Menu
Officials: Three-pronged approach best for combatting meth
McCOOK, Neb. – Better law enforcement is needed to combat an influx of high-quality Mexican methamphetamine in rural Nebraska, but so is better education and treatment, state officials said Thursday.
Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Nebraska Jan Sharp said the increasing supply of meth is leading to an increase in prosecutions, but also an increase in overdose deaths.
Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson told the Gazette that the amount of meth that Nebraska law enforcement has seized has risen significantly over the past five years.
Sharp and Peterson, along with representatives of several state and federal law enforcement agencies, were in McCook Thursday exchanging ideas and best practices with local agencies from around Southwest Nebraska.
One of their goals is to encourage the various local law enforcement agencies to communicate better with each other and with state and federal agencies and to encourage local officers to join task forces that address the meth issue.
The meth coming into rural Nebraska is coming from Mexico, and is of “high, high purity,” according to Sharp. That is a change from the meth dealt through “biker gangs” in the 1980s or the local meth labs he saw in the 1990s. Sharp said prices have come down and the availability is up.
Peterson told the Gazette that there are two major cartels in Mexico manufacturing the drug, which has no medicinal value, in “very sophisticated operations.” Peterson said the Midwest has a strong appetite for meth, calling it the “drug of choice in Nebraska.”
They are using a broad-reaching approach to fight meth, including education, treatment, and law enforcement. “You can’t arrest your way out of this,” Peterson said, which is why the state will be using money from an opioid settlement to develop more treatment options.
On the education side, Peterson wants the public to have an awareness of the addictive nature of meth. He encouraged reaching out to young people through organized mentoring programs because many young people may have a meth-user living in their households. He said the public needs to know how destructive the drug is, and he encouraged calling law enforcement if you see something that looks suspicious.
Peterson said the law-enforcement approach to combating meth is more significant than it was in combating opioids because the distribution of meth is completely illegitimate and criminal. He doesn’t want local law enforcement agencies “to operate in silos,” which is part of the reason for the outreach and training session held in McCook Thursday. By sharing data and intelligence at the local, state, and federal levels, they will have better analysis capabilities of the supply chain. “We want to be smart about how we do it.”
Sharp said there are certain tools available to federal prosecutors that may not be available to state prosecutors, for instance, some mandatory minimum sentences. He said by communicating with local law enforcement, they can come up with the best prosecution to get the drugs out of the community.
Sharp said at the federal level they are prosecuting the dealers exclusively. “People that have the simple possession charges, they’re going through the state system,” Sharp said, further stating that treatment is key and acknowledging the resources are often limited, especially in rural areas.