Tag Archives: Meth

Meth, coke and oil: A drug boom in the Texas shale patch

FILE PHOTO: Aerial view of oil wells near Midland, Texas, U.S. on May 2, 2017. REUTERS/Ernest Scheyder/File Photo

By Liz Hampton

MIDLAND, Texas (Reuters) – When Joe Forsythe returned to the West Texas oilfields last year after a stint in a drug rehab facility, he figured he had beaten his addiction to methamphetamine.

The 32-year-old rig worker and equipment handler lasted about a year before relapsing.

“It’s easy to get back into that mentality,” said Forsythe, of Midland, Texas, who said he no longer uses drugs after several stints in rehab since 2015. “I’d work 24 hours … I was just plagued with fatigue and needed something to improve my work ethic.”

Forsythe’s experience and others like it reflect a painful flipside of the nation’s shale oil boom – a parallel increase in substance abuse, drug crime and related social ills.

While drug use is a problem among industrial workers nationwide, it raises particular concern in the oil patch as U.S. production surges to record levels in what is already one of the nation’s most dangerous sectors – with a fatality rate about three times the average for other industries, according to 2015 federal statistics.

Drug use is a significant factor in workplace injuries and crimes involving oilfield workers, according to drug counselors, hospital and police officials and court records in West Texas, the epicenter of the U.S. shale sector.

As the shale revolution has spawned waves of hiring here since 2010, law enforcement authorities have tracked a boom in drug trafficking and related crime. In Midland and Ector counties, home to many Permian Basin oil workers, state and local police in 2016 seized more than 95 pounds of methamphetamine – up from less than four pounds in 2010.

Meth and cocaine are stimulants of choice in the oil patch to get though long oilfield shifts, but alcohol and pain killers such as opioids are also widely abused – often to soften the crash after taking stimulants, drug addicts and counselors said.

Drug charges in the industry town of Midland more than doubled between 2012 and 2016, to 942 from 491, according to police data. In neighboring Odessa, total drug arrests doubled between 2010 and 2016, to 1291 from 756, according to Odessa Police Department data.

The increase in drug crime stretched through two boom periods in the West Texas oil patch, before and after a crude price crash that hit in 2014.

Oil companies typically drug test job applicants and often conduct additional random tests on employees. For truck drivers and those involved with hazardous materials, tests are also conducted under federal programs run by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Several oil firms with major operations in the Permian Basin declined to discuss how they handle drugs in the oil patch or did not respond to inquiries.

Schlumberger NV <SLB.N>, Halliburton Co <HAL.N> and Exxon Mobil Corp <XOM.N> declined to comment. Exxon referred Reuters to its alcohol and drug policy.

Pioneer Natural Resources Co. <PXD.N> and ConocoPhillips <COP.N> did not respond to requests for comment.

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, declined to comment.

LONG HOURS – ON METH

Despite corporate and regulatory efforts to curb drug abuse, many oilfield workers regularly use stimulants on long shifts of grueling work for relatively high pay, said drug counselors, local law enforcement officials and oil field workers recovering from addictions.

More than a third of clients at Midland’s Springboard drug rehabilitation center are currently involved in the oil and gas industry, said Executive Director Steve Thomason.

Rising oil prices have brought more admissions for methamphetamine abuse, Thomason said.

“People say they can work on it for 24 hours straight,” he said.

Long shifts are common in the oil industry because expensive drilling equipment, often leased at high daily rates, runs through the night, and workers often have to commute to wells in remote locations. Most oil producers subcontract oilfield services to smaller companies that are not unionized.

Springboard’s admissions of methamphetamine users went up 20 percent in the first six months of this year compared with the last half of 2016, he said. The number of rigs operating in the Permian Basin increased more than 38 percent during the same period, according to data from energy services firm Baker Hughes <BHGE.N>.

Corporal Steve LeSueur, a spokesman for the Odessa police, said the influx of drugs in the oil patch is stretching police resources.

“The jail has been full,” he said. “A lot of crimes that are committed are drug-related – simple property crimes, forgeries to feed their drug habits.”

METH AND MURDER

Some offenses are more severe.

In 2016, Shawn Pinson, an employee of a well construction company, was convicted of murdering an acquaintance following a drug-related dispute.

The murder occurred around the same time he was arrested for possession of methamphetamine, police records show. The victim tested positive for meth at the time of the murder, according to an autopsy.

At his trial, witnesses close to Pinson testified he had become addicted to methamphetamine while working in the oilfield, according to a prosecutor and a defense attorney involved in the case.

Pinson did not respond to a letter seeking comment and his current attorney, Michele Greene, did not respond to a request for comment.

When oil jobs are plentiful, companies desperate for labor sometimes will disregard signs of substance abuse, said three recovering drug addicts who worked in the oilfield.

