As meth use rises, so does violence
Bucks County deals with spate of incidents authorities tie to drug
Armed with a long gun, Christopher Dalrymple warned the SWAT team: “There are a lot of dead people in here.”
The standoff with Dalrymple locked down a Doylestown community for hours, as he fired shots at a Warrington police car and a neighboring home where a mother and two children were hunkered in a basement.
Now serving time in prison for the incident, Dalrymple believed he was being attacked by invaders, according to his attorney, and doing all he could to shoot “the folks there to kill him.”
His foes were imaginary. The impact of methamphetamine was real.
The 2019 standoff is just one of a string of violent incidents in Bucks County that law enforcement are tying to a spike in methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant that is not only addictive and lethal, but is known to spark hallucinations and paranoia, and drive users into fits of rage.
Federal and local law enforcement and drug recovery specialists are warning about the drug’s comeback, which they say is intertwined with the continuing opioid epidemic.
Methamphetamine can reverse some of the agonizing withdrawal effects that opioid users experience, and it’s being manufactured with higher purity levels and being sold at low prices from labs outside of the country.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says that overdose deaths involving methamphetamine are on the rise, partly because of trend among users to use both opioids and meth at the same time.
“Overdose deaths with the presence of methamphetamine
and/or cocaine continue to rise each year across Pennsylvania and Delaware, with a significant number also involving an illicit opioid,” said Patrick J. Trainor, supervisory special agent and spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Philadelphia Field Division.
Data from the Bucks County coroner’s office shows that traces of methamphetamine were discovered in 74 deaths in 2020, tripling since 2016, when traces of the drug were discovered in 20 death reports.
Trainor said the deadliest drug in the regional drug supply continues to be fentanyl, which is 50-100 times stronger than heroin and “cheap and abundant” on the streets. But he added, “You have people abusing both drugs concurrently,” and drug users often turn to meth to “bring them up” after using opioids.
“We have seen methamphetamine that has been cut with fentanyl, but we are not sure if it was intentional or cross-contaminated; more often than not, it’s unintentional, but that doesn’t make it any less of a threat,” said Trainor, adding that the same cartels are manufacturing both drugs in large volumes.
Collateral damage
While methamphetamine alone doesn’t kill as many users as opioids, the collateral damage of methamphetamine use in local communities can be lethal.
“These people become one-man wrecking crews,” Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub said. “They have to commit crimes to feed their habit and to get the money to buy more meth. Ultimately, some become so violent and reckless or sexually aggressive ... that it is their compulsion to commit these acts of violence.”
On Feb. 9, Perkasie police said a Lower Makefield Township man admitted to taking heroin and methamphetamine before breaking into a borough home and chasing the owners out with a knife. The residents had to return to get their toddler out of the house during the incident.
In the last two years, suicides, sexual assaults, home invasions and other acts of violence have been tied to methamphetamine, Weintraub said.
Hilltown Township police believed the drug was used by Curtis Fish, a township resident charged in a violent kidnapping and rape last January.
Five months later, free on bail, Fish became involved in another standoff, resulting in a violent explosion that killed him. Methamphetamine was noted in his autopsy report.
“Due to being high on meth, he ultimately took his own life, but he was reacting in a dangerously precarious way, and obviously he endangered law enforcement who had to respond to that location,” Weintraub said.
In Warminster Township, police believe methamphetamine also played a role in a stabbing in October, and another incident in which a woman ran into traffic and stripped off her clothes, township police Chief James Donnelly III said. In the latter incident, police had to close a portion of the road to get the woman under control; she was cited her for public intoxication, he said.
“We try everything we possibly can do to de-escalate,” Donnelly said.
Incidents with people suspected to be abusing meth happen about once or twice a month, the chief said.
Last year, a 30-year-old Bristol Township man was charged and later convicted of breaking into a home and punching a woman in her bed, knocking out one of her teeth. The man, Anthony Thomas Clayborn, admitted he was under the influence of methamphetamine when he climbed through the window of her home and stood naked at her bedside.
