Meth Addiction Steals Lives on Indian Reservations Throughout North West

Police Struggle with Rising Crime Rates Due to Meth Use

In a place of stark beauty, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, poverty, joblessness, alcoholism and now methamphetamines rule supreme. On more than 2.2 million acres, where some 12,000 Native Americans live in mostly isolated conditions, members of the Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes struggle with the effects of a modern scourge that has taken over lives and in many cases already stretched community resources. Crime is on the rise and tribal police who are in most cases understaffed struggle to maintain order. This scourge was not brought into the Reservations by the white man, but by a Mexican Drug Cartel who decided that due to poverty and already rampant alcoholism the Native Americans were ripe for the picking. Their theory seems to be correct.

Back as far as 2000, a Mexican Drug Cartel moved near to the Wind River Reservation. Men involved in the Cartel began romancing the local Native American women, and providing them with free samples of the methamphetamines that they were hawking, and often also fathered children of those women. They were succeeding in their plan to entwine meth into the society they hoped to make into their next victim and money maker. It worked. The women became more and more dependent on the potent drug and the drug dealers left them without resources. The women became forced to deal the drug themselves in order to provide for their newly formed habit and to take care of their children. The cycle had become complete. The women did business by giving out the familiar free samples just as they had once received. In a country where isolation and poverty reigns, the easy money of selling meth and other prescription drugs became a solution to a difficult often unsolvable problem. Drugs became the answer.

During the next four years the drug gangs sold more and more drugs to the Native population much of the meth brought up from Mexico was more then 98% pure quickly hooking its victims The drugs brought in to the US would often travel from Mexico up through Los Angeles, to Ogden Utah and then on to Wyoming and beyond.