What worries me tonight...

I don’t think of myself as a worrier, although my wife and my sons might have a different view.
But I’m starting to get seriously worried about the epidemic of methamphetamine use and meth-related crime I’m seeing.
It seems that almost every crime and aberration that crops up in this semi-rural part of the state is linked, somehow, with meth.
We live in a town of about 1,500 surrounded by farmland. An abandoned railroad right-of-way runs behind our house and on the other side of it is the local Farm Bureau Co-Op with three or four huge storage tanks full of anhydrous ammonia.
At various times during the year, area farmers apply ammonia to their fields using “nurse tanks,” big white torpedo-shaped tanks on wheels that they pull behind a tractor or a truck.
For the uninitiated, ammonia is a component used to manufacture methamphetamine. Of all the ingredients, ammonia is the only one that meth makers can’t walk into Wal-Mart and buy. So they have to steal it.
The tricky part is that guys who make meth are more often than not meth users, which means they spend a lot of time under the influence of this insanely addictive drug. That means we have inherently stupid people who have further impaired themselves with dangerous chemicals trying to break open valves on big tanks full of a highly toxic substance.
One night during the summer of 2003, one of these morons got in over his head trying to steal ammonia from the Co-Op and left a valve on a nurse tank open. My wife arrived home from work about 7 p.m. and noticed a strong smell of ammonia. It got progressively stronger to the point where we had to go inside and shut our doors and windows to keep it out. A Little League baseball game was in progress a block down the street on the opposite side of our house from the Co-Op. The town marshal called off the game and evacuated the ballpark.
The ammonia finally dissipated, but the episode left us with the disturbing realization that we could all be gassed in our sleep by some imbecile trying to filch ammonia to make meth.
A little reconnaissance revealed there is virtually no security at the Co-Op. No night watchman, no security light, no high fence. The nurse tanks are lined up in an area that opens onto a soybean field. Some bold meth head could easily drive through the bean field some moonless night, hook a nurse tank to his vehicle and make off with several thousand pounds of deadly anhydrous.
Now, I could go off on a homeland security tangent here and suggest that our nation’s unsecured agricultural ammonia supplies are an easy target for terrorists, but let’s stay with the meth angle for now.
I wrote earlier about a cop friend who was involved in a police action shooting that killed a young man who was spun on meth and made the fatal error of pointing a pellet gun at an officer in pre-dawn darkness.
Hardly a week goes by in the nearby county where my wife’s newspaper is based that a highly volatile meth lab doesn’t blow up and damage a house or some other structure. During the winter, meth makers look for abandoned structures or the homes of people vacationing in Florida to break into and set up their labs. I read a police report this week about a guy and his son who were making meth in the crawlspace under a stranger’s house. I saw another report about a 19-year-old and a 22-year-old – both meth heads – who decided to support their habit by passing bad checks. Now they face a combined 19 felony counts of forgery.
My pharmacist has a sister-in-law who is hopelessly addicted to meth – been in and out of rehab countless times but just can’t stay away from it.
Cops will tell you that almost all identity theft is meth-related.
My stepson’s cousin lives by himself in his great-grandmother’s house and my stepson says he’s starting to hang out with the meth crowd.
This week, my wife’s publisher had to fire the best photographer who has ever worked at that paper because of meth.
The guy and his wife moved here from the south a few months ago, pretty much dead broke because – the story goes – they spent the last year or so caring for the wife’s dying mother.
The guy went to work, shooting excellent news photos. It was immediately clear that he had the makings of a top flight photojournalist.
However…
His wife was a dirtbag slut. Soon after they arrived, she started hanging out in the sleazier bars and less than a month later, she disappeared with hubby’s car, having run off to Nebraska with a construction worker.
The photog moped around for a few days, then got back to work and was turning out some brilliant photography – spot news, features, illustrations, you name it – until the wife called and tearfully told him the boyfriend had beaten and abandoned her.
However talented the photog was, he had absolutely no judgment when it came to relationships. He drove to Nebraska and brought her home.
It was all downhill from that point on. Coworkers said they saw the couple out partying all night every night. He was later and later getting to work every day.
A couple of weeks ago, at a time when a nasty flu bug was running rampant in the newsroom, he called in sick on a Monday. His editor checked on him daily until Wednesday when his wife said she’s keep the office apprised of his condition. But there was no call on Thursday and by Friday morning the sports department was getting nervous about whether he would be available to shoot weekend sports or whether they needed to hunt up photo stringers.
My wife, having a good rapport with the police department, called the cops and asked them to drop by his apartment and do a welfare check just to make sure he was still alive.
A short time later, the photog called the newsroom – barely coherent but with his wife screeching in the background. It took the editor a good 15 minutes to explain to him that nobody was angry with him, they just got worried and also wondered what plans to make for the weekend. He didn’t have a phone and had turned off his company cell phone.
So fast forward to Wednesday morning when the folks in the newsroom hear police radio traffic mentioning the photographer’s name and something about a portable police scanner radio belonging to the newspaper.
The editor was off with the flu, so my wife and the publisher went to the police station where they identified the scanner radio as the one they had issued to the photographer.
Seems it turned up in the apartment of a meth dealer. Further investigation revealed that the photographer had earlier sold the meth dealer his Ford Explorer for two grams of meth. The closest we could get to an explanation of how the scanner radio got into the meth dealer’s apartment was that the photog said he’d given it to his wife while he was off shooting a high school basketball game because it’s impossible to hear the scanner in a noisy gym. So we’re left to suppose the wife went visiting and accidentally left behind a device that would be extremely useful to a criminal who wanted to know what the local police were up to.
My wife finally reached the photographer at his apartment – after he had been questioned by police – and told him the publisher wanted him in the office immediately. He tried to beg off, saying he was “too freaked out” at the moment. An hour or so later, the publisher ordered him to report to the office with all of his company-owned equipment within 25 minutes. Otherwise, the publisher would call the police and report the equipment stolen.
A staff member saw the photog park his car in front of the office with the left rear tire up on the sidewalk. His wife was in the car, applying makeup.
He turned in his stuff and was terminated.
His Nikon D70 had a 1 gig Compact Flash card that held 86 photos taken between 7:04 and 7:38 a.m. that same day. Most were of his wife posing seductively by candlelight. Since sunrise wasn’t until a little after 8 a.m., it was obvious that they had been up all night. It was equally clear that they were oblivious to the shit storm gathering around them.
It’s impossible for me to see this stuff happening around me and not be concerned.
What happens when the stepson’s cousin gets seriously spun on meth and tells his buddies about the burglary opportunities at my house? What happens the next time some idiot decides to crack a valve on a nurse tank behind my house?
Like I said, I don’t think of myself as a worrier, but I do have a heightened sense of danger.