In another Bucks County case, Weintraub said, a woman who was addicted to methamphetamine gave birth to her daughter in a motel room “to avoid the hospital taking her baby when it tested positive [for meth].”
“Unfortunately, the child died shortly after birth and she was prosecuted for endangering her child’s welfare,” he said.
Meth’s mixed appeal
Methamphetamine is a powerful, highly addictive stimulant that affects the central nervous system, said Diane Rosati, executive director of the Bucks County Drug Alcohol Commission.
It’s also known as meth, blue, ice and crystal, among many other terms. It takes the form of a white, odorless, bitter-tasting crystalline powder that easily dissolves in water or alcohol.
“As with many stimulants, methamphetamine is often misused in a ‘binge and crash’ pattern,” Rosati said. “Because the pleasurable effects of methamphetamine disappear even before the drug concentration in the blood falls significantly, users try to maintain the high by taking more of the drug.”
Rosati said that methamphetamine use may start off as a recreational drug and may take longer to negatively affect an individual’s life.
“Therefore, the individual may feel that the use is manageable,” she said.
One 40-year-old woman, now in recovery, turned to meth to give her extra energy. But she didn’t go looking for it. She had been using opioids and cocaine when dealers in the Bristol area began offering her methamphetamine.
“With one line, you are high for six to eight hours instead of just a half hour with cocaine,” said the woman, adding the cost was much less. “It’s so popular now. You can find crystal meth anywhere around here. It’s scary.”
She noted the extreme difference between the stimulant effect of meth and the effect from the opioids, which are depressants.
“With heroin you are calmer, with coke you are antsy, but with meth, you become obsessive and short-fused; it intensifies everything and causes some people to go into fits of rage,” she said.
She knows some opioid users turn to meth to stave off withdrawal symptoms, but said that the remedy is “short-term.”
“The minute you stop using meth, you go back into opioid withdrawal,” she said.
Weintraub said that his investigators also are finding that opioid users are turning to methamphetamine to “level out the withdrawal symptoms.”
“It will reduce the painful withdrawal that many people experience in between fixes of opioids,” said Weintraub, adding that this trend compounds the drug crisis. “This means people are not just putting one toxic substance into their body, whether that be heroin and pills, not just two because it’s frequently mixed with fentanyl, but three because of the introduction of meth and sometimes cocaine.”
For one local 42-year-old man, Joseph, meth wasn’t his drug of choice — until he moved to Bucks County. After a stint in recovery, he relapsed and methamphetamine was easiest to find. Plus at first it was free.
“I went from not doing it at all to doing it every day,” he said. “It was a cheaper high. You did a little bit and it lasted a long time. I was smoking it, snorting it and shooting it.”
Aside from the trauma it caused him physically, he said the drug posed more of a psychological threat than other drugs he used in the past.
“The problem is you don’t come down for a long time, and you can go days without sleeping,” said Joseph, who was arrested for possession of meth and is now in recovery. “This is when it starts to play tricks with your mind. You see things that aren’t there and think things that aren’t true.”
The sexual effect from the drug was also very powerful, he said. “I can see how the meth, with some men with hatred in their heart, can trigger sexual crimes.”
Drug prevention advocates and county officials see the danger in the use of the drug and users’ behavioral “reaction” to it.
Rosati said the county is offering more educational programming and treatment options that are specific to the meth, which poses unique challenges to those in the recovery field.
“Triaging cases where individuals are exhibiting acute mental health symptoms such as extreme paranoia and psychosis has been a challenge to both our mental health and substance use systems,” she said.
“An individual can appear to be having a mental health crisis when in reality it is a drug-induced episode, which takes some time for medical staff to determine. There is a potential for increased violent behavior, as well.”
Meth-induced violence
Local police chiefs said dealing with those on methamphetamine is difficult because they won’t respond to logic and become combative.
