News
County's meth problem growing fast: "Super labs" in Mexico increase presence of drug
By GENTRY BRASWELL/Wick News Service
SIERRA VISTA - Law enforcement authorities in Southeastern Arizona continue to fight the growing tides of addictive and chemically-manufactured methamphetamine narcotics surging in from Mexico.
They also are dealing with the impacts it leaves in other areas of the county's society.
"There are stash houses everywhere in Cochise County," said Sgt. Steve Tritz, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. "Meth is the fastest-growing drug of abuse in Cochise County."
Tritz is the supervisor of the DPS Narcotics Criminal Investigation Squad in Cochise County. He is also supervisor for the strategic unit of the border alliance group. He has been in law enforcement for 18 years and is now an expert on stifling contraband.
"Everywhere in Arizona it is a very significant and increasing problem," he said.
But the landscape of his trade is changing.
Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever said a majority of non-drug cases are rooted in methamphetamine use, and methamphetamine use transcends ethnic lines and age demographics.
"It causes teeth to rot out and gums to recede. It's a nasty, insidious drug," Dever said. "We've had cases where people have been slashed with knives because of hallucinations."
Boyfriend-girlfriend conflicts mixed with methamphetamine use often become "bloody encounters," he said.
Dever said the sheriff's department is seeing a large increase in Mexican methamphetamines coming across the border.
"Early on, most of our methamphetamine came out of California," he said.
Mexican and local manufacturing has overtaken California's black market methamphetamine export to Arizona.
"There's more of it than there are of us right now, and we've got to get a handle," Dever said. "Unfortunately, it seems to the public that the problem continues unabated."
Law enforcement
gets organized
In 1987, Cochise County Sheriff Jimmy Judd, County Attorney Allan Polley and the various city police chiefs met to address the major smuggling to, from and within the county.
There was no Drug Enforcement Agency or FBI representation in the county, and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Customs Service had only four agents in Cochise County at that time, Dever said. The U.S. Border Patrol also had only between 40 and 50 agents in the county back then.
"There was no organized narcotics enforcement effective in the county," Dever said. "Everybody was doing their own little thing."
Judd then assigned Dever the duty of organizing a task force to battle the county drug trafficking problem. After researching his plan, the task force came together to include the Arizona Department of Public Safety and financial support began to arrive, first from the state level with a $25,000 grant.
In 1988, more federal money arrived from the Byrne Memorial Grant Fund.
"That was intended to be a four-year funding process," Dever said.
But the task force still draws from that grant 16 years later.
Once the task force began to function, "the environment was, needless to say, target rich," Dever said. "We seized literally millions of dollars in cash and thousands of pounds of cocaine."
The DEA dispatched an agent named Art Cash to Cochise County.
"Little by little we became more organized," Dever said.
"The battle became a lot more dangerous and a lot more intense," the sheriff said of the traffickersâ efforts as the task force began its work.
And it remains more dangerous today. There have been reports of drug traffickers shooting at authorities as they a retreat across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Dever became sheriff in 1997. In 2001, the southwest of the United States border was officially listed as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking area, meaning Arizona and Cochise County were a destination for more federal dollars. This grant money went to the task force that Dever began organizing in 1987.
The task force was able to add more personnel as a result, but the main operating cost for the task force is still covered by the Byrne grant money.
"HIDT pays salaries for most of the task force," he said.
The problem remains today
All isn't solved.
"The federal government, to this day, continues to measure success through weight and measure," Dever said.
The problem, he said, is that the specific weight and measure is quantified by human casualties and seized contraband. There is no problem hitting federal quota for these weights and measures in Cochise County because of the endless results from the interorganizational narcotics task force "working the fence."
Cochise County has 83.5 miles of U.S.-Mexico border and consists of just less than 6,300 square miles.
"The bodies you get are 'mules,' who are a dime a dozen," Dever said.
These mules, which are the bottom-tier traffickers, are often armed, he added.
"We're seeing a lot more advanced patrols and cover," he said of the techniques used in border trafficking, such as armored vehicles.
