AN UNLIKELY BATTLEFIELD IN THE DRUG WAR

Salt Lake City Confronts Meth Labs, Trafficking Increase

SALT LAKE CITY - Pioneer Park was named for the clean-living founders
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The neatly groomed
common of shade trees and footpaths is six blocks from Temple Square,
world headquarters of the Mormon faith.

It is also a prime location for scoring drugs.

"They're here if you want them," said Kathy Kennedy, 48, an admitted
alcoholic and former heroin addict who has dabbled in cocaine and
methamphetamine.

Unemployed for years, she was killing the afternoon in the park, as
she does most days. "There's every kind of drug. This isn't different
than any other city."

Salt Lake may be the last place one would expect to find a thriving
narcotics culture. After all, the teachings of the Mormon Church
– which remains Utah's dominant institution and is the
wellspring of its law-and-order politics – forbid even coffee
and cigarettes.

But the drug scourge has not spared the Utah capital, for reasons that
Mormon leaders concede may be beyond the church's powers of spiritual
persuasion. They include the same earthly temptations, family failings
and youthful rebelliousness that bedevil any community.

"I wish we knew why these things happen," said Harold Brown,
management director of the church's social services programs. "We have
our share of problems. We wish we didn't."

Over the last few years, authorities in the greater Salt Lake area
have reported sharp increases in the trafficking of heroin; cocaine;
marijuana; methamphetamine, also known as crank or speed; and
so-called club drugs such as ecstasy and GHB. The proliferation of
meth laboratories has been especially dramatic.

"Meth is all around," said Ms. Kennedy, who moved here from Oregon
last fall. Bone-thin and bleary-eyed, her face pitted with sores, she
pointed toward a distant corner framed by maples and elms. "You can
buy meth right down there. You can buy anything."

Top-10 drug state

Utah ranks among the top 10 states for total meth labs and No. 1 for
"speed" cookeries per capita, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration.

In the early 1990s, the DEA and local police agencies raided about a
half-dozen labs a year in the Beehive State. They busted 266 in 1999
– mainly in the Salt Lake region – and are on a pace to at
least equal that number this year.

The typically closet-sized labs are turning up throughout the city and
county, from downtown hotel rooms to suburban garages to foothill
shanties along the emerald Wasatch Mountains.

Outside Salt Lake, meth makers favor the deep recesses of Utah's
national forests. The state has also posted record confiscations of
speed smuggled into the country by Mexican dealers.

"I didn't think there would be this much of a problem here. All I knew
about Salt Lake City was the religion and things like that," said
Keith, a Salt Lake DEA investigator who joined the federal bureau in
1998, after 15 years as a Dallas police officer. He asked that his
last name be withheld because he works undercover.

The 38-year-old agent, who was wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt,
fought off a yawn. He had been up since 4 a.m. to kick in the door of
a suspected meth lab. The target was a small house in a quiet,
blue-collar neighborhood within a mile of the DEA building.

"There's a lot more meth here than in Dallas," said Keith, taking in
the building's third-floor view of church spires, the skyline's
signature feature. "It was surprising."

The magnitude of the meth epidemic also surprised Lisa Jorgensen, a
state children services worker assigned to the Salt Lake police. Her
job is to rescue youngsters from drug-infested homes. In Salt Lake
County, 65 percent of children taken from their parents by the state
come from meth dens, according to the Utah Department of Human Services.

"They live in just deplorable, chronic, horrible neglect," said Ms.
Jorgensen, who was hunched over a computer at the downtown police
station. "We get 20 to 25 cases a month."

The DEA has expanded its Salt Lake staff to root out the meth labs.
Federal prosecutors have also cracked down. They are zeroing in on
meth peddlers who use Utah's sparsely inhabited highway corridors to
ship the drug from Mexico.

Since 1996, the U.S attorney's office in Salt Lake has prosecuted
nearly 1,000 Mexican nationals for drug crimes, most involving meth.

"We're the crossroads of the West [for] Mexican meth," said U.S.
Attorney Paul Warner.

Troubling trend

Meth aside, Utah is not afflicted with the level of drug-related
offenses found in much of the metropolitan West. Its violent crime
rate is roughly 35 percent below that of Western states and the nation
as a whole. Nevertheless, the Utah trend for all drugs has been troubling.

