http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0202110174feb11.story
By Fox Butterfield
New York Times News Service
February 11, 2002
PRENTISS, Miss. -- The trophy houses, with wrought-iron gates and grand-columned
entryways, keep popping up on little country roads here, in clearings in the
piney woods and near doublewide trailers. Sometimes there is a luxury car or two
in the driveway.
In the affluent suburbs of Boston, New York or Dallas, these homes might belong
to successful doctors, lawyers or software company owners. But Prentiss, a small
town in south-central Mississippi, has no industry or affluent professional
class in the conventional sense. The last sizable factory moved to Mexico three
years ago, leaving an unemployment rate of 25 percent.
Instead, the police say, many of these houses belong to drug dealers, made rich
by a flourishing business in crack cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana and
OxyContin, the prescription painkiller. They are the most visible manifestation
of an explosion of rural drugs and crime that is overwhelming local
law-enforcement agencies and bringing the sort of violence normally associated
with poor neighborhoods of big cities. The upsurge has been felt across the
United States from Maine to Oregon and from Georgia to Texas, even as drug use
in most large cities has been declining.
In December, for example, Ron Jones, one of five members of the Prentiss Police
Department and the son of the police chief, was shot to death as he entered an
apartment to serve a search warrant for drugs. It was the most recent of 14
homicides in the last two years in Jefferson Davis County, which has 14,000
residents, giving the county a homicide rate of 50 per 100,000. That is higher
than the rates of Detroit, Washington and New Orleans, cities that regularly
rank among the highest homicide rates in the nation.
Nationwide, while the rate of arrests in drug crimes has fallen 11.2 percent in
cities with more than 250,000 residents over the last five years, it has risen
10.5 percent in rural areas, according to the FBI.
Even more striking, from 1990 to 1999, the last year for which figures are
available, the percentage of drug-related homicides tripled in rural areas but
fell by almost half in big cities.
More rural children using
To measure the problem another way, a continuing survey of drug use among junior
high and high school students by the University of Michigan has found that crack
is now more widely used among 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders in rural areas than
among those in metropolitan areas. Methamphetamine use is now highest in rural
areas among all three grades and heroin use is about equal in urban and rural
areas, the survey found.
The spread of drugs in the countryside is uneven, the experts say.
In Washington County, for instance, at the far northeastern corner of Maine,
prosecutions in crimes involving OxyContin are 10 times what they were in 1998,
say law-enforcement officials, who estimate that at least 1,000 of the county's
35,000 residents are addicts.
"It's gone beyond the epidemic stage," Sheriff Joe Tibbetts said.
"I can't think of a family in Washington County that hasn't been scathed by
it in some way."
His officers' families are among those who have been affected, Tibbetts said.
In Dawson County in central Nebraska, the problem is methamphetamine. "The
percentage of meth-related crimes is through the roof," said Paul Schwarz,
an investigator with the county sheriff's office.
In the state as a whole, officials discovered 38 methamphetamine laboratories in
1999; last year they discovered 179.
"If there is a battle going on out there," Schwarz said, "we're
honestly not winning it."
Similarly, in Douglas County, a vast timber, farming and fishing area in
southwestern Oregon, Lt. Mike Nores of the sheriff's department estimates that
12 percent to 14 percent of the 103,000 residents are making, selling or using
drugs, particularly methamphetamines and marijuana. Drug use and trafficking
account for 80 percent of all crime in the county, including killings, Nores
said.
One reason for the growth in rural drug problems, federal officials say, is that
aggressive prosecution in cities has led dealers to seek safety in the farms and
forests of rural counties, which have far fewer law-enforcement officers.
"We've seen drugs and crime migrate to the rural areas in the past several
years to get away from law enforcement," said Tony Soto, director of the
Gulf Coast High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area in New Orleans, a task force of
federal, state and local law-enforcement authorities established by the White
House Office of Drug Policy Control.
Poverty in `rural ghettos'
Observers site the poverty and isolation of rural areas as keys to their growing
drug trade.
"You have many rural areas that are persistent poverty areas, in essence
rural ghettos," said Joseph Donnermeyer, professor of rural sociology at
Ohio State University. "They were once isolated and were protected by that,
with lower crime, but now better communications have broken down that buffer so
they begin to resemble poor neighborhoods of big cities, where people are
segregated by poverty."
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