[Music]
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
Each week we bring you stories about the people, places
and issues in our state.
This week the dramatic increase in the use of methamphetamine
and illegal and highly addictive drug that's tightening its
grip in western Wisconsin.
Also, joint forces with a weed warrior, a woman on a mission to
stop the spread of an invasive and highly prolific plant.
And find out what bread baked on Washington
Island and beer brewed in Middleton have in common.
We'll also take in the sounds of falling water and
the sights of spectacular fall colors in Wisconsin.
[Music]
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Wisconsin's Technical Colleges.
Communities first.
The illegal drug, Methamphetamine, is considered
by many to be the number one law enforcement
problem across the country.
A recent nationwide poll of county officials shows
meth is the stimulus for a growing list of problems,
crowded jails, increased violence and overwhelming
social services caseloads.
Wisconsin is experiencing its own meth crisis.
Tonight, we begin a special month-long look
at meth in Wisconsin with reporter Frederica
Freiberg, who joins us now.
That's right, Patty.
Some people like to downplay the
problem of meth andphetamine saying that it's mostly hype.
We'll tell that to the people entrenched in the
scourge of meth in the northwestern part of Wisconsin.
It is counties there where meth first took hold in the state.
Klandestine home-based labs are easy to hide and
abandoned barns or the backs of pickups.
And that's where meth maintains its grip.
But law enforcement says it is changing now
to larger quantities shipping in from outside.
Over the next four weeks, videographer Mike Eiker,
Soundman Tom Nonisoni, show you some of the people whose
lives revolve around this uniquely addictive drug.
From those caught up in addiction to cops and courts
trying to stem the meth tide, to public officials working to
prevent its insidious spread.
Tonight, we begin with the ABCs of meth andphetamine, what it
is, what it does, what it costs.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
Okay, we're going to hit this place right now.
You will go to prison or you will die.
I had to have it to get out of bed.
I was addicted.
What were you doing in that garage?
I was cooking meth.
Some people call it the Oramins cocaine.
It's bad as it is and as addictive as it is, it is the
drug of choice for right now.
They could lead to bleeding in the brain.
This has been by far the worst drug I've ever seen.
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The cocaine will give you a high.
You see anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour
depending on the person.
But with meth andphetamine, you can have a high for
eight hours or even 24 hours for some people.
meth is a synthetic drug originally derived
from anphetamine.
It's a powerful stimulant with little medical use and
big potential for abuse.
Once you do it once, you are addicted.
Users would tell you the addiction carries a
heavy cost in many ways, even if the drug itself
is comparatively cheap.
Enough meth for an all day high costs about $100.
That much cocaine would cost at least triple that.
Nearly 80% of meth distributed in Wisconsin is imported
into the state from superlabs.
These are illegal processing plants mostly in California and
south of the border in Mexico.
But it can also be processed and coped locally in
small home-based labs using easily available
and inexpensive chemicals.
You can buy it at local stores, holiday, Walmart, street farm.
Sales of one critical ingredient, pseudophedrant,
contained in cold medicine with brand names like
pseudophet and others, are now limited but not
banned by state law.
That has put a crimp in local cooks ability to make meth.
That's one good thing because the home-style
method renders less pure results and more danger.
It can explode and splatter on you and just melt your skin.
Some of the things will go into the manufacture of a
methamphetamine, it's acetone.
You're at a gas, heat or gas line, antifreeze,
Tuline, Drainel.
As you can see, all of these products by themselves, most
of them if you took them individually, they'd kill you.
But what they're doing is mixing them all together.
You wonder why would a person do this to themselves or why
would they put this particular product in their body?
It's like the best feeling of euphoria and focusness
and it was convenient when my kid was up all night long.
Smoked or snorted, injected or swallowed.
Meth gives users what they call the highest high, but it
also delivers the lowest low.
Emergency room doctors report dangerous psychosis and
violence in people on meth.
And the meth skin, infected sores, picked raw by
addicts trying to claw away imaginary bugs.
Doctors say it's not unusual for patients brought in
on meth to suffer strokes and permanent brain damage.
I just wonder where it ever came from, who brought it in.
Who's the inventor of it?
