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Part IV: Law Enforcement
Because the law enforcement response is an integral part of any drug use prevention and education strategy, it must be interwoven with the overall response to methamphetamine. Also, just as usage of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs varies significantly from community to community (e.g., one community is in an introductory stage while another is in a mature stage where use is prevalent), the law enforcement response must vary accordingly to be effective. Strong law enforcement responses can help curb markets and supply: They can restrict usage and compel users to seek treatment.
Clandestine methamphetamine laboratories are a serious threat to community safety. The laboratories that produce methamphetamine pose particular dangers to law enforcement staff, requiring special training, equipment, and aid from agencies accustomed to dealing with chemical hazards, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or hazardous materials teams. Data from the Drug Enforcement Administration show that most seized laboratories produce only small amounts of the drug. Only 4 percent of laboratories produce more than 80 percent of methamphetamine. Most of these "superlabs"—those that are able to produce 10 pounds of methamphetamine in 24 hours—are located in California. However, the smaller laboratories, which are often in rural areas, also pose many safety and health hazards.
Another area of concern is the environmental dangers to children who have either been exposed to clandestine laboratories or methamphetamine dealers. When children are found at a clandestine laboratory scene, law enforcement officers must consider issues such as the need for physical examinations, involvement of child protection agencies, and documentation of child endangerment. Law enforcement officials should recognize that their work may create new demands on social services agencies.
Stronger laws to provide for control of precursor chemicals are a prime ingredient to curbing production. Research that includes further community-level ethnographic studies is needed to answer questions on the effectiveness of specific strategies and to build databases for intervention analysis. Evaluations of tactics and support for replicating best practices are also needed.
Perhaps the most critical role of law enforcement in the fight against methamphetamine production and use is that of gatekeepers of the criminal justice processes of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, and court-mandated conditions of probation and parole, used to distinguish users and addicts from dealers and producers. As an integral part of these systems, law enforcement must function in a comprehensive response to methamphetamine use. Law enforcement and criminal justice must be linked to community-wide drug prevention efforts targeting youths and families in rural as well as urban communities. They must be attentive to issues of access to treatment (both community-based and corrections-based), and they must provide the measured criminal justice sanctions that will help drug abusers seek treatment, achieve successful treatment outcomes, and maintain abstinence following treatment and reentry. Following are the guiding principles for law enforcement responses to methamphetamine.
Guiding Principles
Law enforcement measures must be part of the overall response to methamphetamine.
Law enforcement agencies must be a central component in a community's comprehensive, coordinated, and integrated response to methamphetamine. In addition to its other important social functions, law enforcement is a critical part of both the prevention and education and the treatment components of an integrated strategy to address methamphetamine. Rural communities, in which methamphetamine manufacture and use are growing problems, pose special challenges. Limited law enforcement resources tend to be stretched thin already. As a result, rural law enforcement agencies often have difficulties dealing with arrestees requiring detoxification and other services, as well as with the environmental and safety problems associated with clandestine laboratories.
Communities have different kinds of methamphetamine problems, requiring
different solutions.
Communities vary in how methamphetamine problems manifest themselves. These variations make necessary locally based responses in which law enforcement, criminal justice, and other efforts are sensitive to the unique and shifting traits of the local community and the methamphetamine problem. Some communities have serious methamphetamine problems, while in others the problem is less prominent. Law enforcement agencies' focus for communities "on the verge" of a serious problem must be different from those already "in the grip" of methamphetamine use. In addition, communities differ in how methamphetamine is introduced and popularized and in how it is produced and distributed.
Law enforcement agencies can help prevent a methamphetamine problem that is just arriving or has not yet arrived.
In communities on the verge of incurring a significant methamphetamine problem, the most effective community response will incorporate preemptive activities by law enforcement agencies. These activities, undertaken early in the emergence of a community's methamphetamine problems, will greatly increase the community's resistence to the drug and can help it delay, reduce, or altogether avoid threats to safety and health, which would otherwise be imperiled by more pervasive methamphetamine use. In this way, swift law enforcement activities are part of prevention and education efforts for communities on the verge.
Strong law enforcement supervision coerces methamphetamine users into treatment.