“These oilfield bosses – they party, too,” Forsythe said. “As long as you’re getting the job done and not making a scene, they won’t drug test you.”

One recovering addict, who declined to use his name because he still works in the industry, said he was often high during long-haul trips driving trucks transporting oil.

“I could do a little coke and speed and it would give me the extra stretch,” he said. “It ended up running me to the ground.”

For a graphic on illegal drugs shadow oil boom, click: http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-OIL-DRUGS/0100507G0H5/index.html

(Reporting by Liz Hampton in Midland, Texas; Editing by Gary McWilliams and Brian Thevenot)

Sex Trafficking on American Indian Reservations – old problem, new name

Tribal elder Tommy Christian, who lives on Montana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation, speaks at an anti-trafficking conference at the Fort Peck Community College in Montana, April 28, 2016.

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A victims’ advocate on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation figures she first saw sex trafficking more than a decade ago, a local nurse says it happened in her own family and a women’s counselor is sure she has seen it countless times.

But while it was sex trafficking, it had no name, they say.

Law enforcement, advocates and residents of Fort Peck, a vast, remote reservation of windswept plains in the U.S. state of Montana, say they have been seeing cases of sex trafficking for years without labeling them as such.

Tribal law at Fort Peck only added sex trafficking as a distinct crime earlier this year, distinguishing it from rape, sexual abuse or kidnapping, experts say.

Public awareness of the crime is critical, say activists who held a conference last month on recognizing trafficking on the reservation.

“We have to acknowledge and say that sex trafficking is happening in our communities,” said Toni Plummer-Alvernaz, a conference organizer.

“Native women are trafficking their relatives. People are often trading their bodies for drugs,” she said.

Colleen Clark estimates she has counseled some 8,000 victims of violence during her three decades working at the Red Bird Women’s Center in Wolf Point, the reservation’s largest town with a population of fewer than 3,000 residents.

“When I look back through those years, I can see where some of those women were victims of human trafficking,” Clark said.

“But we didn’t have a name for that then. There was not a whole lot of public awareness.”

Even now, numbers don’t tell the story, and there is little in the way of statistics to quantify what experts, advocates and authorities say is happening.

“Based on our investigation of trafficking on Fort Peck, the scope of the problem is far larger than any information we have so far in terms of statistics would reflect,” said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

She helped write the tribal law against trafficking.

Updating the law with trafficking will help in efforts to collect data and “demonstrate to the community and to other governments, to the public at large that there’s a problem here and it’s reaching crisis levels,” she said.

One obstacle is overcoming myths and stereotypes, experts said.

“The popular idea of what sex trafficking involves often is people chained to a basement, Russian women brought over to this country in container ships and sold into slavery,” Healey said. “But sex trafficking doesn’t look like that most of the time.”

It can simply involve a person being exploited for sex, someone buying the sex and someone else orchestrating the deal, she said.

“There’s no movement across borders or physical confinement necessary,” she said.

UNDER-REPORTED

Evidence of trafficking on the Fort Peck reservation won’t be found in federal statistics, said Cyndee Peterson, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Montana who heads up a task force teaching law enforcement and attorneys to recognize trafficking.

Records, she said, do not show federal prosecutors handling any trafficking cases on Fort Peck going back five years.

“How do we know these cases are here? Because the advocates that actually are on the ground talking to the victims are telling me,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Don’t look at our numbers and think that it’s not happening,” she said. “People did not know what they were seeing.”

Now, she said, after every training session held by her task force, a law enforcement officer will approach her and say: “You know what? I actually have had trafficking cases in the past and I didn’t recognize it as trafficking.”

Tribal elder Tommy Christian, a member of the Fort Peck tribes’ executive board, blames some of the lack of evidence to Indian problems falling on deaf ears in the white community.

“I think it’s just an attitude of well, we’re all savages and it’s just another dead Indian,” he said.

Twenty-five years after her half-brother was sent to prison, Tami Adams-Martens, 59, a nurse at Poplar Hospital, said she now realizes the case involved trafficking.

Her stepsister had been hooked on crack cocaine and in debt to a dealer but had no money, she said.

“(The dealer) said, ‘Look, somebody is going to get hurt if you don’t pay up. Do you have anything else I want?’ and she said, ‘Well, I’ve got a 13-year-old daughter,'” she said.

A fight broke out, and the dealer was killed by Adams-Martens’s half-brother who stepped in to block the deal, she said. He spend 17 years in prison.

“I didn’t realize it was trafficking,” she said, adding: “I think everyone here has a story like that or is very close to a story like that.”

NO NAME FOR IT

Joni Johnson, who helps crime victims on the reservation, works with two young women who have suffered domestic violence, are drug users and who she is certain are trading sex for drugs.

“They don’t realize when they’re doing, but it is human trafficking,” she said.

