Brownwood, the Meth Beltbuckle of the State of Texas ?
East Texas in the grip of meth
Henderson County has trained its sights on drug plague, but there's been no end to the devastation
09:41 PM CST on Saturday, March 26, 2005
By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News
ATHENS, Texas – Meth horror stories are all too easy to find in Henderson County.
At the hospital, emergency room doctor Dan Bywaters is haunted by the abandoned toddler who vomited uncontrollably after eating methamphetamine.
At the jail, Sheriff J.R. "Ronny" Brownlow has scabby prisoners tell him to his face that they'll go back on meth the day they go free.
At the court building, state district Judge Carter Tarrance jokes about running a full-time meth court.
At Cedar Creek Lake, army retiree Al Gusner tells war stories about twitchy neighbors who rammed his car and held a knife to his throat for trying to chase meth users and labs from his neighborhood.
The drug known as "white-trash crack" has stalked the back roads of Henderson County, fueling child abuse, violence and misery for the last four years.
"Epidemic is almost not strong enough a word, because it doesn't go away," said Dr. Bywaters, the ER medical director at East Texas Medical Center-Athens, the county's only hospital. "It's hard to believe the scope of the problem, to be honest."
The problem is hardly isolated to Henderson County.
The drug is so easy to make, and so many labs have been discovered across the northern half of Texas since 2000, that the area stretching from the Panhandle, through Dallas, to the Louisiana-Arkansas line has become the state's meth belt.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/032705dntexmeth.a924a.html
Drug cuts ugly swath across state
09:41 PM CST on Saturday, March 26, 2005
By LEE HANCOCK / The Dallas Morning News
A look at just a fraction of the human toll caused by Texas' meth problem:
Small-town police surprised no one's been killed
COMANCHE – Meth's alarming effect on this West Texas farm town: two officers shot in "rolling gun battles" just in the last six months.
A parole violator and drug user tried to shoot a Comanche police officer with a 12-gauge shotgun earlier this month, then wounded a sheriff's deputy, Mitchell Best, in the left shoulder with buckshot after police responded to a domestic disturbance.
The gun battle spilled onto the streets and ended only after Albert Fred Marino, 33, ran out of ammunition. Police found meth in his pockets, said Comanche Police Chief Ron Moe.
Last September, a different wanted felon and drug user tried to pistol whip a city officer and then blasted another city officer and a sheriff's deputy with a stolen shotgun, the chief said. That suspect, Michael Scott Townsend, 41, ran from house to house trying to escape police and didn't realize he'd been shot in the buttocks until officers managed to wrestle him to the ground.
Mr. Townsend warned police that he had a needle in his pocket. Officers found a syringe with liquid meth.
Chief Moe said the incidents are only the most extreme indicators of the drug's encroachment into his town of 4,482 and surrounding Comanche County, where dairy farms provide easy access to anhydrous ammonia used in illicit meth labs.
"I'm surprised we haven't had somebody killed before now," he said.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/032705dntexmethvignettes.a931b.html
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