The task force has had to compensate for the change in trafficking technology.
"Certainly, meth is the drug of choice here in Sierra Vista," said David Santor, police chief of the Sierra Vista Police Department. "Followed closely by marijuana."
For now, Santor said, "we don't have the distribution network large enough in Sierra Vista to handle the large quantities that are being smuggled in.
"Our dealers here don't deal on that scale. They deal with individual users," Santor said.
Regardless of the scope of the Sierra Vista drug scene, he said the traditional connection between drugs and crime remains.
"We are seeing a lot more fraud cases associated with methamphetamine trafficking," he said.
Santor said the 2003 calendar year brought a 60 percent increase in Sierra Vista police drug cases, with 314 adult arrests and 165 juvenile arrests.
Enforcing the law
For the Sheriff's Department, state law has made their job more difficult through more lenient drug penalties. In the past, those arrested could be more easily persuaded to disclose upstream trafficking sources, Dever said.
Proposition 200 diluted penalties for lesser offenders and squelched this method for the task force to gather trafficking information. Tritz said the proposition made prosecution for felony possession of marijuana and possession of personal-use amounts of dangerous narcotics a mandatory probation sentence, not incarceration.
Now, he said, people aren't "rolling over" their sources to avoid jail time.
"It reduced the incentive for these people to cooperate with law enforcement," Tritz said.
But that law affects Tritz's investigation squad less so than incidental narcotics arrests because of the scope of the DPS squad goal.
"We do long-term, in-depth drug conspiracy investigation and meth labs, that's our forte," Tritz said.
The group specializes in dismantling major drug-trafficking organizations.
"Most of the people that we target are U.S. residents, not necessarily citizens," Tritz said. "If we capture backpack mules who are illegal aliens, my unit arrests them."
At the mule level, Tritz's agents quite often get information regarding who these captured mules are smuggling for.
"It's our duty to prosecute them," he said. "They're our small fish in this situation."
But, he reiterated, the primary focus is on prosecuting U.S. residents.
The path over the border
and into America
Tritz and Narcotics Detective Rene Valencia explained the typical contraband path currently used to cross the U.S.-Mexican border and continue into the United States.
In Mexico, brokers consisting of smuggling organizations and transport facilitators paid by these brokers begin the trafficking logistics. Once smuggled across the fence, U.S. stash houses facilitated by transportation organizations function profusely as redistribution hubs.
"From here to Chicago to New York, wherever it may be," Tritz said.
Valencia added, "There's obviously a demand for it in the United States."
The staggering volume of Mexican methamphetamine production for export to the United States has affected local clandestine methamphetamine production.
"It's driven them out of the market," said Anthony Coulson, assistant DEA special agent for Southern Arizona. "There is more meth seized at the Arizona-Sonora border than at any other location on the southwestern border."
"The staff number with the DEA is something that we don't make public," Coulson said.
Cochise County currently has its largest DEA presence ever, and the agency is going to keep adding personnel, Coulson said.
So far in the 2004 calendar year, more than 1 million pounds of marijuana have been seized crossing the U.S.-Sonora border, already surpassing the entire marijuana seizure for the same area in 2003, Coulson said. This quantity does not include marijuana that gets through.
Coulson said only the south Texas border surpasses the U.S.-Sonora border cocaine and marijuana seizures, but the U.S.-Sonora border is still the foremost Mexican methamphetamine point of entry.
"We know that there are what we refer to as (Mexican) super labs capable of producing 50- to 100-pound amounts on a continuing basis," Tritz said.
Coulson said local mom-and-pop methamphetamine production is feeling the squeeze of the immense Mexican black market encroaching.
"The small mom-and-pop labs are gram-sized production," he said.
The drug produced in Mexico
Mexican methamphetamine is also known for its extreme potency, law enforcement officials said.
Mexican methamphetamine paths are a bit different than cocaine, marijuana and heroin smuggling routes, Tritz and Valencia said.
