Missouri has been a leading state for the production and abuse of methamphetamine for years running. Tennessee surpassed us in 2010. We’re No. 1 again, but not in a good way. Missouri is the most meth-plagued state in the U.S., with a staggering 2,096 busts in 2011, a 6 percent increase. Tennessee clocked in at 1,090.
Springfield is a contributor to the problem with 108 lab busts last year. The tally of lab busts has nearly doubled every year for the past three years.
A common street term for the drug nationwide is “417.” The Springfield Police department employs narcotics officers like detectives Daron Wilkins and Holly Tucker to remove its area code from the name of national drug culture.
“Our unit … deals with narcotics, but specifically what we deal with is we’re an undercover unit,” Wilkins said. “We don’t drive patrol cars. We don’t arrest anyone. We investigate.”
Tucker and Wilkins deal with two different kinds of cases within their unit. They have follow up cases from patrol and also self-initiated cases. Wilkins investigates approximately 30 follow-up cases at a time and a dozen self-initiated ones, which are instigated by using informants and leads. Another part of his job is the investigation of crime-stoppers tips.
“If someone calls in a narcotics tip, that comes to us and then I’m actually the guy that goes through them and decides where they go from there,” Wilkins said. “[I determine] If there’s enough information there to do a follow up or not, and if there is, I’ll assign it to one of the people in the office.”
When it comes to the undercover work, the bulk of their job, Tucker and Wilkins completely submerse themselves into the drug culture, dressing and acting the part of a potential user in order to gain trust among the people of the drug community, while pursuing dealers and gathering evidence.
“If an undercover is going to be purchasing from someone, then that’s going to be really low key,” Tucker said. “They will make several purchases, and sometimes it will be a year to a year and a half until we present the charges to the prosecutor, and that’s for safety purposes for the undercover officer mainly, so they don’t have any idea who the officer was. Sometimes, if it’s a tip that there’s something going on right now in a house, an officer will go out to the scene. Sometimes we can even go out to the house too and just knock on the door and see what happens. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
The actual bust isn’t all their job entails.
“We actually have to clean it up, separate the different pH level substances and different things like that,” Tucker said. “The cleanup [is the hardest part]. It might be 3 in the morning, I may have only been asleep for a couple hours, and we have to get up and go check it out. There are a lot of unknowns because there are so many different ways to cook meth. Sometimes we just can’t figure out what the substance is or what exactly we should do with it.”
When a meth lab is mentioned, a shack cluttered with hundreds of beakers and tubes comes to mind. The typical meth lab is no longer the norm for this area, according to Wilkins, but “shake and bake” or “one pot,” as well as backpack and mobile labs, are taking hold.
“The ingredients are put into one 2-liter bottle and they shake it to get it reacting,” Wilkins said. “That’s probably 75 percent of the labs we see now. It’s highly volatile, so that’s what’s exploding. We’ll find stuff during our interviews; we’ll just be talking to someone who’s maybe been arrested with a “shake and bake” lab, and just about everyone has had one explode at least once.”
Tucker describes meth as a “subculture that lives among the rest of the community.” Springfield is a popular place to raise children, start a business and even retire, but it is also a welcoming place for meth dealers and addicts.
“The largely rural area around us makes it easy to conceal a meth lab,” Wilkins said. “One form of making methamphetamine made its resurgence from Springfield from an amateur chemist at MSU, which planted some seeds here. There’s a large amount of meth addiction. If there are buyers, people are going to make it.”
Wilkins attributes meth’s popularity in this area not only to the geography, but also to flaws in Springfield’s judicial system.
“I think the leniency of the courts in this area on drug related offenses plays a major role in the number of meth labs and such that we have,” Wilkins said.
Fortunately, the Springfield Police Department is taking action to lock meth offenders away immediately instead of releasing them back into the community.
“One thing that we’ve just implemented since January is getting the prosecutors on-board with filing within 24 hours of the arrest,” Tucker said. “Some of the people who we’d get two or three meth labs on before they’d even go to court are now sitting in jail for a while.”
Recently, Branson put more regulations on the sale of pseudoephedrine in order to cut back meth production, and Springfield is following suit.
“Pseudoephedrine is one of the main ingredients that they have to have [to make meth],” Tucker said. “Our city is trying to get something passed in the city and then lobbying for something statewide to make it a prescription-only drug. I guess there have been other states that have made it a prescription and their meth labs have gone way down.”
Methamphetamine’s highly addictive properties make it one of the most dangerous drugs in existence. It rapidly deteriorates the user, causing loss of hair and teeth, aged appearance, and sores.
“It makes a hyper stimulation to the brain, which eventually leads to paranoia,” Wilkins said. “Someone that’s really heavy into meth and stuff like that is imagining things. They see people up in the trees; they start scratching themselves causing sores, track marks. They’ll be grinding twheir teeth, twitching; they like to talk a lot. I’ve looked at many drivers licenses and you just look at them like ‘’this is you?’ Just tore up by the meth.”
Meth reaches beyond the user, affecting even those not even remotely affiliated with the drug.
“One way would be the monetary side,” Tucker said. “The state is paying for a lot of trips to the hospital, for the kids, for the people burned in the explosions and different things like that, then also the cleanup.”
Wilkins and Tucker stress the urgency of the meth problem, an example being its role in other crimes in the Springfield metropolitan area.
“I don’t think there’s a crime out there that isn’t potentiated by drug use, specifically methamphetamine,” Wilkins said. “Two different times I’ve had people try to stab me while I was working undercover. There’s always guns involved.”
Wilkins’ job gives him a different perspective than most are able to see. Occupy Wall Street protests and other similar events pale in comparison to the underground war he fights on a daily basis.
“It amazes me that we have these people that are sitting in a parking lot protesting a banker who is just trying to make a living and they ignore the people that are running around on the streets driving brand new BMWs Mercedes, Escalades, all financed with drug money, and ruining lives in the process,” Wilkins said. “In our culture, it seems a strange thing to me. Part of it is most citizens don’t see what we see, so our perspective is a little different. I know individuals who are living on disability from the state and driving several hundred-thousand dollar cars that are still drawing disability and making a lot of money on narcotics. It’s a big business.”
Inside the Job:
“Years ago, probably 1997 or ’98, I dealt with a girl who was 13 at the time, her father was in prison. Her and her mom were cooking methamphetamine at their home together. There was a fire and she spilled some chemicals on her arm and hand and it had eaten through her hand where you could see the tendons and the bones and all of that. But she would not, and did not, seek medical care because she was, at 13, so addicted to the drug that she didn’t want to go to jail or have her mom go to jail and lose her source of meth. It wasn’t until probably three weeks after the incident that we caught up with her and we had to force her to go to the hospital. And even then she was hostile. I have no way of describing her arm. I could look in her arm and see her bones and her tendons. It was nasty, but the addiction was so bad that she didn’t care. She spent weeks in the burn unit at St. John’s. That was ‘97 or ‘98 and she was 13 then. She is still around today and still uses meth. I’m surprised she’s not dead. She’s been to prison two or three times since and that’s probably the only thing that’s kept her alive.”
-Detective Daron Wilkins, Springfield Police Department