Methanphetamine was reportedly first synthesized by a Japanese
chemist in the early 1900s.
Later, kamikaze pilots were said to have taken high
doses of it before their missions during World War II.
Today, the drug is even stronger and more potent.
The thing about meth is that it's just such a powerful
drug that it actually seems to be taking over this area.
The area hardest hit so far by meth andphetamine is the
Northwest part of Wisconsin.
Crime lab figures statewide show about 100 meth
cases in the year 2000.
By 2004, the number had grown to more than 500.
In 2005, the state division of criminal investigation
reports a 30% increase over last year in the number of
arrests for distribution of meth andphetamine in Wisconsin.
This Monday morning, I had seven new meth
andphetamine cases in jail.
To intake a case a day from meth andphetamine, which is
what I was running this past spring, in which I do sometimes
talking about 200 and some are 300 and some felonies a year,
just on meth andphetamine.
That's a river.
To have to deal with that number of
people, that's drowning.
Meth andphetamine that's crossing the St.
Croix River to get here, because Minneapolis
is one of the destinations for traffickers importing drugs.
And it's the Midwest meth mecca that's feeding Western
Wisconsin. Police say criminal gangs in the city
are shipping pounds and pounds of it across the border
into Wisconsin every week.
And increasingly, the meth that finds its way into the
small towns and burgeoning suburbs of Northwest
Wisconsin is made in Mexico.
It comes through the Southwest border.
It could be driven across, carried across,
flown across, and then how whatever the established
trafficking cells are here, they mule them up.
And they have their established organizations here that
get it out eventually to the street level.
Still, Wisconsin has been called an island surrounded by
worse meth problems in border states like Iowa and Minnesota.
People battling the meth andphetamine tied in Wisconsin's
worst hit zip code say that's only because it hasn't
yet fully hit Milwaukee.
We lost the war with crack because we didn't pay enough
attention. We didn't believe it could be as bad as it was.
We now know that this is worse.
Meth has started making inroads into Milwaukee.
State narcotics agents say a couple of labs
were recently discovered there.
Police in that city are now getting special
training specific to meth.
What's the scope of the problem here in
Wisconsin and nationwide?
Well, that's a good question.
According to state and federal health departments, it is
estimated nearly 10,000 people in Wisconsin aged 12 and older
have used meth in the last year.
Nationwide, it's estimated some 12 million people have
tried it in their lifetime.
And from our research, trying meth, most often means
becoming addicted to it.
That addiction is the focus of our report next week.
Thanks, Brad.
If you want to learn more about meth and
Wisconsin, go to our website at www.wpt.org/inwisconsin.
[Music]
Our next report is about a menace of a different sort
and a woman turned warrior.
Tammy Bieberstein is engaging the enemy in the forest.
The enemy is a highly aggressive weed called garlic mustard.
Producer Joanne Garrett caught up with Bieberstein on one of
her four rays into the forest.
[Music]
A woman.
A plant.
Stop and run.
Everybody ready?
A quest.
Okay, off to the garlic mustard.
[Music]
Tammy Bieberstein is the founder of a new growing group, the
Madison area weed warriors, the plant garlic mustard, the goal.
We go back and forth as you pull up and get the rut.
Get rid of it.
So this is anybody who doesn't know, this is second year garlic
mustard. And down here, this first year garlic mustard, some
of it is bigger over there.
And we're interested in getting the second year stuff out
because that's the stuff that's going to create the seed.
The seed.
This seemingly sweet plant has created a nightmare
for the state.
It's taking over Wisconsin's
woodlands, starting in the south and spreading north.
It's non-native, invasive, with three devastating advantages
over our native wildflowers.
It starts earlier, grows taller and produces bokeh seed.
Seeds that can remain viable for
up to seven years in the soil.
It's a recipe for disaster, fitting for an out of
control, cooking herb.
Garlic mustard is a plant that was brought to North
America as a cooking herb.
Russ Hefty is the conservation resource supervisor
for the Madison Parks.
And it'll completely carpet the ground and outcompete
the native wildflowers.
And in some areas, be such a carpeted green that
negates our use of fire because it basically, you've
got all these green plants with all that moisture.
