Extension News: September 2006 Archives

A series of booking photos (scroll to bottom of page) taken over a 10-year span shows an attractive, 28-year-old blonde who changes into a gaunt, sickly woman looking much older than her 37 years.

The woman’s health and appearance was drastically altered by her body’s addiction to methamphetamine, which Newsweek magazine, in its August, 2005, cover story, called “America’s most dangerous drug.”

New Hampshire has yet to see the large numbers of methamphetamine addicts that Western and Midwestern states have experienced. But law enforcement officials say New Hampshire’s large expanses of wilderness are attracting those who manufacture the drug. In fact, 12 of the 18 methamphetamine labs discovered in New England in 2004 and 2005 were located in New Hampshire, many of them in rural Grafton County.

The effects of meth
Methamphetamine, also known as meth, crystal, ice, fire, croak, crank, glass, crypto, and white cross, is a powerful stimulant that affects the central nervous system. It makes people feel euphoric; its high can last for six to eight hours or more. Unlike some drugs that can take years to form an addiction, meth can cause addiction from a single use.

But though they keep trying, many users find it impossible to replicate that first feeling of euphoria experienced after initial use. People addicted to meth may suffer irreparable brain damage, as well as other health problems, financial ruin, loss of family, and death.

When on an extended meth high (called “tweaking”) people lose interest in eating and sleeping. Their only goal is to keep the high going for as long as they can, sometimes for days. Paranoia, hallucinations, violent behavior, and psychosis are common. Meth addicts’ typical neglect of personal hygiene is compounded by the smell of meth in their perspiration, a smell described as “putrid.”

Dentists across the country are discovering “meth mouth” caused by long-term methamphetamine use. Symptoms include tooth decay and receding gums. While on meth, some users begin picking at their skin to rid their bodies of imaginary bugs. Perhaps the worst effect is permanent brain damage, as meth destroys the part of the brain that registers pleasure. Long-term meth users can no longer feel pleasure, no matter how much of the drug they use.

Effects on children
Addicted parents may abuse or neglect their children when under the influence of the meth. Some children become “cooking assistants” to parents manufacturing the drug. Others get injured when the “cooking” process erupts into fires or explosions.
Children growing up or around a meth lab may carry the remnants of the drug dust on their clothing and skin. When children are removed from their home, all their possessions must be destroyed because they too are contaminated.

The walls, floors, furniture, draperies and other furnishings in a home, apartment, or garage where methamphetamine is produced and where wastes are disposed typically require assessment and cleanup. The average cost of a cleanup is about $5,000, but can reach $150,000. Who should pay the bill for this cleanup? The building’s owner? The renter? The town? A federal agency? What happens when those resources are exhausted?

Environmental hazards
In addition to the human toll, methamphetamine also poses a hazard for the environment. Meth paraphernalia left on the open ground can contaminate the soil and water runoff can pollute surface waters, wetlands, and groundwater. In some areas of the country, runoff from meth manufacturing facilities has killed livestock and destroyed large areas of trees and vegetation.

Experts estimate that the manufacture of each pound of meth produces five to six pounds of hazardous wastes that often get disposed of illegally in the environment. To make matters more challenging, many of these sites are in residential settings. This means children and other occupants of the property, as well as nearby neighbors, may be exposed to hazardous chemicals and harmful gases during and after the cooking process.

Cheap and easy to manufacture
Meth is cheaply and easily manufactured from readily available ingredients such as decongestant tablets (pseudoephedrine), iodine, Drano, rubbing alcohol, salt, common matches, and commercial fertilizer. “Lab” equipment includes such common items as plastic tubing, Mason jars, coffee filters, soda bottles, blenders, camera batteries, propane cylinders, and hot plates, electric frying pans or camp stoves.

New Hampshire’s Attorney General and county attorneys, as well as local, state and federal law enforcement officials, have begun working together to keep the methamphetamine problem from escalating in New Hampshire. Despite relatively low numbers of meth users, the social and economic costs of meth addiction are high.

Farm and forest factories
Methamphetamine’s relative ease of manufacture has long range implications for communities and landowners. People who make methamphetamines may use secluded farm or forest land to hide their illegal activities. Landowners who frequently walk their land are less likely to become victims of unauthorized use of their land.

Here are a few tips to help landowners protect themselves and their property:

• Don’t accept cash for the use of your property.
• Know what happens on your property.
• Don’t bury, move, or examine any trash found on your property.
• If you discover the trappings of meth manufacturing: red-stained coffee filters, plastic bottles with attached tubing, empty cold-tablet packaging, don’t touch or move anything. You could be putting your health at risk. Don’t confront anyone involved in suspicious activity on your property. If your town has an anonymous reporting system, call that number. Report any suspicious activity on your land to local law enforcement officials, but leave the dangerous part to those who are specially trained for cleanup.