Seizures of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and GHB are up by
substantial margins, the DEA says. Ecstasy and GHB top the list,
soaring from 3,034 doses two years ago to 13,586 in 1999 and 120,827
in the first five months of this year.

"We hate to see it," said Salt Lake police Capt. Roger Winkler. He was
standing in a windowless file room at the police station. The wall was
plastered with mug shots of drug suspects arrested in Pioneer Park.
"Utah has always been above this. It hits home."

Ecstasy and GHB have exploded despite a Salt Lake club scene that is
virtually dormant by non-Utah standards. The Mormon influence
translates into tough limits on alcohol sales. Most bars require
customers to buy memberships before imbibing. And they are often
restricted to serving low-alcohol beer.

But there is a sprinkling of nightspots in and around Salt Lake's
hotel district, where construction is booming in anticipation of the
2002 Winter Olympics. And the blue laws apparently have done little to
keep ecstasy and GHB out of the hands of young revelers.

"People can always find a connection," said Jan Hansen, a 20-year-old
college student who was sipping a latte at Cup of Joe, a downtown
coffeehouse. A jazz band was playing.

"Lots of things are frowned on here, but people still use them," said
Mr. Hansen, a Salt Lake native. He sported a silver stud in his lower
lip and a pair of earrings. "I've tried 'ex.'"

His buddy and fellow student, Garrett Smith, 21, also told of sampling
ecstasy. "At my high school here, there were only 20 good Mormons,"
Mr. Smith said, speaking above a saxophone wail. "The rest were, like,
jocks who just wanted to get stoned."

Widespread plague

Salt Lake's drug counselors know the type. They have seen the demand
for treatment spike 20 percent since the mid-1990s, driven largely by
meth users under age 35. Clinic operators say that although most speed
addicts are lower-income white people, the meth plague has cut across
the socio-economic spectrum.

"I don't know why we're seeing proportionately more meth here than
other places," said Dr. Bruce Jacobson, director of the Cornerstone
clinic near downtown. "We wonder about that ourselves. ...

"Obviously, we live in a more conservative area. But I can't say with
any confidence or certainty what the influence of the Mormon Church is
on the drug problem here."

Barbara Hardy, who heads Salt Lake County's drug abuse programs,
considers the church a mixed blessing in her mission. Its anti-drug
strictures, she says, have undoubtedly steered countless young people
away from narcotics.

Then again, Ms. Hardy added, the church's pre-eminence may have
fostered a false sense of security. Utah's population of 2.1 million
is 70 percent Mormon, a figure that has been fairly constant for four
decades. About 60 percent of the Salt Lake region's 1.2 million
residents belong to the church.

"It's easier here to look the other way and say the drug problem
doesn't happen," said Ms. Hardy. "Denial is a wonderful thing."

Church spokesman Dale Bills sat down to discuss drugs in a paneled
conference room at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, a renaissance
revival monument to the religion's patriarch. The gem of marbled
columns and stained-glass ceilings was once the Hotel Utah. It is
across Main Street from Temple Square, whose six-spired worship hall
is Salt Lake's tangible heart and soul. Tourists strolled the grounds
behind high iron gates.

"Our message is the same, the doctrine is the same, the principles are
the same," said Mr. Bills, referring to the church's stance on drugs.
"We set a high standard, but not all kids are perfect."

The church offers its own drug-treatment programs, including 57 weekly
group-counseling sessions in Utah. "It's sort of our take on AA," said
James Goodrich, the church's welfare director for northern Utah.

Attendance is modest, however; 15 to 20 people turn out at each
meeting. Mr. Brown, the Mormon social services executive, said the
church has yet to see a marked upswing in demand for help.

"It has not been reported to me that we have any dramatic increases,"
he added. But he acknowledged that admission rolls at secular clinics
might paint a darker picture.

Don Mendrala, now in his fourth year as chief of the DEA's Salt Lake
office, says he had envisioned a much brighter picture when he
transferred here after stints in St. Louis and Chicago.

"I thought this would be a nice, quiet community," he said. His desk
phone was ringing. Night had begun to fall, a busy time. "I'd been
completely unaware of the problems."

The phone bleated away. Mr. Mendrala had to iron out the details of a
predawn raid set for the following morning. "We want to get 'em while
they're sleeping," he said.

It was another meth lab. Not far from Pioneer Park.