he says.

The truth of that is hard to know. But it does seem that black-tar heroin, as it destroyed lives in America, remade his own in Mexico and channeled his gumption unlike anything else available to him at the time.

"At least I'm not going to die wanting to know what's on the other side of that river," he said from prison. "I already know."

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How meth took hold on an Indian reservation

Mexican drug gang permeates community, leaving landscape of broken lives


April 30, 2007

WIND RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Wyo. - Just off the deserted highways, the silver pickup truck eases down quiet streets, its driver offering a numbing tour of a remote reservation framed by the beauty of snowcapped mountains.

There, Leon Tillman says, over there — the house on the right, a white, two-story building set off by itself. It used to be a big drug house. Now it's shuttered, its owners in prison.

A man dressed in an army green shirt and pants appears on the side of the road, his thumb up, looking for a ride. "That's a meth head," Tillman says. "He's bumming right now."

A few more drug houses and Tillman's tour of the despair of methamphetamine ends.

Not long ago, most people here had never even heard of meth. But today, most know someone on meth or in prison because of it. Tillman, 39, knows too many to count.

"It's everywhere," he said.

Indeed, American Indians have been especially hard hit by meth. Drug cartels have targeted Indian Country because the people are vulnerable, and law enforcement struggles to keep up.

But the story of how meth came to this remote reservation is really quite remarkable.

Like a cancer, a Mexican drug gang permeated the reservation and its families. It left behind a landscape strewn with broken lives.

Salesman learns his territory
Some 12,000 Indians — members of the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshone tribes — live on 2.2 million acres, an area so vast many homes are separated by miles of barren land.

Poverty and unemployment are high, alcoholism is rampant and the police department is so understaffed — patrolling such a large area — that the average response time is 15 to 20 minutes.

Jesus Martin Sagaste-Cruz knew that. And he knew the reservation's isolation would be perfect for his business.

Authorities learned of the Sagaste-Cruz drug ring back in 1997. Sagaste-Cruz and his Mexican gang had already been selling around Indian reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.

But it was an article in The Denver Post that changed the way they did business. The story talked about how a Nebraska liquor store near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota did millions of dollars in business. Sales were especially high immediately after Indians received their per capita checks — their share of their tribe's income.

Sagaste-Cruz figured if there were already so many Indians addicted to alcohol, it would be easy enough to addict them to methamphetamine.

So around 2000, the Mexicans moved in and near Wind River Reservation.

"They came to a place where people don't have anything," said Frances Monroe, who works in the Northern Arapaho Child Protection Services office.

The first one is free
They started with free meth samples. The men pursued Indian women, providing them with meth even as they romanced them and fathered their children. Eventually, the women needed to support their habit, so they became dealers, too — and they used free samples to recruit new customers.

It was all part of the plan.

For the next four years, the gang sold pounds and pounds of meth, much of it 98 percent pure. The drugs came from Mexico, then on to Los Angeles; Ogden, Utah (where Sagaste-Cruz lived); and finally Wyoming, where gang members had a handful of local distributors, each with his or her own customer base.

Customers became dealers and recruiters, and their customers did the same.

Before, meth was barely mentioned on the reservation. Police reported only sporadic arrests.

But now the reservation was saturated with it. Crime soared. From 2003 to 2006, cases of child neglect increased 131 percent. Drug possession was up 163 percent; spousal abuse rose 218 percent.

More than Wind River
The Wind River reservation is not alone. The Bureau of Indian Affairs found that methamphetamine was listed as the greatest threat to Indian communities by police departments.

Mexican drug cartels take advantage of the often complicated law enforcement jurisdictions in Indian Country. Isolated communities are hit the hardest, and sometimes even tribal leaders are not immune, said Heather Dawn Thompson, director of government affairs for the National Congress of American Indians.

Here on the Wind River, a tribal judge, Lynda Munnell-Noah, was arrested in a 2005 drug ring bust and accused of trying to assault and murder a Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement officer.

Resources are few, and most reservations don't have treatment centers. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of methamphetamine contacts in Indian Health Services facilities increased by almost 250 percent.

"Even if we arrest people for use or sale, there's almost nothing to do with them in order to help them recover," Thompson said. "Where do you go, and how do you pay for it?"

‘How do you fight this?’
In his 2008 budget, President Bush proposed a $16 million increase in law enforcement funding in Indian Country to help combat methamphetamine, a godsend to police departments like Wind River's, which has only 10 police officers.

