Meth in Tennessee: The Danger Next Door

This drug has become a menace here, one that has eluded easy remedy despite success in other states in regulating its key ingredient: the over-the-counter decongestant pseudoephedrine.

It touches — directly or indirectly — every person in this state.

Tennessee is the buckle of the Meth Belt, which stretches roughly from Oklahoma to South Carolina. For the better part of the past decade, Tennessee has been in the top three methamphetamine states in the nation, along with Missouri and Indiana.

It is a story told daily in the the vacant stares of the longtime addicts, in the odd tics they pick up as the disease ravages their brains, in the scars and skin grafts that illustrate how dangerous it is to make the drug — and the burnt-out homes that remind just how dangerous it is to live near.

It is told in dollars and cents and statistics, whether it is the $1.6 billion Tennesseans pay every year to fight and clean up the meth epidemic or the 722 children placed into state custody in 2010 and 2011 all because of meth. It is told in the shrugs of neighbors who have grown accustomed to living near the toxic waste dumps left behind by meth labs.

It is told in broken promises, broken families and broken lives.

This is Tennessee's story.

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