A losing battle: meth hits reservations.

At 15, Neela Bear was a high school freshman on the Lame Deer Reservation in Montana who ran track and was diligently moving toward the honor society. But she was also looking for comfort. Her father had been gravely ill and nearly died, sending the teenager to her peers and to drug use. It was then that she first tried methamphetamine.

"I told myself I would never touch alcohol because I had seen since I was little how it affected people on the reservation," says Neela, who felt then that marijuana seemed a little safer because she was able to maintain a certain level of consciousness even with heavy use. Smoking pot with friends was common until a new drug called "crank" began to surface.

"Being high at the time and feeling peer pressure, I thought it was OK to do it," says Neela, now 25, recalling the first time she tried meth. "I didn't believe it was real. This huge drug was like cocaine, and it came down to our reservation. It didn't seem as bad. This drug was in the big city."

The big city drug soon exploded on the reservation, with Neela's boyfriend and other friends becoming dealers. Neela rapidly went from 115 to 85 pounds. She broke her promise to herself and tried alcohol. The aspiring honor student realized the effect crank had on her when she skipped school one day to clean a woman's home so she could earn money to get high.

Neela's story is increasingly familiar in Native communities according to health care providers and police officers who say methamphetamine has become an epidemic on reservations. The number of people who sought treatment for stimulants--mostly for amphetamine--at clinics and hospitals run by Indian Health Service jumped from 137 in 1997 to 4,946 in 2004. Yet, Indian communities receive little money to combat the problem.

"The tribes do well with treatment for people who use alcohol and marijuana, but methamphetamine is hard to beat," says Dr. Kathy Masis, a medical officer for Behavioral Health, the mental health unit of Indian Health Service in Billings, Mont. "Things are bad, they are really, really bad up here."

A Way Out

Known also as crystal, ice, salt or glass (g for short), methamphetamine is highly addictive. Snorted, swallowed or injected, but often puffed, the drug produces a euphoric sensation and takes very little money to make. The profits can be as high as three-fold for dealers. Most of the drugs are brought onto the reservation, where there is a lack of law enforcement.

Since the onset of meth in the late 1990s, tribes have been looking for ways to curtail the epidemic. Tribes in Montana and Wyoming receive about $9 million in federal funding a year for primarily out-patient treatment and some in-patient counseling. Some tribes have incorporated culture and spirituality in the healing process in hopes that the addict can beat the highly addictive chemical. Sweats, a cleansing ceremony that is done in an intense, sauna-like atmosphere to get out impurities of the body while healing the mind, are included in treatment.

Lenny Foster, a program supervisor for the Navajo Nations Corrections Project in Window Rock, Arizona, says the drug problem in Native American communities, especially the Navajo Nation, is the result of a cultural imbalance.

"Anger and rage is very prominent among Navajo youth," says Foster, a Navajo who counsels Navajo and other Native American prisoners in state and federal prisons and who conducts sweats as part of his therapy.

Initially, Foster says, all young Navajos were taught their language and ceremonies and respect for the environment that surrounds them. But with the creation of reservations and federal policies that "tried to take the Indian out of the Indian," many Navajos and other Native people have gotten misplaced.

"We're talking about generations of Indian people who have been denied their pride, dignity and respect," says Foster. "It has crossed generational lines. There's a lot of anger, rage and resentment."

Foster tries to help Native inmates reconnect with their traditional spiritual side through sweats and support. "If our people are allowed to practice their own ceremonies and spirituality, you're going to have healing," he says. "You're going to have pride, dignity and self-respect. There will be no need for drugs and alcohol in their lives."

Sergeant Alvernon Tsosie, a criminal investigations officer on the Navajo reservation who has seen meth use there balloon in the past three years, agrees. "I find it a little upsetting when [teenagers] don't know what our ceremonies are," says Tsosie, who is also Navajo. "When you ask them what a Fire Dance is or the true meaning of a Squaw Dance is, they say, "There's a lot of drinking [alcohol] there."

"Kids do it because they are bored," says Tsosie. "They come from low-income families where there is a lack of supervision, domestic violence or sexual abuse. They do it because they are looking for acceptance and they are looking for comfort, just like we see when kids join gangs."

Add poverty rates that soar to nearly three times above the national average and unemployment rates that are more than double the national average, and many reservation residents may be looking for a way out.

Trying to Monitor and Enforce

Looking to address the meth problem, the National Congress of American Indians, one of the oldest and largest Indian advocacy groups, passed a resolution last year to ask Congress to support regional methamphetamine drug in-patient treatment programs for treatment and rehabilitation throughout Indian Country.

Other Native communities like the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma have received money from Congress to bust meth labs in rural areas of the state. Tribes in Oklahoma have also formed a task force with local, state and federal law enforcement. Other tribes, such as the Navajo Nation, are tightening their laws. The Navajo Nation Council passed a law making methamphetamine an illegal substance on the reservation last month. A person found guilty of possession of meth may receive the maximum sentence of a year in jail or a fine of $1,000. Prior to passage of the law, people found on tribal land with meth were tried in federal court, which is 100 miles away.

The Navajo Nation, like many tribal communities, also continues to educate parents, teachers and officers about the dangers of meth use.

"Can we control crystal methamphetamine and alcohol problems? Probably not," Tsosie says. "We can, however, monitor and enforce it."

On the law enforcement side, Duwayne Honahni Sr., chief of the Division of Special Investigations for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the federal agency overseeing resources for Native Americans, said the division doesn't have enough staffing or resources to combat the problem. "Were just barely scraping the bottom," he says.

Honahni's department receives an average of $1.2 million a year for eight anti-drug agents to combat methamphetamine, cocaine and other drugs for 562 federally recognized tribes in the country. These eight officers set up sting operations looking for big dealers, who now include Mexican drug traffickers.

The BIA, however, may receive an increase this year to expand law enforcement following the community outcry when prisoners died in reservation jails. Violent crimes on the reservations have also risen significantly in the past few years. The Bush administration recommended a $19.2 million increase to expand law enforcement programs in areas where violent crime is most severe, and to staff, operate and maintain detention facilities, among other mandates. Both branches of Congress were set to unveil their proposed budgets in March.

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However, Honahni says that even with the increases, the funding is not enough to hire the 100 agents needed to combat the drug problem, especially in very isolated Native communities in the West.

Neela Bear says it was her parents, drug counseling and the birth of her son during her senior year of high school that helped turned her life around. Neela went into a drug treatment program twice and saw a friend die from what may have been a drug-induced heart attack at the age of 18 before she herself stopped doing meth completely.

"There's a high unemployment rate, and during the winter months a lot of people say there's nothing to do on the reservation. The reservation has a grocery store, a Post Office, and there's a Boys and Girls Club that's limited to age 18. Nowadays, they have more activities and programs," says Neela, who is married now and lives outside Lame Deer. "I used [meth] more as an escape, but after I've seen the effects it's had on my cousins and friends and family, I've stayed away."

Kim Baca is a freelance writer who lives in Washington, D.C.