"The heartbreaking part of it is, it's had this absolutely devastating effect on our community," Thompson said. "I have tribal leaders coming to my office all the time just crying. I mean, how do you fight this? How do you function as a government when 30 percent of your tribal employees are now using meth?"

Inside a tribal office, a bulletin board displays meth's effects: In a series of mug shots, a woman deteriorates — her teeth rotting, her skin collecting scabs. A nearby poster warns that making, selling or using meth around a child will mean prison time.

This is a place where people mostly keep to themselves. They know meth is a huge problem, but they don't want to talk much about it. They fear retaliation.

A jury found that the Sagaste-Cruz ring had distributed more than 99 pounds of meth — an amount that had a street value of between $4.5 million and $6.8 million, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The gang also sold meth on the Rosebud, Pine Ridge and Yankton reservations in South Dakota and Santee Sioux reservation in Nebraska, authorities found.

Sagaste-Cruz and 22 other people were given prison time — a life sentence, in Sagaste-Cruz's case. His brother, Julio Caesar Sagaste-Cruz, remains a fugitive.

A family affair
Ask people on the reservation about the Sagaste-Cruz case and most don't know much about it. They seem surprised to learn how sophisticated the operation was.

But mention the Goodman case, and everyone knows. The Goodmans were an entire family, grandparents down to grandchildren, who were dealing meth and prescription drugs here.

Nineteen people, including the tribal judge, were arrested in 2005.

The two cases weren't directly related, but with many Indians already hooked on meth compliments of the Sagaste-Cruz gang, the Goodmans didn't have any trouble finding customers. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Rankin said the Goodmans often had 20 to 50 customers a day come to their house.

Darrell LoneBear Sr., whose sister, Donna Goodman, and her husband, John Goodman, were the ring's leaders, said his relatives fell victim to easy money on a reservation where jobs are hard to find.

He rattles off his family's prison sentences: "John Goodman, 21 years. My sister Donna, 24 years. My nephew James got 19 years. My nephew Darrell got 8.

"It was all of my family," he said.

Thirteen children were sent to live with other relatives. One sister took in six children, another took in three.

Police taxed to the limit
"It is a tremendous, added responsibility emotionally and financially," said LoneBear, crime prevention and safety supervisor for Northern Arapaho Tribal Housing. "All of us have been traumatized by this matter. We all still stay here."

Police Chief Doug Noseep has a police force that can't possibly keep up with every call. He is grateful for the help from outside law enforcement agencies in the raids over the past few years and believes it has reduced the amount of meth here.

Noseep knows who is trying to get help, who is still using. Once, his officers encountered a 12-year-old girl who was addicted.

"It's sad as hell," he said. "It's here, and it's not going to go anywhere. It's never going to go away."

Seven years on, meth still casts its shadow
Seven years after the Sagaste-Cruz gang arrived, meth rolls on: Last summer, another bust at Wind River resulted in 43 arrests, the largest drug bust in the history of Wyoming.

On a recent night, Partners Against Meth met at a local school. The group struggles to attract volunteers and to keep committees on track. But here families that have been struck hard by the meth epidemic, and those that want to learn more about it, can come together to talk.

Leon Tillman brought his wife, son and daughter. He told the group he has six relatives in prison for meth or alcohol charges. "That's one of my worst fears, is to have one of my kids on drugs. I want to at least say I tried," he said.

A few years ago, John Washakie noticed his daughter, now 27, was losing weight and locking herself in her bedroom at her house. Then, one night, she dropped off her three young children at his house and disappeared into the darkness.

He cared for the kids for three years. It wasn't easy. "They lose all their energy about life. You spend a lot of time dealing with their emotions," he said.

Today, his daughter is clean and cares for her children, now numbering five, herself.

"I think there are a lot of people that are scared to tell you the truth," the grandfather said. "You don't walk away from this."

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Meth Addiction Steals Lives on Indian Reservations Throughout North West

Police Struggle with Rising Crime Rates Due to Meth Use

In a place of stark beauty, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, poverty, joblessness, alcoholism and now methamphetamines rule supreme. On more than 2.2 million acres, where some 12,000 Native Americans live in mostly isolated conditions, members of the Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes struggle with the effects of a modern scourge that has taken over lives and in many cases already stretched community resources. Crime is on the rise and tribal police who are in most cases understaffed struggle to maintain order. This scourge was not brought into the Reservations by the white man, but by a Mexican Drug Cartel who decided that due to poverty and already rampant alcoholism the Native Americans were ripe for the picking. Their theory seems to be correct.