Originating in the interior where narcotic manufacturing is less criminalized than in the United States, Mexican methamphetamines often cross in Nogales, Naco or Douglas. From there, they are shipped to Yuma, Tucson and Phoenix.
The scope of the Mexican methamphetamine import is such that the product arrives back in Cochise County from the hubs in Arizona meth-hub cities north of the county, as large parcel-courier services similarly operate because of sheer bulk.
Methamphetamine smuggling also is a serious problem at the U.S.-Canada border, they said.
Norm Bradley Jr., a candidate for Cochise County sheriff, said smuggling has been a part of the international boundaries since 1776.
Bradley has served as the national director for the Counter-Drug Center, the Director of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for the 103rd Congress, and as undersheriff and chief deputy to Dever during Dever's first term as sheriff.
He said his experience has taught him what he feels is the only approach to fight smuggling. The first is inter-organizational cooperation.
"Law enforcement needs to work desperately to learn how to work together," he said.
The second key, Bradley feels, is approach.
"Law enforcement focuses on peripherals, whereas the core structure remains intact," he said.
Bradley believes smuggling organizations must be attacked at their cortex.
"Methamphetamine smuggling on the Mexican border is relatively new," he said. "I think what's important for everyone to understand (is) that it's going to continue to get worse."
In the post-9/11 era, "Drugs that used to be a (national) priority have taken a distant third," Bradley said, even though, ironically, international drug smuggling is known to be an important breadwinner for international terrorists.
He agreed that the rampant methamphetamine abuse truly eats at the fiber of America, as addicts reach the point of no return.
"People do not understand that once addicted to meth, there's no cure," Bradley said.
Danger of dealing with drug production, smuggling
"Our job, to a certain degree, is inherently dangerous," Tritz said.
"It's my philosophy as a supervisor (that) if my people are in harm's way, so am I. It is my job to be there."
Tritz and Valencia believe the danger is worth the risk.
"Any good policemen want to put good criminals in jail," Tritz said. "The dumb ones are easy. The organizations are a challenge."
Methamphetamines, once cheap because they're made from cheap, poisonous chemicals such as drain abrasive, battery acid and bug spray, have seen a hike in user purchase price.
"It's about the same price as cocaine is now," Tritz said.
It may seem impossible to stop, but Tritz said his personnel operate with a piecemeal goal under which success is measured by each life saved by interrupting and disrupting the organization, and preventing addiction on a case-by-case basis.
Proactivity is an important factor, especially when the reactive side tends to be jail, death or a permanent shift for the worse, Valencia said.
"You can't factor out education," he said. "Domestic violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse all go hand in hand with methamphetamine abuse."
When serving methamphetamine-related search warrants, arsenals of firearms, child/hardcore pornography, assault rifles, homemade bombs, pipe bombs and booby traps are often encountered by authorities within these homes, Tritz and Valencia said.
And then there are the highways.
"You've got all these people who are high on methamphetamines driving vehicles," Valencia said. "It's not just a personal problem."
Tritz said state patrolmen constantly encounter people on highways who are drunk and on narcotics at the same time.
"We encounter filthy, absolutely disgusting and repulsive (households) on meth warrants," he said. "And you have children walking around with full (methamphetamine) access.
"It's a symptom of the problem that we have," Tritz added. "We have the drugs, we have the weapons, and we have the children being endangered. And it's what we are fighting every day."
Valencia said parents need to play a role. "It's so important for the parents to establish the rules of behavior: 'Drugs aren't permitted,'" he said.
Eight years ago, 98 percent of the drug cases in Cochise County were marijuana-related, Tritz said. Now 40 percent are methamphetamine or methamphetamine-related.
"In my career, I've only known of two people who have successfully quit using methamphetamines," Tritz said.
One, he said, quit cold turkey. The other quit to avoid death.
(Editor's Note: Gentry Braswell is a reporter for the Sierra Vista Herald.)
