BOONE, N.C. — Mark Shook says he's fighting a war in this mountain town -- complete with explosions, abandoned children and an enemy that won't give up.
Shook is Watauga County's sheriff and, for the past year, he and others have tried to beat back the spread of methamphetamine through the hills and hollows of western North Carolina.
"Meth is choking this town," Shook said recently, moments before taking a call about yet another raid on a possible meth lab. "We are fighting a war -- and it's going to spread. I've never seen anything like it."
Meth is a highly addictive and potent powder "cooked" from such common ingredients as ammonia, lithium from car batteries and pseudoephedrine from cold tablets. After snorting, eating or injecting the drug, users experience rushes of energy and euphoria.
"You feel like Superman," said David Mclemore, a former addict who now counsels substance abusers here. "You can get addicted the first time. And then it takes more and more and more to get high."
Popularized by bikers and truckers in the late 1980s, meth and its makers have migrated eastward from California and other Western states.
They've increasingly taken root in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. The latter state led the South with more than 1,150 of the nation's roughly 8,000 meth lab seizures last year.
Boone, a town of 13,500 that is home to Appalachian State University, is surrounded by rugged terrain that offers meth-makers the kind of protection it once provided to moonshiners. The open, isolated spaces diffuse the pungent, nauseating odors that are the meth labs' giveaway.
"You can't cook when you're living on top of each other in a city," Shook said.
Last year, 34 meth labs were seized here, and social workers removed 17 children from homes where the chemicals saturated the walls, furniture and carpet.
Because these so-called "meth orphans" were often covered in dangerous toxins, doctors had to decontaminate them. Their toys, books and clothes had to be burned.
"The kids didn't always understand why they couldn't take their Barbie with them," social worker Chad Slagle said.
Children sometimes unwittingly caused their parents' arrest. A first-grader told her teacher how to cook meth. An older student included meth cooking in a "How I Spent My Summer" essay.
