When narcotics agents in the Golden Triangle arrest a drug addict with several grams of ice methamphetamines, they’re seeing the small-town result of a global industry dedicated to manufacturing and selling what is quickly becoming Mississippi’s drug of choice.
The sale of ice, or crystallized meth, has been increasing throughout the state, finally surpassing the sale of crack cocaine about a year ago, said Eddie Hawkins, methamphetamine coordinator with the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics.
“If I’m a drug user … and I go out here and I buy a $20 rock of crack … the high lasts anywhere from eight to 10 minutes,” Hawkins said. “Now the same user can go buy the same dosage unit of methamphetamines and that high gets him much much higher than crack cocaine did and can keep him high anywhere from eight to 24 hours.”
It’s buyer’s choice, basically, he said. And certainly most buyers prefer the Mexican-manufactured ice to the old “shake-and-bake” method of producing methamphetamines using over the counter drugs and home equipment. That method died out in Mississippi after the legislature passed a law in 2010 banning the sale of pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient in methamphetamines, without a prescription.
It was one of the most effective laws Hawkins has ever seen, he said. This year so far, MBN has found one active manufacturing lab in the state. But the absence of homemade methamphetamines has opened the door for cartels to push their more refined, purer form of methamphetamine.
Snuck in from Mexico
The cartels have what are called “super labs” in Mexico and western states, Hawkins said. Traffickers buy pseudoephedrine smuggled into Mexico illegally from China and hire professional chemists to mix a purer form of the drug which gives users a longer, more intense high.
The drugs travel far before local dealers sell a few grams at a time to addicts on the street in Clay, Lowndes and surrounding counties, Hawkins said. Chemists in super labs convert the ice into a liquid form and traffickers smuggle it across the border in bottles disguised as anything from water to gasoline.
“We’ve seen it concealed in a number of different items,” Hawkins said. “…It could be Tequila bottles, it could be beer, it could be Lipton tea. They buy all this packaging material and put factory seals on the bottle.”
It’s much harder to detect methamphetamine in its liquid form, Hawkins said, but it’s impossible to get high from it that way too. Once the liquid meth has made it across the border, it goes to conversion labs in “source cities” – major cities like Atlanta and Dallas where traffickers run labs converting the liquid meth back into its crystallized form. Local traffickers then take the ice from the source cities back to their home communities where they sell them a few grams at a time.
The traffickers use the already-established routes they’ve been using to traffick heroin and cocaine for years, Hawkins said. In Mississippi, those routes tend to be on the coast and in the Jackson area. Interstate 55 is a major route, as is Interstate 59 from Hattiesburg to Meridian. And while most of the drugs found on Highway 82 are user amounts – grams instead of pounds – it’s not necessarily out of the question traffickers are using it as well.
Making progress
Thanks to the decrease of manufacturing in Mississippi itself, MBN is able to focus its effort on stopping the organizations that traffick drugs along these routes, Hawkins said, though catching the traffickers involves time-consuming investigations that can take up to a year and spread over multiple counties. But agents have been making progress, stopping vehicles and catching traffickers with up to 10 or 12 pounds of methamphetamine.
One such investigation, which MBN worked in conjuction with the Drug Enforcement Administration, spread across north Mississippi, even reaching into the Golden Triangle. Hawkins specifically mentions stopping a trafficker with nine pounds of methamphetamines during that investigation.
Regardless of the efforts, Hawkins said he doesn’t know if the drug problem will ever be solved completely.
“When there’s a demand for something, there’s always going to be a supply and somebody figuring out a way to get around the law to supply it,” he said. “And there’s so much money involved in the drugs, I don’t know what the answer is.”
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