{"id":16298,"date":"2014-06-12T15:27:53","date_gmt":"2014-06-12T19:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=16298"},"modified":"2014-06-12T15:27:53","modified_gmt":"2014-06-12T19:27:53","slug":"st-lawrence-county-meth-lab-numbers-dramatically-up-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/06\/12\/st-lawrence-county-meth-lab-numbers-dramatically-up-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Lawrence County meth lab numbers dramatically up this year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Meth pipe. Photo: michelle.irish<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

We’ve been talking a lot in the last few months about the growth of heroin<\/a> in the North Country. At the same time, the manufacture and use of methamphetamine in our region seem like they’re also growing.<\/p>\n

We blogged last November about that possibility<\/a>. Half a year later, the St. Lawrence County Sheriff’s Department<\/a> is saying that since January, there have been nine methamphetamine labs found in St. Lawrence County, resulting in a total of 12 arrests.<\/p>\n

I spoke with St. Lawrence County Sheriff Kevin Wells, and he told me that’s a marked increase: “In St. Lawrence County, where we would have had zero meth lab clean ups last year we’re already at nine now. In St. Lawrence County it’s a public safety problem, not to mention a health problem.”<\/p>\n

On May 30 in Lisbon, two more people were arrested for manufacturing methamphetamine<\/a>. This was the third drug bust related to the meth within four days; it resulted in seven of the 12 arrests.<\/p>\n

Meth is a vicious, highly addictive and immensely destructive drug. And it comes with its own set of special problems. One worry about meth (as opposed to heroin) is that you can make it yourself, and when people do, the process creates toxic fumes and is highly explosive.<\/p>\n

Wells told me that with heroin, “you would have to worry about needles and such. But with meth, now you have a whole chemical composition you have to worry about and how volatile it is and what stage were they at and how much clean up is this going to take.”<\/p>\n

As any curious person who’s tried to buy Sudafed<\/a> and wondered why they had to provide a lot of information knows, many of the ingredients people use to make the drug are ones you can easily get locally (along with pseudoephedrine, things like ammonia, lye and red phosphorus you can scrape from matchbook covers<\/a>). While that’s bad in the sense that it makes it easier to manufacture meth, Wells says it does make it easier to keep track of people who might be buying in excess.<\/p>\n

“Sometimes you have to clear whole areas so that you can safely remove the product. As law enforcement, no matter what the agency is, if something happens, you have to make sure that you don’t have any civilians in there and it just makes everything that much more complicated.”<\/p>\n

I’m working on a larger story about this issue, and in the next few weeks I’ll be learning a lot more, and we’ll be hearing more. In the meantime, what do you think? Is meth impacting your community? Is that news? And how do you feel police should deal with the problem?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ve been talking a lot in the last few months about the growth of heroin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/90"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16298"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16307,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16298\/revisions\/16307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}