METH FIGHT GAINS SUPPORTER

Congressman Says He'll Talk To His Colleagues

About a dozen community, business and political leaders -- including
U.S. Rep. Howard Coble -- gathered in a conference room at the
Alcoholic Beverage Control Board offices in Salisbury Wednesday
afternoon to talk about the relatively recent explosion of
methamphetamine onto the local illicit drug scene.

"Meth (as the drug is commonly referred to) is the new crack cocaine,"
said Bill Belvin, an agent with the ABC's Law Enforcement Division.

Belvin said meth has replaced crack as the latest "high-powered drug
of choice."

"It will become more and more of scourge," Belvin said. "And we need
to look at it from all angles."

One of those angles is the process by which meth is
made.

Key ingredients include chemicals available at most grocery
stores.

And that is why Food Lion has been on the leading edge of the battle
against meth.

"We saw this wave coming from the west coast a few years ago, and we
started with working with east coast states to promote awareness of
the drug," said T. Ross Young, a Food Lion spokesperson.

Two years ago, Rowan County created an awareness-oriented program
called Meth Watch.

Mark Miller, of the public relationships firm Miller Davis, helps
coordinate the publication and distribution of Meth Watch's
educational materials. He said the sight of a person who has used meth
for only a few years can be a strong deterrent to children.

Miller said the drug takes a strong toll on a user's appearance "to
the tune of five to seven years of aging for every year they use the
drug."

He said the first phase of Meth Watch was mostly aimed at retailers
and consumers and the goal was to make people aware that meth's
primary ingredients -- ephedrine or pseudoephedrine -- were in many
cold and flu symptom medications.

Last year, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law that made
it more difficult to purchase to those medications.

The law -- which monitors and limits the amount of products containing
these chemicals a person can purchase in any 30-day period --
officially goes into effect Jan. 15, but many pharmacies and retailers
have already begun the monitoring program.

Aside from addiction and restricting ingredient chemicals, the meth
problem includes the unique component of dealing with the facilities
at which the drug is manufactured, and decontaminating those who come
in contact with these so-called "meth labs."

"This is a two-pronged problem," Coble said. "There is the problem
with addiction and abuse and then there is the whole separate problem
of pollution and contamination."

Some meth labs cost as much as $1 million to clean up, Belvin said,
and the average cleanup is more than $100,000.

The most recent meth lab discovered by officers in Rowan County was on
Oak Breeze Drive, in the southwest part of the county.

"But one of the problems is that meth can be produced in a space as
small as a car trunk," Belvin said.

Kyle Huffman, a member of the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education, said
another problem related to contamination comes when children wear the
coats or other clothing of children who have come in contact with meth
labs.

"The children are always innocent pawns in this kind of thing,"
Huffman said. "They are the victims."

ABC General Manager Terry Osborne said he put the meeting together
after hearing on the radio that Coble had taken an interest in
combating the growing meth problem.

"I had been thinking about (the meth problem) and then I heard Howard
was willing to come down here and get involved, and I took that as a
sign to take action," Osborne said.

Coble said the meeting amounted to a fact-finding mission and that he
had not made specific plans about what action he intended on taking.

"All I can say is that I will bring the information back to Washington
and that I will talk about this with my colleagues," Coble said.

When asked if thought he would be able to gain support on Capital Hill
for anti-meth funding, he said he wasn't sure.

"I'm going to put my oars in the water and see where we can go with
this," Coble said. "I'm not certain what kind of attention this will
get, but I can say it is the kind of issue that deserves a lot of
attention."