By Kimberly Hefling, The Associated Press
MONROE CITY, Indiana (AP) -- Under a clear sky, Steve Luce navigated his sport utility vehicle past cornfields, a horse trailer in tow.
The Knox County sheriff, a former heavyweight wrestler with a Wild West streak, was about to saddle up to charge into a modern-day rural problem: methamphetamine.
With meth’s use soaring across the Midwest and South, especially in rural areas, law officers like Luce are searching for innovative ways to stop meth production and distribution with few resources.
“Rural agencies don’t have that much manpower,” said Ted Kamatchus, sheriff of Marshall County, Iowa, and an officer in the National Sheriffs’ Association.
Some communities have distributed locks to farmers to place on their tanks of anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer that is an ingredient in some forms of meth. Kamatchus’s county has trained its road crews to identify a meth lab and how to respond.
Luce, 40, dons a cowboy hat and hops on a horse.
Three or four times a month since March, he and his deputies have gone by horseback through forest and farms, looking for meth cooks and their toxic labs.
“The top two things people don’t want are methamphetamines and drug dealers,” Luce said. “It’s my job to let them know we don’t want them here.”
Methamphetamine is a highly addictive stimulant that can be snorted, smoked or injected.
The meth labs, consisting of kitchen appliances and glass jars, can be small enough to fit in a backpack; at least one found in southern Indiana was on the back of a motorcycle. Most of the ingredients to make meth are easily found at a supermarket, except for anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer commonly found on farms.
An abundance of the fertilizer and rural areas to hide make places like Knox County popular with cooks. Just nine labs were found in Knox County in 1999, compared with 71 last year.
Luce said it’s not uncommon for 70 percent of the inmates in his jail to be behind bars because of meth-related crimes.
“They get hooked on this stuff,” he said. “It’s evil.”
For farmers, meth also is a menace. Cooks stumble on their property to steal the fertilizer. They hide labs in the middle of cornfields, unbeknownst to a farmer until the labs are run over by farm machinery.
Yet some farmers are afraid to call police, said Chad Brown, a salesman at Grower Co-Op in Vincennes.
“They’re afraid they’re going to come back,” Brown said. “They feel like they’ll tear up their equipment if they call them in.”
In 2000, a farmer in Flat Rock, Ill., was shot in the eye after chasing two men attempting to steal anhydrous ammonia from his property. He survived but was blinded.
Luce said the horseback patrols are helping to win farmers’ trust. He invited farmers to a hog roast before the patrols started and persuaded many to let him go on their land. Others agreed to lend seven horses to the program.
Since the patrols started in the spring, he and his deputies have found 18 labs -- 17 of them inactive.
“The horse definitely has an advantage. They can go where four-wheelers can’t go,” Luce said.
On a recent day, Luce and his men saddled four horses and headed to Long Pond, an area of tree-filled hillsides on abandoned strip-mined land. Deputies followed on four-wheelers bought with $7,600 in drug seizure money.
Luce and his men had not received a tip about a lab in the area but wanted to check it out just in case.
“You just don’t know unless someone gives you a tip,” Chief Deputy Bob Hart said. “You just got to go out and look.”
As they navigated hilly, steep paths, Luce and his deputies looked for signs of meth, such as the smell of ether or ammonia. They stopped when they saw fabric hanging from a tree, knowing it could be a marker left by a cook.
Though they didn’t find any meth this day, the effort is what counts, said Stacye Johnson, the agriculture extension agent in Knox County.
“Any little bit can help -- especially if they’re getting results and finding meth labs because we don’t want them just lying around,” Johnson said.
First Sgt. Dave Phelps, team leader of the clandestine lab team for the Indiana State Police, said the horse patrols are a practical solution to the meth problem in a state where the number of meth labs found by authorities rose from 988 in 2002 to 1,260 in 2003.
“So many are hidden out in the woods and fields in desolate areas,” Phelps said. “If any agency really wants to aggressively look for them, you’ve got to look outside the box.”
Kamatchus, the Iowa sheriff, said a key to solving the meth problem is enlisting residents’ help.
“It’s paramount to have involvement of citizens in the community,” he said.
Luce agrees, and he hopes the inroads he has made with farmers continue to yield results among his county’s 40,000 residents.
“It’s about building a bond and trust,” Luce said. “It’s trying to get the community in a whole new way of thinking.”