Reported by Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent

Don't tell Kirk Rust that methamphetamine isn't a small town problem. Last June 3:00 in the morning he is on his normal patrol around Franklin, Nebraska, a guy has his pick-up stopped at the Sinclair Station so Officer Rust stops.
[Officer Kirk Rust] "Right from first when I contacted him, he just wasn't acting quite right. He was real jittery and real nervous."
It was this guy, Mark Tuling with a bad check warrant hanging over his head and dummied up Kansas tags on his truck. When Officer Rust had him empty out his pockets, they were loaded with a lot of cash and methamphetamine.
[Officer Kirk Rust] "The more we kept emptying out his pockets, more and more stuff we kept finding."
"What are you thinking then? "
[Officer Rust] "I'm thinking this is pretty cool, this is good."
In the truck were all the makings of a traveling laboratory for making meth even a jug full of half brewed crank hidden in back.
[Officer Rust] "I was a little nervous. I really didn't know what it was. This stuff is pretty dangerous and so we pretty much just kind of set it aside and called for someone that knew more about it."
All in all a big bust for a young cop just out of the law enforcement academy and a red flag for the chief of a two-man police department.
[Byron Detlefsen, Police Chief, Franklin] "We spend most of our time chasing the pot pickers and people that came in from Georgia and Tennessee and come in and pick the ditch weed. That's what we spend all our time doing."
[Tom Monaghan, U.S. Atty.] "It's brand new for them and they don't have the law enforcement expertise yet nor do they have the social side ...the treatment programs, the prevention programs and the community awareness."
Nebraska's U.S. Attorney, Tom Monaghan, took his case to an Omaha middle school. He fears young potential customers may be attracted to this cheap, powerful drug.
[Monaghan] "What we're trying to do is not be preachy but to explain the dangers of methamphetamine."
[PSA actor] "What's up?"
[PSA actor 2] "So what's it cost?"
The U.S. Justice Department came out with slick and disturbing public service announcements.
[PSA actor 2] "40 bucks."
[PSA actor] "Thanks."
These 7th graders seemed to get the message.
[Monaghan] "We see that this drug is being marketed to young people. The ads are aimed at the age group from 13-19. We think that's a market we need to provide information to so that they don't end up being the drug users."
[PSA Narrator] "Crystal meth gives you a longer lasting high..... This one will last 11 more hours."

One hundred miles north of Omaha at the Dakota County Courthouse, County Attorney Bob Finney fears it may get worse before it gets better for the small towns facing a meth crisis.
[Bob Finney, Dakota County Atty.] "There isn't an arraignment day go by where we don't have a meth related case. There isn't a week that doesn't go by where I don't have parents calling me up from small towns, whether it be Allen, Waterbury, Jackson, where a loved one has been picked up for methamphetamine possession and they're sitting down in our jail and they just don't know what to do."
Jackson, Nebraska, never figured it had a methamphetamine problem not until Curt Echtenkamp's estranged wife got mad enough to call police. Officers looked around the barn on Vine Street and saw enough to get a search warrant.
[Investigating officer] "Excellent location for a lab. It's up on top of a hill. It's in the rafters of the building. He has a vent where it goes outside of the building and the winds on top of the hill float the odor away."
When a newspaper reporter showed up, the county sheriff displayed the combination of chemicals and housewares that convinced investigators that Echtenkamp had a small do it yourself drug lab in his barn. Echtenkamp pulled up in his truck while police were still at the crime scene and a TV crew was still taping. Before he was charged with manufacturing meth, his neighbors had him pegged as a clean cut man in the National Guard.
[Finney] "I think it shocked 'em. You know once again, this doesn't happen in our small communities. This happens elsewhere. So it was an eye opener."
These days in Dakota County, not just some but most of the felony cases have some link to meth.
[Finney] "We see an increase in child abuse. We see an increase in forgeries, bad checks, thefts, home burglaries, home invasions, car stereo thefts."
"All meth-related?"
[Finney] "Not all of them but a large percentage of them can be tied back to the need for the money to buy the drugs."
The Jackson case is unusual in one way. Meth labs are rare in Nebraska. Only three of them were found last year and all were pretty small.
[Monaghan] "We call them the Beavis and Butthead labs."
Federal drug investigators have discovered hundreds of meth labs in neighboring states -- Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa. Many in small rural communities.
[Monaghan] "We don't see that yet in Nebraska. We're hopeful that it doesn't happen. But that's the good news. But the bad news is the reason we don't see it here is there is a large quantity of methamphetamine comes directly from Mexico or via California."
[Glen Kemp, Federal Drug Task Force] "If you went down to old Mexico right now where Efedrin is not controlled, you would probably see similar type glassware, larger labs. We're talking round bottom reaction vessels that are probably as big as a washtub."
Glen Kemp with the Adams County Sheriff's Department has reluctantly become one of the state's leading experts on meth and how to make it.
[Kemp] "Basically you go from the solid to the vapor and we want it back to liquid."
The step by step process to make meth has been around for years. The ingredients readily available.

[Kemp] "For someone reading the recipe and these people refer to these as a recipe, it's as simple as baking a cake. Unfortunately, your gas stove doesn't blow up when you're baking a cake, here if you do something wrong, your cake could be your undoing."
This is the high tech approach but much cheaper labs like the one found in Dakota City can pretty much be bought at a hardware store.
[Kemp] "This is essentially my new lab."
Tupperware bowls, plastic hose, gas cans, and an electric frying pan are what a cook can use. The chemicals from road flares to over the counter diet pills and cold drugs are cooked to make the street drug.
[Kemp] "I'm going to put them into a bucket, thousands of them, hundreds of them. I'm going to have my friends shoplift Sudafed, Efedrin, anything I can get. Before I put it in here, I'm going to stick it into a blender. So you use a pound of Efedrin, I'm going to get about 80% return on that. I got a little less than a pound of methamphetamine done in eight hours. You get into a situation, the key there is back out."
The police recruits that Glen Kemp trains are often amazed at how easy and affordable it is to make. They are rarely aware that it can also be a deadly process.

[Kemp] "You just flunked, you're out of here, you're dead, kiss yourself good-bye. You picked it up. People, people, people, don't pick anything up that you ever see like this without rubber gloves. If you took the cap off of this to smell because you thought the guy -- he is impaired but you don't smell anything but here is the rum bottle. Walt, what happens when you take this bottle and stick your nose into it? You're gone. Kiss your ass good-bye, boys, because you are gone. This is phenyl 2 propanol."
The danger of meth labs lead federal law enforcement to get special training and hazardous material suits for OSHA inspectors in Nebraska.
[Recruit trainer] "Okay. This is powdered meth. This I believe is courtesy of the Adams County Methamphetamine Manufacturers Association."
Training and recognizing both the drug and its users has been emphasized for new recruits and veteran law officers.
[Recruit trainer] "The purity of this stuff is outrageous. It's up in the 90-95% pure stuff."
[Finney] "It's cheap and it's plentiful and it's a lot stronger now than it ever was before."

In Dakota County, Bob Finney is getting ready to put the National Guardsman turned suspected drug dealer on trial. It has become a sad routine for every prosecutor in the state. In Franklin, Kirk Rust is a good more deal alert to the possibility meth is a daily part of Nebraska life. Something he and his chief of police hope they can get across to everyone else in town.
[Detlefsen] "It just tells us it is coming through here, just the little bit that was found. You know there is more that's been coming through before that."
"And maybe staying in town?"
[Detlefsen] "And maybe staying in town."
"Does that scare you?"
[Detlefsen] "Yeah. I got two children at home. That's something that we think about a lot."