“It seems like it’s almost impossible to get them to cooperate to resolve the situation,” Hilltown Township police Chief Christopher Engelhart said.
When someone is under the influence of the drug or a combination of it, there’s no rationalizing with them, the chief said.
“It’s not always easy to prepare for something like this,” Engelhart said.
Falls Township police Chief Nelson Whitney said those who use stimulants like methamphetamine are more likely to escalate situations. He anticipates use-offorce incidents to increase as methamphetamine use goes up.
Whitney likened the drug’s link to violence to the crack epidemic decades ago. He said things quieted down when opioids, which are depressants, became more widely used.
“The two things are very different,” he said of meth and opioids.
The Falls chief said it is “readily apparent” when someone is on methamphetamine. They can stay up for days on end, become paranoid and can hallucinate. “It’s a tough drug,” he said. Upper Southampton Township police Chief Ron MacPherson said officers try to talk to those on the drug after they are not under its influence.
“They’re not rational,” he said. Upper Southampton police recently arrested a man they believe had a methamphetamine lab in his condo, not far from a day care facility. MacPherson said the township has not had any other arrests like that recently.
The Upper Southampton chief noted that meth is on the rise, and that in the township most methamphetamine-related arrests come from traffic stops. He said over the past six to nine months, the drug arrests have gone from mostly heroin to about half methamphetamine and half heroin.
“These jobs can easily go bad,” he said.
Suspected methamphetamine use happens in some of the motels in the area, according to Donnelly, the Warminster police chief. The people using the drug are usually not from Warminster, he said.
In Bensalem, where police recently recovered $1.6 million in methamphetamine during an arrest, investigators are seeing an increase in meth arrests.
Harran, the township’s public safety director, said that before 2017, meth arrests made up about 5% of the department’s narcotics arrests. Between 2018 and 2020, that increased to about 25%, he said.
In 2020, the department recovered about 12.3 pounds of methamphetamine. In the years prior, the department averaged about 2 pounds per year. Two months into 2021, Bensalem police have recovered nearly 18 pounds of meth, according to Harran. “Meth is on the rise,” he said. Local police do not know why that is the case. Both Harran and MacPherson said drugs are cyclical.
“It’s just like anything else,” Harran said.
Where is it coming from?
Weintraub said the bulk of meth discovered in Bucks County is being produced in Mexico, unlike cases more than a decade ago, when labs were set up locally in remote pockets of the county. National DEA reports add that most of the meth available in the U.S. is smuggled in at the Southwest border, and there is a push among cartels to sell more on the East Coast.
“The Mexican cartels, similar to what you see in ‘Breaking Bad,’ have access to large amounts of the precursors — these are the ingredients needed to make meth,” said Weintraub, adding that the cartels are trying to dominate the market on “all illegal drugs.”
“They inundated the United States, in particularly our area with extremely cheap or sometimes even free meth in very large amounts.”
Compounding the problem is the purity level of methamphetamine, which is much higher than it was 10 or 20 years ago, said Trainor, of the DEA. In the 1990s, the Philadelphia market, including Bucks County, “was the East Coast capital of meth production,” he said.
“You had biker gangs and organized crime groups involved in the manufacturing of meth and you had cooks making meth that was maybe 60% pure.”
Now, in Mexico, where the ingredients to manufacture meth are more prevalent and not as regulated, cartels are producing lab-grade meth with purity levels at 95%-97%, Trainor said.
“Today, users are being exposed to drugs with purity levels that are through the roof. So the risks are greater,” he said.
Weintraub said the increase in meth in the local drug market should be concerning to everyone.
“Ultimately, some of them [users] become so violent, reckless and sexually aggressive that that is their compulsion to commit these acts of violence,” he said.
“When some gets addicted to meth, or any drug, it’s not a ‘them’ problem,” he said. “That’s a problem for all of us. It has ripples that really affect our entire community.”