“You just miss the good old days when you just had somebody that was growing pot,” said Fortner, a 26-year veteran of the force.

These days, drug users are seeking out longer lasting, more intense highs and subsequently more heavy-duty drugs.

“We’re not seeing much marijuana anymore,” Fortner said. “Cocaine we’re not seeing much anymore.”

In addition to the abuse of prescription drugs such as oxycontin, more and more people are turning to methamphetamines. Meth, as it is commonly known, is a cooked down combination of household products, each ingredient reading like a list of toxic substances best kept in childproof cabinets — engine starting fuel (for ethyl ether), fingernail polish remover (for acetone), the striker plates from match books (for red phosphorus), iodine (to mix with red phosphorus to make hydrochloric acid) and Sudafed (for the primary ingredient, ephedrine).

Recipes are readily available on the Internet, with varying methods and potencies.

“It’s like making a cake,” Fortner said.

Even the most addicted of users most likely would balk if asked to sit down and take a drink of each of these ingredients in their raw form, swallow a handful of pills and chew on some matchbooks. But processed together, the chemicals form a new compound, which produces an instantly addictive, hyper-high.

Users tend to stay awake for days, their sleep deprivation leading to a state of paranoia, the jitters prompting them to pick at their skin, leaving red, oozing sores. Lungs and livers are some of the first organs to go with prolonged use. Tooth decay and rapid weight loss also are common.

A gram of crystallized meth, an amount akin to the contents of a table-top sugar package, is fetching a nice price on the market.

“Meth is going right now for about $125, $150 a gram,” Fortner said.

In its powdered form, meth comes in at about $80 to $100 a gram. The drug’s rabid popularity and relatively high price make selling it seem almost like a sound business plan in terms of supply and demand — the sale of one gram from one batch can fund the purchase of an entirely new set of ingredients to make the next one.

Consequently the drug has crossed any and all social dividing lines. Gender, race, income, education all become insignificant in the face of a powerful addiction and a booming market.

Swain County sheriff’s deputies arrested a 72-year-old man for selling meth.

“He said the money was good, that’s what he told us,” Fortner said. “Of course he’s doing federal time right now.”

The poor are stealing to fund their habit, the middle and upper classes selling everything they’ve got. One recent arrest was of a man pulling in a $100,000 salary a year. But with his $150 a day habit, he lost his job, his family, and his house.

Now, with meth having officially become an epidemic — there were nine labs busted in North Carolina in 1999, 177 by 2003, 322 last year, and 289 so far this year, which still doesn’t even speak to the number of users across the state — communities are beginning to realize that they must pull together to address the issue from all sides.

“I hate to say that meth brought us all together, but it’s made us aware that we have a problem,” Fortner said.

Child welfare has emerged as an immediate concern, as children have been found in 20 to 25 percent of the labs busted in the state, said North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper during a methamphetamine seminar held at Western Carolina University Nov. 16.

Meth users have a tendancy to abuse or neglect their children in a variety of ways. Cooper cited a lab bust where a mother had taught her 14- and 9-year-old children to help her cook meth. Researchers have said that exposure just to meth fumes is so dangerous that it is just like taking the drug, Cooper said.

North Carolina’s state government has stepped in to help curb meth production, by instituting a law in December of 2004 that results in automatic jail time for meth makers. Old laws only led to an arrest and bond, meaning manufacturers were back out on the streets before the paperwork had even made it all the way through the system.

“I do hear that people are going to jail for things that they weren’t going to jail for before,” said Sen. John Snow, D-Murphy, a former judge and one of the co-sponsors of the subsequent Meth Lab Prevention Act.

The Meth Lab Prevention Act will take effect Jan. 15 and will pull meth’s main ingredient — ephedrine — behind drugstore counters. While the law means that customers with stuffy heads and runny noses will have to take a few minutes extra to ask for a package of Sudafed tablets, non-tablet drugs like gel-caps are still available on the shelf. The law is expected to make it harder for meth makers to procure the drug, as current regulations limiting customers to purchasing only three packs at a time are abused by joint buying schemes.

“If the criminal can’t get the main ingredient, they can’t make the meth,” Cooper said.

The commercial retail industry took issue with the law to pull ephedrine products behind the counter, saying that it would drive customers away; however, lawmakers stuck to their guns. Now, some stores like CVS have already pulled their ephedrine behind the counter by way of corporate mandate.

Others, like the independently owned Plaza Pharmacy in Franklin, have not yet done so, as owner Carter Mason didn’t know exactly when the law was going to go into effect. Even so, he has no problem with the law.

“It suits me fine,” Mason said. “Anything that’ll cut this back.”

However, not all states have taken similar measures. Ephedrine is still available on store shelves in neighboring states and, if nothing else, is available on the Internet. And a growing amount of meth is trafficked in from Mexico. So while the new state laws should help, they won’t solve the problem.

“We’ve never presented this as a panacea for the methamphetamine problem,” Cooper said.

But, Jackson County Sheriff Jimmy Ashe, whose deputies have busted nine meth labs, is optimistic about the future.

“I think the big fire of methamphetamines is slowly, but surely burning its way out,” Ashe said.