Inform yourself and take action
A recently formed New Hampshire Government Leaders Methamphetamine Task Force has developed a statewide strategy to keep meth use from growing in New Hampshire.

Local, state and federal officials are committed to getting and keeping methamphetamine issues in the open for citizens to learn more. As a community member, learn all you can about this drug and its devastating impacts. You can mobilize your fellow community members to become more aware of the dangers of methamphetamine, co-sponsor open forums and protect yourself and your family.

To learn more:

• How meth destroys the body
• Meth pharmacology (how it works in the body)
• Meth Q & A
• National Institute on Drug Abuse Infofacts: Methamphetamine
• New Hampshire Government Leaders Methamphetamine Task Force
• Photo gallery: Faces of meth

People who come together to tend a vegetable garden produce much more than food. They get the camaraderie of work, a sense of community, a bond to the land, food for the soul and a lower weekly grocery bill.

This has definitely been true for the 12 Somali Bantu, Sudanese, and Meskhetian Turk families who have been coming together weekly since early May to tend their plots in the Brookside International Community Garden in Manchester.
           
Started in 2005 on the initiative of Master Gardener Riekie Sluder and I, the garden has thrived. This year it almost doubled in size, to 4500 square feet. In August the families harvested as much as 150 pounds of okra, beans, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, herbs, and flowers. That’s amazing, considering that this was the most difficult growing season in several years.

The community garden is a partnership between Brookside Congregational Church, the International Institute of New Hampshire and UNH Cooperative Extension. For the church, which contributes the land and water, it’s about community outreach. For the Institute’s Anne Sanderson, “it’s about helping immigrants become integrated into American life. They learn about scheduling, punctuality and arranging for transportation. They get a chance to grow foods from their native homeland. They begin to understand that there are people trying to help them adjust to life in America.” And that last item sends a powerful, positive message indeed.
           
For the UNH Master Gardener volunteers, it’s all about the people. It’s about bridging cultural differences, about learning to communicate with sign language, smiles and body language. It’s about the pleasure of working in a garden with others on a sunny summer day. It’s about teaching, But, most of all, it’s about joy.
           
The experiences shared within this disparate group of gardeners build memories that will last a long time. Some are fabulous, some humorous, some bittersweet. Some are poignant, like the day a church member and her mother paid a visit to the garden. They had been arranging the funeral of the church member’s grandmother. The member’s mother, grieving and tearful, was able to connect with Romena Fatkulina, a young Turkish mother who speaks some English, and who had lost her own mother recently. The visitors stayed to work in the garden for a while. They found the experience healing and said they’d come again.
           
The week after planting, the refugees and Master Gardeners cooked a meal for each other in the church kitchen. Each group prepared dishes they would be cooking from the vegetables they hoped to harvest. The Master Gardeners prepared a vegetable omelet, two salads and mint tea. The Africans cooked a delicious casserole using goat meat and vegetables. The Turks made a stir-fry using potatoes, green vegetables and what they thought was chicken, but which turned out to be pork—forbidden by their religion. Apparently, the specified ingredient got lost in translation to the shopping list. But once the mistake was revealed, the gardeners good-naturedly traded dishes and enjoyed themselves despite the confusion.

All these immigrant groups have close relationships within large, extended families. At one time or another, most of the gardeners bring some of their children with them. The children generally learn to speak more English faster than their parents and often become their interpreters. Children will ask for the English names for common objects used in the garden. Then they try to teach the Master Gardeners the words in their native languages. You can guess which group is more successful!
           
Here’s a conundrum for you: Romena asked one day, “Why are American grocery stores full of boxes? Don’t Americans know how to cook?” Apparently her apartment building houses seven Turkish families, some Sudanese and one American family. The Americans, she noted, always eat convenience food. That’s food for thought.
           
As the season winds to a close, the gardeners will be harvesting butternut squash and cabbage to provide some food this fall. We’ll clean up the garden and begin planning for next year, incorporating some of what we’ve learned and chuckling over other parts.

In 2004 the city of Manchester alone helped to settle more refugees than settled in 23 other states. Because of the generosity of donors, the partners and volunteers, Brookside International Community Garden has helped to create a warm welcome for a few of these refugee families. If you’d like to donate to the garden, please contact Margaret Hagen or phone (629-9494).

