Meth Labs On The Rise North Idaho Faces ‘Major Epidemic,’ Post Falls Drug Counselor Believes

Drug counselor Geral Brouillette waited in a jail visiting room to talk to a woman who had been busted along with her husband and a friend during a recent drug raid.

Police say the trio was operating a methamphetamine lab. While the woman claims they were cooking the powerful stimulant only to satisfy their own habits, all three face drug charges that include manufacturing and trafficking in methamphetamine.

Similar arrests have occurred frequently in recent months throughout North Idaho, forcing Brouillette to increasingly visit clients in jail. The five northern counties accounted for more than 40 percent of the clandestine meth labs busted statewide last year.

“We’ve got a major epidemic going on and no fingers in the dike,” said Brouillette, who works at Aspen Behavioral Counseling in Post Falls.

Most of the North Idaho meth labs have been discovered in Kootenai County, state narcotics agents say. The surge in drug-making activity has swamped counselors, social workers, attorneys and police.

Families of meth users have been left to absorb much of the impact.

“She had her two kids and nine addicts in the house while she was cooking,” Brouillette said of the woman caught in one of the Kootenai County busts.

Like typical meth users, the woman and her husband had few belongings and less money. Their roots to the drug community seem to stretch everywhere.

In the interview room next door at the jail, the woman’s ex-husband was speaking with an attorney about an unrelated drug charge he faces.

“It’s the peer association that’s the most difficult to break,” Brouillette said.

He estimates as many as 90 percent of the people meth addicts associate with are drug users. The drug’s quick, long-lasting high and relatively low cost have made it soar in popularity during recent years.

Few consider its destructive downside: violent behavior, dramatic mood swings, hallucinations and paranoia. It’s also illegal.

“It’s so accessible,” said Lindsey Parent, a certified addiction counselor at Port of Hope in Coeur d’Alene. “It’s everywhere in this community.”

To that end, state narcotics agents assigned to North Idaho have busted 39 clandestine meth labs this year - tops in the state and more than six times the number they found two years ago.

Last year, drug agents raided a dozen labs in North Idaho.

Readily available meth-making recipes and a refined process that uses ingredients available at local hardware and grocery stores has pushed the boom, narcotics agents said.

Dozens of Internet chat rooms and Web sites are dedicated to making meth. One area hardware store has had trouble keeping acetone in stock, while grocery stores have seen runs on match books and cold tablets.

All three items contain ingredients meth cooks extract to make the drug.

More than half the fiscal year remains, but chasing meth labs already has exhausted the overtime budget for state investigators in North Idaho, who also investigate homicides and other crimes, said Wayne Longo, special agent in charge of the region’s state Criminal Investigations Bureau office.

“I don’t know how many labs are out there, but based on what we’ve found there are a lot more out there,” Longo said.

Men and several women caught in those raids typically have been anywhere in age from their 20s to 40s.

Perhaps most disheartening to the heavily armed, specially trained officers who make those busts has been finding small children at home during a handful of the raids.

“If a little kid has grown up with chronic drug use they learn, `Don’t trust anyone, cops are bad, mind your own business and don’t have people over to the house,”’ Parent said.

They also learn to become drug users.

“As much as we thought we were hiding it from them, there’s no way you can hide it from your kids,” said a Coeur d’Alene woman who is trying to kick a nine-year meth habit. “They’re not as dumb as you think they are.”

A casual marijuana smoker when she married at 20, the 46-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified, says her husband introduced her to cocaine four years into their marriage. She struggled for 14 years to quit using the drug, only to discover meth.

By the time the woman’s marriage ended four years ago, she was hooked and dealing.

A friend of her oldest daughter introduced her to a woman who became her supplier. After taking what she needed to satisfy her addiction, she sold the rest of the drugs to her daughter and her friends.

She was selling a half-ounce of meth three times a week - enough, when cut, to get several people high - and could easily have sold more.

Last March, when her live-in boyfriend’s probation officer showed up to do a surprise search of her house, she got busted.

Now on probation for the next three years with the threat of a substantial prison sentence if she goes back to drugs, she is struggling to start over as a convicted felon.

“I have no trade,” she said. “I have nothing to fall back on except knowing how to sell drugs. It sucks.”

Beyond that is the guilt of knowing that her daughters have picked up the drug habit she and her ex-husband “secretly” shared.

Her 22-year-old daughter, once an outgoing soccer player, quickly found trouble after high school. She has amassed 16 drug- or alcohol-related charges over the past four years and, according to her mother, become a slave to meth.

“She was one of those you call, `Crank whores,”’ her mother said. “She’d follow it wherever she had to and do whatever she had to to get it.”

The girl’s 15-year-old sister, now pregnant, also has developed an alcohol and marijuana habit.

And their 9-year-old brother has showed up at his mother’s house with marijuana buds in his pockets.

Counselors say meth users typically graduate to the substance after first abusing other drugs.

“I see my son coming right up behind the rest of us,” the woman said quietly. “Already.”

But her oldest daughter’s problem, by far the worst, is her immediate concern. Stoked by her on-again-off-again boyfriend of five years, the girl’s drug addiction nearly killed her before she landed back in the Kootenai County Jail a few months ago on petty theft charges, her mother said.

“The minute she gets out she’s going to go right back to where she was,” she said. “I can’t even help myself right now let alone my kids. That’s a killer.”

Meanwhile, the woman’s 67-year-old mother is learning to deal with the drug addictions plaguing her daughter and granddaughters. The Hayden Lake small-business owner second-guesses herself for not stepping into her daughter’s life nine years ago when a friend came to her with suspicions of the drug abuse.

Finding a balance between her desire to nurture and the independence her daughter needs to kick her drug habit has been difficult. At the height of her addiction, the woman cut off all communication to her family.

She wonders if her grandchildren can be far behind.

“I just can’t believe my granddaughter went from a beautiful soccer-playing teenager to a purple-haired girl in jail,” she said.