And they basically stop the fires.
Fitting for a botanical that hefty has described
as the plant from hell.
It's a plant out of place.
It's okay where it normally comes from.
It's being from Northern Europe.
I read on the internet it has something like 53
natural biological predators that go after it.
I say it needs every one of them.
With no natural predators in Wisconsin, like the
shoot-mining weevil or the root-feeding flea beetle.
It's up to us.
I think you've got to have a warrior spirit to lie a
tackle, something so big.
That's how bebrasteine sought and so began her quest.
This is garlic mustard here.
Five years ago, she approached Russ Hefty and
others in the Madison Parks system with this idea.
She would recruit citizen volunteers to adopt parks
and green spaces in their neighborhoods and gather
Saturday mornings early in spring to pull the
plant before it flowers.
I was nicknamed "crazy Tammy".
There's crazy Tammy, you know?
But that was like the second year of pulling garlic mustard.
I had visions of when I was planning on doing this.
I was thinking we're going to get
everybody in Madison to get out there that first summer and get
rid of all the garlic mustard.
It ended up only being four of us.
We're out there every day pulling garlic mustard.
It's not exactly the most glamorous thing in the world
to do on a Saturday morning.
No, it has annoyingly invasive plant making me crawl around
on my hands and knees smell.
Last year we had about 161 people show up that I
counted and we're surpassed that already this year
and we're only halfway through our official season.
She just has a natural infectious enthusiasm that
people just grab onto.
We also have Madison area weed warrior buttons for those
that didn't get a button.
It's just a great passion and enthusiasm for natural areas
and a great passion for sharing her knowledge and appreciation.
Watch your work these two total strangers that
she just met on the path.
Name and phone number if you ever have any
questions. Yeah, with the Madison area weed warriors.
If you take a big and you see some garlic mustard along the
way here, feel free.
Thanks. So that's why she's very
successful in and getting folks to come out and
pull garlic mustard.
15 minutes later we find them down the path pulling.
Now if everybody knew how much fun it was,
everybody did that thing.
And that's Bieber Steins goal, her quest.
I would actually like to see this become as big activities
like this become as big as sports in our school system.
I think it would be a neat way to teach kids a sense
of cooperation and community and working together.
I'm Mary Bean, nice to meet you.
Something happens sometimes when people work together.
There's an outgrowth of community connections.
Bieberstein is self-educated in botany and the wild world.
This is Birdack.
Second year Birdack.
It's another one of those biennials.
I didn't know that Birdack ever grew up to be gay.
Oh yes.
What a punk.
Uh-huh. Bieberstein has a degree in
education, but she works now as a crossing guard and a
groundskeeper for a church.
In part to carve out time for this quest.
These Saturdays are a chance for her to educate others.
This is why I wanted to plant where we're
working on trying to save.
And next month I'll be with a little white flower coming out.
And then here's one of our Solomon seals.
And here's our wild geranium.
So it's really an important issue.
If you lose the native plants, well then what's going to
support the native insects, the native birds, and all the
other creatures that require and evolved with the native
plants that belong in Wisconsin?
This is a kidney leaf buttercup.
This is one of the plants we're trying to
save from garlic mustard.
But it's one that people could mistake it for garlic
mustard if they easily.
It's Bieberstein's hope that this knowledge about invasive
species and the idea of service will spread like seed before our
woodland wildflowers are lost.
Yeah, actually I find it to be kind of healing to the soul.
It just feels good to be able to give back to the planet.
If you'd like to help eradicate invasive plants
like garlic mustard, you can volunteer as a weed watcher
anywhere in the state.
To find out where to sign up, check our website
at www.org/inwisconsin.
[Music]
We head up to the tip of Door County next and climb aboard
the ferry to Washington Island.
It's a place where long ago farmers grew their
own food and enough extra for export to the mainland.
Well recently some island residents decided it was
time to put that historic farmland back into production.
Producer Andy Seltz travels to the island
to check out the crop.
[Music]
Washington Island sits in Lake Michigan, a top of the Door
County Peninsula.
Thousands make the ferry crossing each summer.
One tourist stop is the Washington Island Farm Museum.
