Reported by Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent

On the night in 1995 that Kim Stuzman shot her husband to death in the little town of Boules, she was in a paranoid rage fueled by methamphetamine. Carlos Sanchez tried to shoot his brother Pedro to death last fall in Grand Island. He hit Pedro's girlfriend instead. She's still paralyzed. Carlos was using meth. They're both charged with dealing now. Cory Serp went to his prom at York High School. He dropped dead at the dance. Extraordinarily potent speed killed him. Everyone in Grand Island now knows what dealers and addicts have known for several years now -- it's a buyers' market for methamphetamine.

How easy is it to find the street level dealer in Grand Island?

[Chris Rea, Hall County Sheriff Deputy] Oh, my guess is your cameraman could go to at least two bars here in town and buy meth today.

Chris Rea is Hall County's only sheriff deputy assigned fulltime to drug enforcement. More than any other street drug, meth frightens him.

[Rea] I had people that I arrested for cocaine distribution call me and say, hey, you know, you got to do something, so and so is whacked out on the meth and they're going crazy.

Coke dealers were turning in meth users because they were scared of them?

[Rea] Yep. They were afraid of the effects that the meth was having on people.

[Mark Bassett, former meth dealer] Keeps you awake. It makes you feel real good. You get things done that you would never do. That's the way it seems at the time anyway. You're always on the move. You stay awake for days at a time. Things that were -- that seemed like they were a pain, they get a little easier. They seem funner. You end up -- it seems like it, but it's kind of an illusion.

When Mark Bassett was both a meth addict and dealer, he would he would buy in Grand Island and sell back in Hastings. That was before the U.S. Justice Department caught up, and it was a very lucrative business.

[Bassett] I would say off a quarter pound, I could make oh, $3,000. That's in a week's time.

That had to be a big draw?

[Bassett] Yeah. The money itself is addicting. You know, it's not just the drug itself. The money's addicting, too.

That is not a surprise to veteran drug investigators.

[Lt. Bill Schlachter, Nebraska State Patrol] Grand Island has a great consumer demand. Because we have consumer demand, it became a center. We have a lot of people who are using methamphetamine.

If Grand Island's drug trade may be a response to capitalism at its most raw, it's also partly a matter of geography.

[Jim Fosket, Hall County Sheriff] You've got Highway 2. You've got Highway 34. You've got Highway 30. You've got Highway 281. You've got Interstate 80. You've got five major highways that all, except for Interstate 80, converge right in Grand Island. They're going to come to Grand Island. No matter which one of those highways they take, that's where they're going to show up.

And the arrival of a major meatpacking plant indirectly has also made an impact. The new jobs attracted many law-abiding, legally employed workers who also happen to be recent immigrants.

[Rea] Then you have the other part that come up to prey on the legitimate people, and they come up and they hall the drugs up and sell the drugs and prey on their own people, and it saturates out to the other residents in the community. It seems to follow a trail through the packing plant industry.

[Schlachter] This is approximately three pounds of methamphetamine. It is street form.

This seizure made in Colorado but apparently destined for Grand Island dealers still wreaked of the garlic used to disguise the drug's distinctive chemical odor.

[Schlachter] You know, it's in the chemical, and then it dries and gets kind of hard. Here's a smaller bag. See how this is more in the powder form.

Just one of these bags would be worth $8,000 to a dealer with users paying $100 for a single gram. The arrival of meth was telegraphed by a significant crime wave.

[Schlachter] If you look at crime statistics, you see a big rise in check forgeries, bad checks, and bankruptcy things. You start to see fraud, you know, break and enter stuff, steal stuff out of cars, whatever is easy to get guns, to get stereo equipment, whatever is easy to trade.

You're seeing all that in Grand Island now?

[Schlachter] Yes, we're seeing that a lot in Grand Island now.

At the Hall County Courthouse, evidence of the meth explosion shows up very nearly everyday. This morning three new cases passed through you county court. Curt Garrison threatened to rob and shoot a store clerk. Police officers claim he had meth on him when he was busted. That same night Vicki Reed and Bethany VanWinkle were busted on a routine traffic stop. Both are young mothers. Both are accused of being in possession of methamphetamine.

[Ellen Totzke, Hall County Attorney] Meth is apparently the ultimate high right now, the ultimate affordable high.