Numer of dangerous drug-related arrests in Willcox since Oct. 1, 2004:
Possession of a Dangerous Drug for Sale (includes methamphetamine): Two
Possession of a Dangerous Drug (includes methamphetamine): Seven
Possession of drug paraphernalia: 10
They also are dealing with the impacts it leaves in other areas of the county's society.
"There are stash houses everywhere in Cochise County," said Sgt. Steve Tritz, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. "Meth is the fastest-growing drug of abuse in Cochise County."
Tritz is the supervisor of the DPS Narcotics Criminal Investigation Squad in Cochise County. He is also supervisor for the strategic unit of the border alliance group. He has been in law enforcement for 18 years and is now an expert on stifling contraband.
"Everywhere in Arizona it is a very significant and increasing problem," he said.
But the landscape of his trade is changing.
Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever said a majority of non-drug cases are rooted in methamphetamine use, and methamphetamine use transcends ethnic lines and age demographics.
"It causes teeth to rot out and gums to recede. It's a nasty, insidious drug," Dever said. "We've had cases where people have been slashed with knives because of hallucinations."
Boyfriend-girlfriend conflicts mixed with methamphetamine use often become "bloody encounters," he said.
Dever said the sheriff's department is seeing a large increase in Mexican methamphetamines coming across the border.
"Early on, most of our methamphetamine came out of California," he said.
Mexican and local manufacturing has overtaken California's black market methamphetamine export to Arizona.
"There's more of it than there are of us right now, and we've got to get a handle," Dever said. "Unfortunately, it seems to the public that the problem continues unabated."
Law enforcement
gets organized
In 1987, Cochise County Sheriff Jimmy Judd, County Attorney Allan Polley and the various city police chiefs met to address the major smuggling to, from and within the county.
There was no Drug Enforcement Agency or FBI representation in the county, and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Customs Service had only four agents in Cochise County at that time, Dever said. The U.S. Border Patrol also had only between 40 and 50 agents in the county back then.
"There was no organized narcotics enforcement effective in the county," Dever said. "Everybody was doing their own little thing."
Judd then assigned Dever the duty of organizing a task force to battle the county drug trafficking problem. After researching his plan, the task force came together to include the Arizona Department of Public Safety and financial support began to arrive, first from the state level with a $25,000 grant.
In 1988, more federal money arrived from the Byrne Memorial Grant Fund.
"That was intended to be a four-year funding process," Dever said.
But the task force still draws from that grant 16 years later.
Once the task force began to function, "the environment was, needless to say, target rich," Dever said. "We seized literally millions of dollars in cash and thousands of pounds of cocaine."
The DEA dispatched an agent named Art Cash to Cochise County.
"Little by little we became more organized," Dever said.
"The battle became a lot more dangerous and a lot more intense," the sheriff said of the traffickersâ efforts as the task force began its work.
And it remains more dangerous today. There have been reports of drug traffickers shooting at authorities as they a retreat across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Dever became sheriff in 1997. In 2001, the southwest of the United States border was officially listed as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking area, meaning Arizona and Cochise County were a destination for more federal dollars. This grant money went to the task force that Dever began organizing in 1987.
The task force was able to add more personnel as a result, but the main operating cost for the task force is still covered by the Byrne grant money.
"HIDT pays salaries for most of the task force," he said.
The problem remains today
All isn't solved.
"The federal government, to this day, continues to measure success through weight and measure," Dever said.
The problem, he said, is that the specific weight and measure is quantified by human casualties and seized contraband. There is no problem hitting federal quota for these weights and measures in Cochise County because of the endless results from the interorganizational narcotics task force "working the fence."
Cochise County has 83.5 miles of U.S.-Mexico border and consists of just less than 6,300 square miles.
"The bodies you get are 'mules,' who are a dime a dozen," Dever said.
These mules, which are the bottom-tier traffickers, are often armed, he added.
"We're seeing a lot more advanced patrols and cover," he said of the techniques used in border trafficking, such as armored vehicles.
The task force has had to compensate for the change in trafficking technology.
"Certainly, meth is the drug of choice here in Sierra Vista," said David Santor, police chief of the Sierra Vista Police Department. "Followed closely by marijuana."