Well I think it's very important for people when they come
to the island and even people that live on the island to
realize that the farm museum shows the heritage that
you know this is the way of life in the past but these
things were very important.
The museum tells the story of Icelandic and other
Nordic settlers who cleared the land and then lived
off it on small farms.
Large scale farming came in the 20th century as the
island became known for its potatoes.
But having to ship the spuds off the island
made it harder to compete.
And that became very very expensive for them to do so
that's basically why the potato farming went bottom up up here.
So farming for the most part disappeared by the 1970s but
agriculture is making a bit of a comeback on Washington Island
in a small and surprising way.
This is the Washington Hotel, a recently restored
inn on the island.
Shaff and co-owner Leah Kaplan is a founding member
of Homegrown Wisconsin, a movement to support local
farmers by using regional and seasonal produce.
Sustainability and regionality are the two
most important things to me.
Everything I cook with and everything I serve
has some significance.
However, she'd opened her hotel in a place that hadn't had
significant farming for decades.
Her first job was to recruit locals to grow
for her, like Tom Coien.
My great great grandparents, they lived on the island.
I was born on a dairy farm.
We had a meeting with a bunch of us and we met at the hotel and
it came right down and everybody laid it on me on the line.
That if we were going to do anything for it was
up to me.
Well, I love farming.
I always did.
So I decided, well, I'll plant some wheat.
This is only a couple days from
being harvested, I would say.
The harvested wheat was ground into flour at the
hotel, baked into bread and sold in bread mixes.
But there was one problem, as Kaplan's business partner
Brian Van DeWall explains.
We ended up with way too much wheat because we couldn't
make that much bread and sort of tried to add a desperation
to figure out where we could do with that wheat.
At the same time, in Dane County, at the Capitol Brewery
in Middleton, these makers of traditional, heavy German
beers were thinking about creating something lighter.
We were out on a search at that point for a key ingredient
that would become part of this brand, part of its personality.
Capitol also saw this new brand as a chance to establish itself
with consumers as a brewery with strong Wisconsin roots.
And that's when Brian Van DeWall met Capitol's
brewmaster, Kirby Nelson.
We're walking around, Kirby's got his little spiket and
he's given us tests out of these big vats, you know.
And I turn around and look at his grain storage
area. It kind of hit me.
We turned to Kirby and said, "Curvy, I never realized
you brew beer locally, but you don't brew local beer."
So it really wasn't a supplier of locally grown grains
in the state of Wisconsin.
And so to kind of like almost stumble upon the source of
wheat in Washington Island and to make this American style
wheat ale in the state of Wisconsin, which is known for
making quality beers, from this wheat grown in these
unique local, it's tremendous.
It's the most fun I've ever had developed in a beer.
And so, Island Wheat was born.
The whole thing was very serendipitous.
We really go with serendipity in our field.
Van DeWall's field is community planning and
economic development.
He sees Island Wheat as a perfect
example of a product that can promote sustainability.
But everybody in the chain, in the supply chain, has
formed a friendship and a social structure and
each one is participating in the economic return.
For Tom Coen, that means a chance to see the farming way
of life return to his home.
It would be good.
It would get some of the land back into
what it used to be used for.
I don't want to look around the island and say this used
to be beautiful farmland and it's a bunch of subdivisions.
And so the only way you can save that farmland is to farm it.
For Chef Lea Kaplan, Island Wheat represents the next step
in the regional food movement out of the gourmet kitchen
and directly to the consumer.
Beer is a great end to this consumer product.
And for the makers of that beer, it's the
chance to tell a story.
It is very important for our consumer that the product
is deep and with some tradition, with a story, with
a purpose, with a meaning.
Island Wheat is a story of where it's grown.
What is Washington Island?
An island discovered in 1631 in a historical tell a
hundred years old.
It's a story that just doesn't end.
As you heard in Andy's report, some businesses like Capitol
Brewery and the Washington Hotel, bank on customer
interest in regionally grown food, an encouraging trend
for local farmers and people interested in preserving
farmland in the state.
We leave you tonight with some sights and sounds of
water. It's a beautiful spot on the shore of the Wolf
River at Big Smokey Falls.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
See you next time.
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