State following worldwide drug trend Law enforcement officials around the world have gotten what they wished for in the past decade. According to the United Nations World Drug Report 2000, cocaine and heroin production has dropped significantly, with fewer and
State following worldwide drug trend
Law enforcement officials around the world have gotten what they wished for in the past decade.
According to the United Nations World Drug Report 2000, cocaine and heroin production has dropped significantly, with fewer and fewer countries involved in the making and selling of those two drugs. Opium production worldwide fell 17 percent between 1998 and 2000.
But with the good always comes some bad.
The same study, conducted by the Vienna-based U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, and released earlier this year, reported the use, demand and market for methamphetamine is rising precipitously.
According to the U.N. study, approximately 180 million people — not quite 5 percent of the world’s population over the age of 15 — used some type of drug in the 1990s.
Marijuana, with 144 million users worldwide, was the drug of choice for the most users.
Methamphetamine has risen to second on the drug-use hit parade, with an approximate 29 million worldwide users — more than heroin and cocaine users combined.
Methamphetamine use is rising worldwide, including Europe, the United States and parts of Asia, especially Thailand and Japan.
Cocaine use in the United States fell 70 percent since 1985. But methamphetamine is taking its place. Nowhere is that more true than in Hawai`i.
According to statistics released by police on Big Island earlier this year, meth arrests increased from less than 50 in 1995 to almost 300 last year, while cocaine arrests remained steady at around 170 per year for the past five years.
Crackhouses on Big Island have converted to crystal meth, primarily smokable “ice.”
An ounce of ice on Kaua`i sells for approximately $5,000. A pound of it can sell for anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 on Hawai`i, according to authorities.
Ice came into use in the 1980s, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It arrived on Kaua`i in the `90s, said Kaua`i County’s chief deputy prosecutor, Craig De Costa said.
“Ice is the drug of choice on Kaua`i, and one reason is because it’s easy to get. There have been dozen of labs taken down on Oahu,” said Wilfred Ihu, Kaua`i County Police deputy chief.
Why so popular?
“In my opinion, it’s the intensity of the high. And it’s relatively cheap to start. You can get a half paper (50 milligrams) for $50. But then you keep needing more and more because of the addiction,” De Costa said.
De Costa and his boss, Prosecuting Attorney Mike Soong, attribute most of a certain type of crime on Kaua`i to the use of smokable methamphetamine.
“Car break-ins and burglaries, especially. And we’re also seeing an increase in white-collar crimes, forgeries and thefts of credit cards” for money to buy drugs, De Costa said. “I think that some domestic violence is related to that, too. It intensifies the domestic situation when they run out of drugs.”
“One of the scary problems, too, is the use of ice” to trap young girls, De Costa said. Promoters of the drug get girls started “and then they have no money to pay for it and they end up trading their bodies for the drug,” he said.
Juveniles involved with methamphetamine use and sales are increasingly enmeshed in the court system, too.
“We’re prosecuting more and more of them for drug use,” De Costa said.
Things have changed so much that in 1999, the state of Hawai`i was named as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. HIDTA, a federal program begun in the early 1990s, has been active since in Los Angeles, Tucson, El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces, N.M., San Diego, New York City, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Atlanta, Miami, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Boston.
The HIDTA has brought in federal funds statewide to the tune of three quarters of a million dollars annually.
“The federal agencies are working more and more closely with local police departments. That’s going to help a lot” in the fight to control ice, Ihu said.
The problem noted by law enforcement officers hasn’t spread into the island’s hospital ERs. According to an emergency room physician, Wilcox Memorial Hospital hasn’t noted an increase in youthful overdoses.
“We see a little bit of everything,” Wilcox spokeswoman Lani Yukimura said.
Ice is a large, usually clear crystal of higher purity than other forms of meth. The flash high for it is supposedly not quite as intense as shooting the drug into a vein, but the effects can last longer, up to 12 hours in some cases.
Methamphetamine can increase wakefulness and decrease appetite. But the addicts keep coming back because of the rush.
And they do become addicts in many cases. Long-time meth users often become paranoid, hallucinate, indulge in suicidal and homicidal thoughts, and sometimes act those delusions out.
Meth users also suffer increased problems related to the heart, and long-term shooters of the drug exhibit multiple skin abcesses and lose their teeth.
Acute lead poisoning is another risk because a common meth production method involves lead acetate. This problem most often affects shooters of the drug.
Fetal exposure to meth is also a growing problem that can lead to congenital deformities and other difficulties.
Studies on animals have shown meth has toxic effects, damaging nerve terminals in the dopamine-containing regions of the brain.
High doses of meth can raise body temperatures to dangerous and even fatal levels and also cause convulsions.
According to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, an estimated 4.9 million people (2.3 percent) have tried the drug at least once.
Staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and mailto:dwilken@pulitzer.net