For now, Santor said, "we don't have the distribution network large enough in Sierra Vista to handle the large quantities that are being smuggled in.
"Our dealers here don't deal on that scale. They deal with individual users," Santor said.
Regardless of the scope of the Sierra Vista drug scene, he said the traditional connection between drugs and crime remains.
"We are seeing a lot more fraud cases associated with methamphetamine trafficking," he said.
Santor said the 2003 calendar year brought a 60 percent increase in Sierra Vista police drug cases, with 314 adult arrests and 165 juvenile arrests.
Enforcing the law
For the Sheriff's Department, state law has made their job more difficult through more lenient drug penalties. In the past, those arrested could be more easily persuaded to disclose upstream trafficking sources, Dever said.
Proposition 200 diluted penalties for lesser offenders and squelched this method for the task force to gather trafficking information. Tritz said the proposition made prosecution for felony possession of marijuana and possession of personal-use amounts of dangerous narcotics a mandatory probation sentence, not incarceration.
Now, he said, people aren't "rolling over" their sources to avoid jail time.
"It reduced the incentive for these people to cooperate with law enforcement," Tritz said.
But that law affects Tritz's investigation squad less so than incidental narcotics arrests because of the scope of the DPS squad goal.
"We do long-term, in-depth drug conspiracy investigation and meth labs, that's our forte," Tritz said.
The group specializes in dismantling major drug-trafficking organizations.
"Most of the people that we target are U.S. residents, not necessarily citizens," Tritz said. "If we capture backpack mules who are illegal aliens, my unit arrests them."
At the mule level, Tritz's agents quite often get information regarding who these captured mules are smuggling for.
"It's our duty to prosecute them," he said. "They're our small fish in this situation."
But, he reiterated, the primary focus is on prosecuting U.S. residents.
The path over the border
and into America
Tritz and Narcotics Detective Rene Valencia explained the typical contraband path currently used to cross the U.S.-Mexican border and continue into the United States.
In Mexico, brokers consisting of smuggling organizations and transport facilitators paid by these brokers begin the trafficking logistics. Once smuggled across the fence, U.S. stash houses facilitated by transportation organizations function profusely as redistribution hubs.
"From here to Chicago to New York, wherever it may be," Tritz said.
Valencia added, "There's obviously a demand for it in the United States."
The staggering volume of Mexican methamphetamine production for export to the United States has affected local clandestine methamphetamine production.
"It's driven them out of the market," said Anthony Coulson, assistant DEA special agent for Southern Arizona. "There is more meth seized at the Arizona-Sonora border than at any other location on the southwestern border."
"The staff number with the DEA is something that we don't make public," Coulson said.
Cochise County currently has its largest DEA presence ever, and the agency is going to keep adding personnel, Coulson said.
So far in the 2004 calendar year, more than 1 million pounds of marijuana have been seized crossing the U.S.-Sonora border, already surpassing the entire marijuana seizure for the same area in 2003, Coulson said. This quantity does not include marijuana that gets through.
Coulson said only the south Texas border surpasses the U.S.-Sonora border cocaine and marijuana seizures, but the U.S.-Sonora border is still the foremost Mexican methamphetamine point of entry.
"We know that there are what we refer to as (Mexican) super labs capable of producing 50- to 100-pound amounts on a continuing basis," Tritz said.
Coulson said local mom-and-pop methamphetamine production is feeling the squeeze of the immense Mexican black market encroaching.
"The small mom-and-pop labs are gram-sized production," he said.
The drug produced in Mexico
Mexican methamphetamine is also known for its extreme potency, law enforcement officials said.
Mexican methamphetamine paths are a bit different than cocaine, marijuana and heroin smuggling routes, Tritz and Valencia said.
Originating in the interior where narcotic manufacturing is less criminalized than in the United States, Mexican methamphetamines often cross in Nogales, Naco or Douglas. From there, they are shipped to Yuma, Tucson and Phoenix.
