As its cost in dollars and lives mounts, the fight against methamphetamine now invloves sportsmen to a degree no one predicted a handful of years ago. Across the rural countryside, meth labs have invaded the lands where we fish and hunt.
Mar 27, 2006
One December evening in 2004,
Wildlife Officer Amy Snyder heard shots
after legal shooting hours in a popular duck-hunting area in Madison County, Tenn. She put on hip boots and set out into the marsh. But when she arrived at the blind where she thought the shooting had occurred, she found it unoccupied.
Then Officer Snyder noticed a chemical odor in the air. She shined her light around and in the grass saw a large glass mason jar filled with what looked like corn hominy. She kicked over the jar, saw rubber hoses coming out of the top and panicked.
"It was a meth lab, actively cooking," Snyder recalls. "What I'd done was extremely dangerous. The stuff could have exploded, not to mention what might have happened if I'd surprised the cookers at work."
Snyder had reason to be unnerved. The February before in Greene County, Ind., Conservation Officer Mike Gregg got a report of suspicious activity deep inside the Hillenbrand Fish and Wildlife Area. Gregg went in alone to investigate on a cold winter day and caught the unmistakable acrid tang of anhydrous ammonia, a liquid fertilizer and key component in the manufacture of methamphetamine. He got closer and, to his surprise, noticed a man trying to hide beneath the root ball of a fallen tree.
"He took off and I chased him through the snow," Gregg says. "When I caught up to him, he pulled a 9mm pistol on me. I had to shoot him in the leg to subdue him. He was typical of the methers we see: paranoid, armed and violent."
The prior March, Alabama conservation officer Jimmy Hutto learned just how paranoid, armed and violent meth cookers can be. While arresting a man for fishing without a license, he found meth and soon was involved in serving a search warrant on the suspected cooker. But the man's property was wired to detect intruders. And when Hutto broke down the door to the lab, the cooker was waiting and shot the conservation officer in the abdomen. Hutto died two weeks later.
A Rural Scourge
These incidents are not isolated. Law enforcement and conservation officials we contacted across the country describe a wave of methamphetamine manufacturing activity that has crashed across the rural countryside in the last five years, causing a dramatic change in the way game wardens operate and in the way hunters, anglers and other recreationists should conduct themselves afield.
"The landscape is changing," says Keith Aller, deputy director of law enforcement for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. "Twenty years ago meth was an outlaw biker thing, an urban thing. But in the past five years we've seen cookers take their labs to the forests and rural areas to avoid detection and to dump the toxic by-products of their work. We've also seen meth addicts exploiting public lands to pay for their habits. I don't want to sound alarmist, but people need to understand what we're up against these days and what they might encounter when they head outdoors."
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