The Meth Battle
A Discussion on Meth in Indian Country
By Sanjay Talwani, 11-07-05
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If you live in the West, the methamphetamine horror stories I heard last week in Tulsa were nothing new. The scabby faces. The days and days without sleep, the violent paranoia. The children sexually abused, burned with chemicals and boiled alive. Crude forgery rings in small western cities. And those labs, those labs, with the nasty chemicals in hotels room and the trunks of cars.
Although when someone at a rap session at the mentioned that meth-freaks sometimes drink each other’s urine for the residuals, and that detainees in county jails will battle one another for the fresh urine of a newly arrested crank-head, I had to admit I hadn’t heard that one.
At this particular discussion, a series of experts seemed to agree: The West’s big meth problem is extra-bad -- or at least bad in a specially insidious and unfortunate way -- in Indian Country.
So what are the Indian leaders, assembled for one of the year’s biggest Native conferences going to do about it?
One thing they’re not doing is waiting for the federal government to rise to the occasion. Now, Indian Health Service is funded at only 52 percent of its need, and at only at seven percent of its “Behavioral Health� needs, said Holly Echo-Hawk at a “breakout session� at the conference, something like a panel discussion but really just a series of five or six presentations, with no questions or give-and-take. Echo-Hawk, who runs a management company that deals with children’s mental health, said there’s only one meth-specific IHS program in the country (in Tulsa).
“We have to do it ourselves,� said Lynette Willie, who works in Window Rock, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation for the U.S. Department of Behavioral Health Sciences. “Through education. We as a people have to take that first step. We have to take the steps to protect our children.�
There’s a lot to educate, she said. Nowadays most kids in Navajo country are raised by their grandparents. Explaining to a grandmother, who has never taken illegal drugs, that her fifteen-year-old granddaughter is using meth, is no easy task, but Window and her program are traveling to the remotest corners of the vast Navajo nation, to the furthest tendrils of rural America, where there are people using meth and others who apparently still have barely heard of the stuff.
They’re showing them pictures of meth paraphernalia, the little baggies and pipes, and what meth labs look and smell like. They’re teaching grandmas some of that hep lingo the kids are using do talk about their dub, jumbo and glass.
“We had to tell them, if your kids are talking about ice on the Navajo reservation in the summer, they’re not talking about the winter,� Willie said.
As Willie described the Navajo elders, I thought of a county attorney in Montana who once lamented to me that nowadays a lot of the grandparents on his local reservation are the ones doing crank. So these education programs had better be finely tailored.
These speakers all had a shared implicit message: On the Navajo Nation, said Willie, that means including the elders, medicine men, and teaching against the desecration of body and land by the drug.
Meanwhile we see slides of Navajo kids smoking crank outside their high school. And we also heard that meth-rehab programs have relapse rates above 90 percent - for those lucky enough to end up in a program
So where is there success? The federal government is incarcerating plenty of Indians, thanks to a huge budget, mandatory minimum sentences and strict guidelines that judges must follow in sentencing. Also, there is no parole in the federal prison.
Thomas Heffelfinger, the United States Attorney for Minnesota and chairman of a key Justice Department advisory committee on Native American issues, made almost no mention of incarceration. He instead pointed to the problematic patchwork scheme of jurisdiction: “Is there anybody in this room who understands criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country?� he asked.
And with all the talk about meth labs, about the human and environmental costs, Heffelfinger may have surprised some by pointing out that 80 percent of the drug in the country comes from Mexico, not home-brews. So
the sale of Sudafed at Wal-Mart contributes to less local meth than some might think.
(Once I heard a senate aide brag to all present, including a U.S. Senator, that his hotel room back in the home state had been used as a meth lab, as evidenced by the smell in the room of cat piss. He rejected my theory that perhaps it WAS cat piss.)
As Heffelfinger sped off to a much more heated discussion on a controversial tribal gaming issue, I asked him about sentencing disparity between Indians and non-Indians.
“There is no disparity,� he said. A federal commission studying it found very little, he said.
So I checked and it turns out this study deals with assault, manslaughter, murder, and sexual assault. But it doesn’t address drug crimes at all. Heffelfinger may be right - that Indians do not receive longer prison terms than non-Indians for the same crimes - but there’s no definitive data and many folks in and out of Indian Country dispute his claim.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from prison are some of the more holistic healing methods that tried to incorporate healing with what’s worked for Indians before -- involvement with the elders and a big-picture view of tribe, body and spirit. One speaker showed complex models of things like a forest of healing - with a diagram of trees of different sizes; with labels like “sexual assault victim� on one tree; and the roots intertwining below in three layers of soil; and the soil having labels such as “forgiving.� I could follow, but time will tell of the real-world success of these models on their meth-addicted targets.
Native ways like the sweatlodge, and talk of four directions and 12 steps may well work; but no one at this conference seemed too confident that Indian Country is going to whack this plague. Not when meth-users’ teeth are rotting in prison so fast that dental costs are stretching the budgets of prison systems around the west. Not when counties are running out of jail beds. Indian leaders warn that meth is the greatest threat to survival of their people, that it’s the “Devil’s dope� and all this innovation and education may not be enough.
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Comments
This may be the largest problem facing communities in the rural west today, without any exaggeration.
This article is a good step to keeping the meth problem in our faces, where it belongs. I hope that the trend continues, that more articles are written, that this problem never gets swept under the rug again.
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I can't believe that people still use this 400 year old misnomer. There is a country called India and the people from it are Indians!!!! NOT what some idiot called people he ran into when he tried to sail around the world to India.