History of the Problem:
Methamphetamine (meth) manufacturing, trafficking, sales, and abuse are having a significant impact of Indian individuals, children, families, and entire communities. Indian Country’s meth problem stems from the drug’s origins in the central valley of California in the 1990s and its steady spread eastward across the United States. Indian communities in state after state have been affected. One of the earliest identified was the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana. Today, a number of tribes have reported serious meth problems among their citizenry, including the San Carlos Apache Tribe, White Mountain Apache Tribe and Navajo Nation in Arizona, the Cherokee Nation and Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota, and the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
Tribal leaders have described in vivid detail the effect this dangerous and highly addictive drug is having in their communities. One example of the devastating impact meth has had on a tribal community was provided by San Carlos Apache Chairwoman Kathleen Ketchiyan before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee earlier this year. She testified that as recently as 2005 approximately 25 percent of reservation births resulted in babies born under the influence of meth. Another tribal leader has stated that an “entire generation in my tribe is being lost to meth.”
Meth’s Effects:
Methamphetamine’s intense highs at low cost lead many to refer to it as the “poor man’s cocaine.” It is easily manufactured with various household chemicals using recipes that are all too easy to obtain. One of meth’s key ingredients is pseudoephedrine, which is commonly found in over-the-counter cold medicines.
Even small meth labs can be highly dangerous to children and families, as well as to emergency and law enforcement personnel, due to the large amount of highly toxic and combustible waste they generate. The fumes produced from manufacturing meth affect everyone who is exposed and meth labs pose an extreme risk. Since meth labs also must be treated as toxic waste sites, the costs and administrative burdens of containment and clean-up fall heavily on tribal, local, state, and federal resources.
In addition, users often engage in criminal conduct to support their meth habits, and many commit violent crimes while under its influence. For example, the Navajo Nation has seen at least one meth-related triple homicide and one Navajo police chief recently reported that his department now sees a greater number of meth-related arrests than alcohol-related arrests. Again, combating the rise in the levels of meth-related crimes can have a large impact on a tribal government’s human and financial resources.
The Impact of Methamphetamine on Indian Communities:
Meth impacts all aspects of a tribal community – culture, people, property, land – not just a few individuals. Even natural resources on Indian lands such as lakes, public areas, and open fields are at risk due to the dumping of toxic waste that is a by-product of the meth manufacturing process. Due to the violence associated with meth production, trafficking, sales and use, BIA and tribal law enforcement and tribal courts personnel have been overtaken by meth-related arrests and cases.
Meth also has an impact on every social and economic aspect of Indian communities. It has been closely linked to child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, suicide, reduced employability, degraded physical health, and reduced academic achievement. As a result, meth is overwhelming Indian social, economic, education, and health programs.
Even more troubling, Indian Country’s isolated reservation and rural communities are viewed by foreign drug cartels as numerous enterprise zones with limited law enforcement and resident populations in need of income-producing opportunities. In order to alter the devastating course meth is taking across Indian communities, tribal leaders and community residents are reexamining their governing, social and economic policies and practices, and developing comprehensive, integrated community-wide strategies involving prevention, enforcement, treatment, and post-treatment recovery.
The Federal/Tribal Response:
The first step taken to address the meth problem in Indian Country was to acknowledge its existence. In October 2005, the U.S. Attorney General’s Advisory Committee’s Native American Issues Subcommittee met in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to discuss the problem of meth in Indian Country. This historic meeting was attended by over 20 United States Attorneys, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Justice Services (formerly the Office of Law Enforcement Services), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and over 30 tribes. Consensus was reached that a meth epidemic existed, that it was affecting most tribes in the United States, and that the best way to tackle the problem from a law enforcement perspective was for federal, tribal and state/local law enforcement to work cooperatively together, by pooling resources and minimizing jurisdictional conflicts, in a common effort to combat meth in Indian Country.
In January 2006, the federal government followed the lead of many states so that federal law now requires that cold medications containing pseudo-ephedrine be under lock-and-key or behind pharmacy counters. A direct result of making the main ingredient for meth production harder to obtain is that the small, toxic meth labs are becoming less common.
A new challenge for tribal, local, state and federal authorities is in combating the smuggling of illegal drugs from Mexico and Canada across tribal lands that border or are traversed by the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canadian borders, such as the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona and the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in New York State. Approximately 80 percent of the current meth supply in the U.S. is due to illegal smuggling from Mexico.
While the numbers of dangerous meth labs in the U.S. are decreasing, problems with smuggling, violent crime, and social devastation of tribal communities continue to have a devastating impact throughout Indian Country.