Back as far as 2000, a Mexican Drug Cartel moved near to the Wind River Reservation. Men involved in the Cartel began romancing the local Native American women, and providing them with free samples of the methamphetamines that they were hawking, and often also fathered children of those women. They were succeeding in their plan to entwine meth into the society they hoped to make into their next victim and money maker. It worked. The women became more and more dependent on the potent drug and the drug dealers left them without resources. The women became forced to deal the drug themselves in order to provide for their newly formed habit and to take care of their children. The cycle had become complete. The women did business by giving out the familiar free samples just as they had once received. In a country where isolation and poverty reigns, the easy money of selling meth and other prescription drugs became a solution to a difficult often unsolvable problem. Drugs became the answer.

During the next four years the drug gangs sold more and more drugs to the Native population much of the meth brought up from Mexico was more then 98% pure quickly hooking its victims The drugs brought in to the US would often travel from Mexico up through Los Angeles, to Ogden Utah and then on to Wyoming and beyond.

On reservations throughout the northwest, crime rates began to rise. From 2003 through 2006 the rate of child neglect rose more than 131%.Arrests due to drug possession was up 163% and spousal abuse rose by an alarming 218%. The Bureau of Indian Affairs stated that the effects of methamphetamines are the greatest threat to Indian communities that they face in modern times. The local police departments are struggling to keep up with the negative effects that the insidious drug creates. The Drug Cartels had counted correctly on the difficulties that the local police would face due to the complicated law enforcement jurisdiction on Indian Reservations. The communities that are hit the hardest are the most isolated with residents living sometimes miles apart. This issue is more complicated by the fact that the local police departments are insufficiently understaffed. Wind River Reservation has only 10 police officers on staff to care for it's spread out community. Normal response times for police calls is often more than 20 minutes.

Most Indian Reservations have few if any drug treatment centers and the contacts for Indian Health Services are up more then 250%. One spokesperson stated, "If more people are arrested there is no treatment available nor anyone to pay for it anyhow". The drug problem has escalated to the point that in many cases whole families are participating in use and sales of meth and other prescription drugs illegally. One family with the surname of Goodman has had more than 19 people including grandparents to grandchildren arrested for dealing drugs.The tribal judge was also arrested in the incident. In many tribal communities, members of the tribal council are falling victim to addiction of this powerful drug. One tribal member commented on how difficult it is to have a government function when many of leaders are also addicted.

The Drug Cartel has also been selling their wares on The Rosebud, Pine Ridge, and Yankton Reservations and also Sioux Reservations in Nebraska. One article in the Denver Post stated that in one Nebraska liquor store near Pine Ridge Reservation, there had been millions of dollars of drugs sold to Native Americans. The sales would be much higher after the periods when per capita checks or shares of tribal profits were made to residents.

President George Bush has proposed in his budget for 2008, a $16 million dollar increase in funding to Indian Countries to combat meth use and its effects. Wind River is looking forward to getting more money to increase it's depleted and over worded police staff and to fight another battle that is threatening the Native American community.

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Morongo Indian Reservation, East of San Bernardino:

the other side of the Indian story concerning meth...

News From Indian Country 9-09

...With a monthly income averaging $30,000 for each Tribal
Member, the new Morongo Casino has done more than just eliminate
welfare and federal subsidy dependencies. The Morongo Band of Mission
Indians has become one of the most successful tribes in California and
ranks amongst the most successful in the Nation...


...There is a huge methamphetamine epidemic for the Morongo Reservation
and members there still suffer from drug and alcohol related dependencies...

To be fair, this is an exerpt. I don't know how biased the article is, but for sure things are much different than twenty years ago, certainly forty years ago.

There truly has been a meth problem at Morongo in the near past. I haven't seen anything concerning Mexican dealers at Morongo.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=...lTx9g3FPDDq9bQ

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Tribes taking varying paths in war on meth

Indians viewing issue as 'critical'

Diana Marrero

The Desert Sun Washington Bureau

August 20, 2006

American Indian tribes and tribal groups are getting creative in fighting what they consider an epidemic on tribal lands - methamphetamine use.
In Oklahoma, Indian archery and the traditional game of Cherokee marbles have taken on new meaning in the past couple of years as vehicles for teaching students about the dangers of meth and other drugs.

Some tribes, such as the Lummi Nation of Washington, are fighting meth with one of the harshest punishments at their disposal: banishment. Still others are integrating traditional ideas and healing into alternative sentencing options through new drug courts.

And the Morongo Band of Mission Indians in California is among dozens of tribes who have sent employees to meth training programs to help them spot the signs of addiction.