In communities in the grip of a serious and widespread methamphetamine problem, the most effective community response will incorporate criminal justice sanctions and contingencies, enforced by police and the courts, that compel methamphetamine users to stop their drug use and seek treatment. Using coercive contingencies linked to treatment is an effective law enforcement strategy and holds great promise for sustainable reductions in methamphetamine use in communities where use of the drug is pervasive or well established.
Traditional law enforcement policies should be pursued; the constant threat of arrest
disrupts methamphetamine markets.
Traditional law enforcement strategies, from interventions at the street level to disruption of major trafficking organizations, are also important in limiting supply. Directing efforts at major organizations focuses limited Federal law enforcement resources at supply chokepoints and entails investigations and coordination with other countries and within the United States between all levels and components of law enforcement agencies. Vigilance against low-level traffickers can deter some persons from entering or continuing in the drug market, can reduce street-level violence, and responds to communities' legitimate expectation that the more visible elements of drug trafficking be curtailed.
Police must have the resources to comply with mandates on training and equipment for seizing and dismantling clandestine
laboratories.
Clandestine methamphetamine laboratories create special problems for law enforcement because capturing and destroying them is more complex and hazardous than for other drug-production facilities. The chemicals used to make methamphetamine are volatile, flammable, and toxic, and are often stored and used in a makeshift, haphazard fashion. Methamphetamine laboratories literally can explode without warning, endangering anyone in the vicinity. Because of these dangers, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has mandated that police officers and other responders receive training and wear special equipment before entering a situation involving a clandestine laboratory. Law enforcement agencies must receive resources to support the mandated special training and equipment to handle, contain, and dispose of dangerous substances while still performing
traditional law enforcement functions.
Laws and regulations to control the supply of the chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine should be implemented and enforced.
Control of precursor chemicals—domestically and internationally—continues to be a proactive, cost-effective law enforcement strategy. Wherever possible, preventing the manufacture of methamphetamine through effective control of precursor chemicals helps free law enforcement and other resources that can be used to address a more comprehensive strategy of
community safety.
Needs and Recommendations
Following are needs and recommendations for methamphetamine-related law enforcement efforts based on the previous guiding principles:
- Improve information sharing across jurisdictions (e.g., develop existing intelligence systems that encompass Federal, State, and local partners; fix responsibility for data collection; standardize definitions; enhance dissemination efforts).
- Increase information sharing among agencies (e.g., involve treatment providers, educators, law enforcement officers).
- Expand collaborations with social services agencies and public health officials, particularly in situations involving clandestine
laboratories.
- Facilitate law enforcement and other research-based interventions by promoting early detection and warning systems that identify emerging methamphetamine and other synthetic drug problems.
- Establish ongoing drug monitoring systems at the local, regional, and national levels.
- Link law enforcement activities to other criminal justice efforts, especially the judicial system. Use sanctions to combat existing and pervasive methamphetamine use through such mechanisms as comprehensive drug testing, the diversion into treatment of arrestees who test positive, the implementation of drug courts, and the use of graduated sanctions and enforced abstinence to complement treatment efforts.
- Invest resources in law enforcement training, such as expanding existing efforts in police training on how to seize methamphetamine laboratories and further developing laboratory cleanup hazard education programs for both law enforcement agencies and entire communities.
- Increase outreach efforts (e.g., training vendors of products used to produce methamphetamine, neighborhood residents, and landlords; developing problem-solving and community policing activities; and collaborating with community- and school-based prevention and education activities).
Research Priorities
Following are the priorities for research initiatives on law enforcement and methamphetamine:
- Conduct comparative evaluation studies to assess the relative efficacy of enforcement, treatment, and hybrid strategies.
- Support long-term studies of methamphetamine use that have a national scope.
- Build sensitive local data systems that provide a means of measuring, tracking, and assessing the impact of specific law enforcement efforts and other interventions.
- Conduct community-level ethnographic studies to reveal the nature and characteristics of local drug markets and drug use patterns, particularly in rural and suburban areas.
- Conduct evaluation studies of preemptive law enforcement efforts early in the development of methamphetamine markets to determine the methods that merit replication.
- Study further the safety hazards of methamphetamine production, particularly hazards to children who are exposed to methamphetamine laboratories.
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