HILLSBORO, Mo. — The detectives were relaxing over fried pork rinds when they saw a car turn into the driveway of the farmhouse they had just raided.
The car rattled past the Confederate flag, past the skull and crossbones, heading for the overgrown yard where several addicts had been cranking out the illegal drug methamphetamine. The detectives exchanged glances. They ducked behind a truck.
When the car stopped and the driver got out, they rushed him.
"Randy!" Det. Darin Kerwin exclaimed in mock surprise. "I thought you were trying to clean up."
"Oh, man," the driver said, sweating. "Oh, man."
Rummaging through the back seat, Kerwin pulled out a McDonald's bag crammed with decongestant pills -- a key ingredient for manufacturing meth.
"Oh man," the driver said again. He banged his head on his car trunk. "I'm dead."
In fact, he'd be released within hours -- just as he had been the last time these officers arrested him at a meth lab, and the time before that. Swamped with meth cases, the crime lab that serves Jefferson County is six months to a year behind in processing evidence. That's not unusual.
A decade after meth took hold in the heartland, the inexpensive, highly addictive home-brewed stimulant is straining rural law enforcement resources to the breaking point.
The Polk County Jail in central Iowa is so packed with addicts that the sheriff sends the overflow out of state, at a cost of $5 million a year. Indiana's state crime lab has such a huge backlog of meth cases that the governor has appealed for help from chemistry graduate students.
In central Missouri, nearly every case of child abuse involves meth. Social workers in Franklin County keep a log of parents under investigation and the circumstances involved; this spring, it read: Cocaine. Meth. Medical and physical neglect. Meth. Sexual abuse. Meth. Meth. Manufacturing meth.
"It becomes the only work you can do," said Cpl. Jason Grellner of the Franklin County Sheriff's Department.
Meth is not just a Midwestern drug. It's popular among club-hoppers in Miami, gay men in New York City, stay-at-home moms in Omaha. It poses achallenge for law enforcement in cities such as Phoenix, Sacramento, San Jose and Honolulu, where two out of every five men arrested test positive for meth.