''Several years ago, this wasn't Indian country's biggest substance abuse issue,'' said Jackie Johnson, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. ''Now, meth is clearly one of those critical crisis areas.''
The group - which considers fighting meth a top priority - is working with the
Partnership for a Drug Free America on designing a national ad campaign to warn American Indians about meth addiction. It also plans to address the problem at its annual convention in Sacramento in October.

The organization, which represents at least 250 tribes across the country,
launched a major effort earlier this year to draw attention to what it says is an alarming rate of meth abuse on tribal lands.

Since then, the White House has created an interagency working group to
address meth in Indian country, the Senate has held a hearing on the issue and tribes are creating a national task force to combat the problem.

Worries in Riverside County

In Riverside County, most of the tribal officials reached for comment either
reported they did not have a major problem with meth or did not want to discuss the issue publicly. But local health officials say meth abuse is a problem countywide.

"It is the No. 1 drug of choice in Riverside County right now and has been for a number of years," said Maria Lozano, a behavioral health specialist at the county's mental health department.

Even though only 1.4 percent of the county's population is American Indian, they comprised about 2.2 percent of the nearly 5,000 admission cases for meth addiction last year at publicly funded facilities in Riverside, according to statistics kept by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.

Statewide, about 4.4 percent of the nearly 79,000 admissions were American Indian, while only 1.2 percent of the state's population are tribal members.

Local police officials say the number of meth-related calls received by the Riverside County Sheriff's office is rising even as the number of labs declines because meth is imported from Mexico.

Meth is a problem across the region, including on Indian lands, said Fred Fierro, the task force commander for the Coachella Valley Narcotics Task Force.

While the local tribes are generally supportive of law enforcement efforts, some Mexican drug pushers have been known to live on the reservations and traffic the drug from there, he said.

Waltona Manion, a spokeswoman for the Morongos, said she did not know how prevalent meth use among tribal members is, but the tribe sent its counseling staff to a recent meth training session to help them spot the signs of meth addiction and learn to work with meth users.

"It is a part of their proactive approach to their social service," she said.
The National American Indian Housing Council also has provided meth training to Morongo housing authority officials.

"The most tell-tale signs are rapid weight loss and extreme paranoia," said Jay Barton, a retired police official who helps train the organization.

Nancy Conrad, a spokeswoman for the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, said she did not have any information about whether meth was a problem for tribal members. But Mary Belardo, the former chairwoman of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla tribe, said several tribal members on her reservation can't seem to kick the meth habit.

"The whole valley has a problem," said Belardo, who now works at the tribal clinic. "It's a strange drug and it seems to be very powerful. People who get hooked on it, get really hooked."
Jacob Coin, a spokesman for the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians based in San Bernardino, said he did not think the tribe had a problem with meth.
However, Coin said the tribe has worked hard to combat the root of many social problems by creating jobs.

"When people have no economic opportunities and little other opportunities, these people tend to be swept away by these social ills," he said.

Rich, poor afflicted

But wealthier tribes, such as the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, also feel the effects of meth.

Earlier this year, law enforcement officials announced one of the biggest meth busts in the region, netting 93 arrests and breaking up a trafficking ring that distributed drugs at three casinos in Oklahoma.

Some tribal officials hope returning to tradition also will help them combat the meth problem. B.J. Boyd, with the Cherokee Nation's behavioral health services, said traditional activities can reach youth in a way a speaker in a classroom can't.

Substance abuse changes

In the past few years, meth has replaced alcohol as the No. 1 substance abuse problem in Indian country, tribal leaderssay. The consequences have been even more devastating.

American Indians are more likely than other racial groups to use meth, according to a 2004 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. At the time, 1.7 percent of American Indians had used meth - compared to .7 percent of whites, .5 percent of Latinos and .1 percent of blacks.

Indian activists say those numbers have grown. Some tribes report much higher abuse rates.

It's the biggest problem facing tribal police now, said Chris Chaney, Bureau of Indian Affairs' director of law enforcement. Chaney said tribes are being hit hardest because of sheer geography. Until recently, meth was primarily a problem in the West, home to most Indian tribes.

"One of the reasons is the vast majority of Indian country is west of the Mississippi [River]," he said.

In California, meth has created disturbing problems, say officials with the California Indian Legal Services. In nearly everycase they have worked on in which Indian children are taken from their home, at least one parent is using meth or the baby tested positive for the drug at birth.

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I'm sorry, I went way off topic - I got started and I couldn't stop.

If the moderator would like to cut the material out of this thread and place
it in a new thread elsewhere, that's fine.