The scope of the Mexican methamphetamine import is such that the product arrives back in Cochise County from the hubs in Arizona meth-hub cities north of the county, as large parcel-courier services similarly operate because of sheer bulk.
Methamphetamine smuggling also is a serious problem at the U.S.-Canada border, they said.
Norm Bradley Jr., a candidate for Cochise County sheriff, said smuggling has been a part of the international boundaries since 1776.
Bradley has served as the national director for the Counter-Drug Center, the Director of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for the 103rd Congress, and as undersheriff and chief deputy to Dever during Dever's first term as sheriff.
He said his experience has taught him what he feels is the only approach to fight smuggling. The first is inter-organizational cooperation.
"Law enforcement needs to work desperately to learn how to work together," he said.
The second key, Bradley feels, is approach.
"Law enforcement focuses on peripherals, whereas the core structure remains intact," he said.
Bradley believes smuggling organizations must be attacked at their cortex.
"Methamphetamine smuggling on the Mexican border is relatively new," he said. "I think what's important for everyone to understand (is) that it's going to continue to get worse."
In the post-9/11 era, "Drugs that used to be a (national) priority have taken a distant third," Bradley said, even though, ironically, international drug smuggling is known to be an important breadwinner for international terrorists.
He agreed that the rampant methamphetamine abuse truly eats at the fiber of America, as addicts reach the point of no return.
"People do not understand that once addicted to meth, there's no cure," Bradley said.
Danger of dealing with drug production, smuggling
"Our job, to a certain degree, is inherently dangerous," Tritz said.
"It's my philosophy as a supervisor (that) if my people are in harm's way, so am I. It is my job to be there."
Tritz and Valencia believe the danger is worth the risk.
"Any good policemen want to put good criminals in jail," Tritz said. "The dumb ones are easy. The organizations are a challenge."
Methamphetamines, once cheap because they're made from cheap, poisonous chemicals such as drain abrasive, battery acid and bug spray, have seen a hike in user purchase price.
"It's about the same price as cocaine is now," Tritz said.
It may seem impossible to stop, but Tritz said his personnel operate with a piecemeal goal under which success is measured by each life saved by interrupting and disrupting the organization, and preventing addiction on a case-by-case basis.
Proactivity is an important factor, especially when the reactive side tends to be jail, death or a permanent shift for the worse, Valencia said.
"You can't factor out education," he said. "Domestic violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse all go hand in hand with methamphetamine abuse."
When serving methamphetamine-related search warrants, arsenals of firearms, child/hardcore pornography, assault rifles, homemade bombs, pipe bombs and booby traps are often encountered by authorities within these homes, Tritz and Valencia said.
And then there are the highways.
"You've got all these people who are high on methamphetamines driving vehicles," Valencia said. "It's not just a personal problem."
Tritz said state patrolmen constantly encounter people on highways who are drunk and on narcotics at the same time.
"We encounter filthy, absolutely disgusting and repulsive (households) on meth warrants," he said. "And you have children walking around with full (methamphetamine) access.
"It's a symptom of the problem that we have," Tritz added. "We have the drugs, we have the weapons, and we have the children being endangered. And it's what we are fighting every day."
Valencia said parents need to play a role. "It's so important for the parents to establish the rules of behavior: 'Drugs aren't permitted,'" he said.
Eight years ago, 98 percent of the drug cases in Cochise County were marijuana-related, Tritz said. Now 40 percent are methamphetamine or methamphetamine-related.
"In my career, I've only known of two people who have successfully quit using methamphetamines," Tritz said.
One, he said, quit cold turkey. The other quit to avoid death.
(Editor's Note: Gentry Braswell is a reporter for the Sierra Vista Herald.)
Numer of dangerous drug-related arrests in Willcox since Oct. 1, 2004:
Possession of a Dangerous Drug for Sale (includes methamphetamine): Two
Possession of a Dangerous Drug (includes methamphetamine): Seven
Possession of drug paraphernalia: 10
Copyright © 2010 - Arizona Range News