A more haunting case was some 15 years ago when a sexual assault victim revealed that she was selling her nieces for drugs, she said.

“There just wasn’t a name for it,” she said.

Name or not, the problem stretches far back in time, Clark said.

“We could go back to the day that the settlers came, the day that fur trappers came, those days when colonization hit and demeaned the significance and honor and sacredness of women and children,” she said.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Sex trafficking reaches crisis on Native American Reservations

By Ellen Wulfhorst

POPLAR, Montana (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Life on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana has all the ingredients for sex trafficking – poverty, isolation, joblessness and violence, topped with an epidemic of crystal meth addiction.

Drug users are selling their babies, daughters and sisters for the potent stimulant that is ravaging Native American communities such as the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes living on the desolate plains of Fort Peck, say community leaders, experts and federal authorities.

“We’re in crisis mode,” said Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure. “We have mothers giving their children away for sexual favors for drugs. We have teenagers and young girls giving away sexual favors for drugs.”

No numbers record specific rates of local sex trafficking, which can often be buried in crimes of sexual assault, abuse, prostitution, abandonment or kidnapping. But it is a crime, poorly documented and fuelled by drug abuse, plaguing Indian reservations across the United States.

The rate of meth use among American Indians is the highest of any ethnicity in the country and more than twice as high as any other group, according to the National Congress of American Indians.

The number of drug cases on Indian lands nationwide rose seven-fold from 2009 to 2014, and crime rates on some reservations are five times higher than national averages, according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report.

On Fort Peck, a reservation of some 10,000 people, six newborn babies tested positive for meth in just two weeks in April and were taken to a hospital 300 miles away, said Howard Bemer, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent for Fort Peck.

Meth use and other crime exploded with the tapping of reserves in the Bakken oil fields to the east and south of the reservation in the last decade. The boom brought tens of thousands of workers, flush with cash, to the region.

With the drop in world oil prices, many of those workers are gone but the crime has not, said Melina Healey, a trafficking expert at the Child Law Policy and Legislation Clinic at Loyola University Chicago.

“The boom brought problems that don’t disappear when the boom disappears,” she said.

The drug trade helps incite sex trafficking, as people exchange themselves, family members or friends to get high, she said.

“If someone is addicted to meth, they’re not in their right mind. It is much easier to get them to do things that they never would have done if they weren’t addicted,” she said at a recent anti-trafficking conference in Poplar, the reservation’s tribal headquarters.

Drug debt is a forceful driver of trafficking, and dealers threaten users to pay up by any means, said Sgt. Grant Snyder, a trafficking investigator with the Minneapolis Police Department.

“Maybe it’s your 12-year-old daughter, maybe it’s your 5-year-old daughter,” he said.

FAMILY

A harrowing number of victims are trafficked by their own family members.

“Traffickers are not just scary men who drive around in Cadillacs in their leather trench coats,” said Healey.

“A trafficker can be a parent or guardian. A trafficker can be an aunt or an uncle or it can be a boyfriend or another friend.”

The often close relationships between abuser and abused present a web of problems such as forcing victims to leave home for their protection, experts said.

Victims may fear the community and authorities won’t believe them and will instead defend the trafficker, said an Indian Health Service social worker who did not want to be identified.

“Nobody wants to go after a family member,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

On the bleak, windswept reservation along the Missouri River just 20 miles from the Canadian border, more than half the children live in poverty and jobs are scarce.

Most people work in ranching, mining and farming, but one in three is unemployed. The largest communities are Wolf Point and Poplar, rundown hamlets that are little more than crossroads with a smattering of stores, gas stations, bars and fewer than 4,000 residents between them.

Outside of town, dirt roads link the weathered houses and tumble-down trailers that dot the seemingly boundless grasslands.

Demand for foster care for children removed from homes due to substance abuse is showing a sharp increase, said Courage Crawford, a program director at the Spotted Bull Recovery Resource Center in Poplar which offers rehabilitation programs.

“There aren’t a lot of places in the country that have a perfect storm of both being this rural and this under served of basic services … and also such high rates of poverty and also such rates of abuse,” Healey said.

Last month, the reservation was mourning the death by beating of a 13-month-old girl. A woman responsible for caring for her, while the child’s mother was in jail, has pleaded not guilty to murder.

A memorial service program showed a photograph of the smiling chubby-cheeked girl with shining eyes and a flowered headband.

“With the loss of this child I think we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel,” said Azure, the tribal chief.

Also this year, a Wolf Point man was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl grabbed at a local playground.

Meth is blamed for 40 percent of crime on native land, and most tribal police say domestic violence and assault has increased as a result of addiction, according to the NCAI.

Just thirteen tribal police patrol Fort Peck’s 3,200 square miles, according to the local Journal newspaper.

Across the country, fewer than 3,000 tribal and federal officers patrol more than 56 million acres of Indian country.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)