Ellen Totzke is Hall County Attorney.

[Totzke] Drug cases have skyrocketed in the last few years. In the early 1990's, we were prosecuting maybe 20 to 30 methamphetamine cases a year. In the last couple of years, we're averaging over 100.

That's a big burden on this office.

[Totzke] It's a very big burden.

For the past two years, one out of every five felonies in Hall County has been methamphetamine possession or conspiracy to deal. The huge spike in drug cases, they doubled in two years, compounded by all the crimes related to drugs have swamped the courts here. A request for an additional attorney was rejected by the county supervisors last year.

[Totzke] The more enforcement efforts we have, the more our caseload is going to be. And I guess I'm glad that they're doing more enforcement, getting the drugs -- working to get the drugs off the street, but I only have so many resources to deal with, too.

[Dave Arnold, Ass't. Corrections Director] Typically when they bring them in if they've caught them doing the drug, they're going to come in pretty violent.

The isolation cells at the Hall County Jail have been very busy. How often are the meth cases filling these up?

[Arnold] At least several times a week on the two in the detention area.

Methamphetamine often makes users very ugly to deal with, paranoid and frequently violent, and coming to jail seems to bring out the worst.

[Arnold] Typically, the first 24-34 hours they're unmanageable, real bad fits of violence. You know, pounding on the door, pounding on everything, the glass, the walls, throwing their trays, doing whatever.

That's got to be very frightening for your people.

[Arnold] Yeah, they don't go in there much.

What types of people are you seeing through here using methamphetamine?

[Arnold] Any type. You know, from the normal people who we get here to -- it has no boundaries. It's all classes, all professions. Anybody and everybody.

That may be true, but since the primary importers appear to be Mexican, often in the country illegally, often with little or no English language skill, that's a problem for a very white law enforcement community. One state trooper is Hispanic. Only one sheriff's deputy can even speak Spanish. Public defenders and county attorneys in Hall County have the very same problem.

Do you have any Spanish speaking attorneys on your staff?

[Totzke] No, I don't. Well, I speak a little Spanish, but...

Whether it's budget or staff hours, Sheriff Fosket says the strain has shown on every branch of law enforcement.

[Fosket] Methamphetamine is diverting the attention to where every agency is putting as many resources as possible into their drug units so they can better fight the drug, which I think is -- you have to do that. We have to fight this drug. We can't let it go. But yet there's other places -- somewhere along the line, there's going to have to be a sacrifice somewhere. Well, who do we sacrifice?

There is some help on the way from the federal government. A major drug enforcement grant will add a prosecutor that will work both local and federal cases here. An investigator will be added. And more federal resources will be aimed at slowing the meth trade in central Nebraska and throughout the Midwest.

[Tom Monaghan, U.S. Attorney, Omaha] The reason we have asked you come here today is we are unsealing and announcing some indictments having to do with methamphetamine in the Grand Island, Hall County area.

There have been a steady parade of federal conspiracy indictments and convictions announced in the past year. They've been aimed at stopping dealers and pressuring those arrested into providing information about the source of Grand Island's methamphetamine.

[Monaghan] We think these indictments indicate a significant dent in the methamphetamine distribution network. This is a significant conspiracy.

Each significant organization that's been broken has been replaced by another.

[Monaghan] That's right. I mean, that's why law enforcement can't do this by itself. It doesn't make any difference how effective the police are, how effective the federal agencies that deal with drugs are, and how effectively the local prosecutor and the federal prosecutor do their jobs, the community has to be involved.

U.S. Attorney Tom Monaghan adds that what Nebraska is not doing with its convicted meth users may be part of the problem.

[Monaghan] There are not a lot of good treatment facilities in this state.

But the federal aid package just released emphasized investigation and prosecution over drug rehabilitation. Nearly everyone on both sides of the law will tell you that without treatment in the cycle, that cycle cannot be broken.

[Bassett] Supply and demand. There's always those people that will pay the money. There's always people who will put it out no matter what the penalties are going to be. I think penalties just raise the stakes, the odds -- the stakes as far as the money goes.

Mark will be getting treatment next spring, that's two years into his term in a federal lockup outside of Nebraska. For Statewide, I'm Bill Kelly