By Margaret Hagen, Hillsborough County Agricultural Resources Educator

Professional cooks and diners who’ve sampled the blue mussels New Castle fisherman Andy Lang will soon begin marketing proclaim them the best they’ve seen or tasted: huge, tender and flavorful.

Lang, a commercial fisherman for more than 20 years, has expanded into aquaculture—seafood farming—with his first-in-the-nation offshore blue mussel farm. His business emerged from more than a decade of research, collaboration, innovation, and experiment by a team of UNH marine biologists, engineers, Extension staff, and local fishermen. It’s part of UNH’s Open Ocean Aquaculture Project to research, develop, and transfer to commercial operators the technology for farming various species of finfish and shellfish in offshore waters.

Meeting demand for seafood, expanding economic opportunities for fishermen
“The U.S. currently imports 70 percent of its seafood, and 40 percent of that comes from aquaculture. Global demand for seafood continues to grow, and harvests from wild fish stocks can’t keep up,” says Rollie Barnaby, a Sea Grant and Extension marine resources educator and a former commercial fisherman himself. “Expanding aquaculture in the U.S. could help meet consumer demand, while improving the economic situation for the region’s fishermen.”

Barnaby spent years looking at aquaculture operations in other parts of the U.S and world. He discovered that “most aquaculture takes place in protected fjords, harbors, and bays. But most of our inshore and near-shore waters are already overcrowded with other users. I realized that to make commercial aquaculture viable in New Hampshire, we’d either have to grow fish in warehouses on land, or take to the open ocean.”

“But the problem was that we didn’t have models in the U.S. for aquaculture in the extreme conditions of the open ocean, with its winds and 12-foot waves,” says Barnaby. “We had a long list of engineering and biological questions.”

Moving aquaculture to the open ocean
So, in 1996, Barnaby found grant funding to organize the nation’s first open-ocean aquaculture conference. The Portland, Maine, event attracted more than 200 people from 13 countries. “We focused on these questions: What do we know? What do we not know? What do we need to know to move off-shore?” says Barnaby.

The meeting fired up a group of UNH faculty and researchers that included marine biologists, ecologists, ocean engineers and others, who set to work on tackling the engineering, ecological and economic challenges of seafood farming in the open ocean.

Founded in 1998, funded by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and strong support from U.S. Senator Judd Gregg, the UNH Open Ocean Aquaculture Demonstration Project has piloted techniques for offshore culture of finfish and shellfish. The shellfish component of the project, led by Dr. Richard Langan and Forbes Horton, focused on developing techniques for mussel culture.

Why blue mussels?
“The blue mussel is a native species that’s hardy, readily seeds itself in the wild, requires no feeding, and provides nutritious and tasty human food,” says Barnaby. “Submerging the lines offshore, with its deeper water, stronger currents, colder water and superior water quality apparently produces a superior mussel of unparalleled taste, size and quality.”

The mussel larvae, or “spat,” seed themselves by attaching to “collector ropes” that are set out in the spring and fall Crews later strip the ropes and run the baby mussels through a machine that stuffs them into a tubular cotton mesh that holds the seed mussels to specialized grow-out ropes. . After a few weeks, the cotton mesh biodegrades, leaving the mussels attached to the grow-out ropes. More than 2,000 feet of growout rope can be suspended from each 600 ft. longline, eventually yielding 12,000 to 15,000 lbs of market-size mussels. Secured by 4,000-lb granite anchor blocks, the longlines sit three to five miles offshore, about 35 feet below the surface—far enough down that other boats won’t interfere with the lines and out of reach by starfish and other predators who live closer to the bottom.

Bringing open-ocean aquaculture research to commercial fishermen
Barnaby says he saw in open-ocean aquaculture “an opportunity for the region’s commercial fishermen, who had the boats, the boat-handling skills and the knowledge of the ocean environment and conditions.” In addition to the ongoing research, he says, “We also hosted meetings, wrote fact sheets, produced a video, and talked to commercial fishermen about the opportunities.”

Andy Lang “came to one of those meetings about three years ago and picked up a fact sheet about blue mussels. It seemed like a sound idea, although I knew it was a heavy investment in terms of equipment,” he says.

Before he’s finished, Lang says he’ll have invested about $100,000 of his own money into the project. He plans to continue his other fishing operations, filling in with sustainable 5000- to 6000-lb. monthly harvests of mussels.

“My own decision to make the heavy investment in equipment [for blue-mussel aquaculture] was predicated on the fact that the people involved were smart, skilled, knowledgeable, and committed,” says Lang. “If I had a problem, I’d know the people I’d be dealing with to help me solve it. UNH is a world leader in open-ocean aquaculture research. Cooperative Extension is the lifeblood of the University, always there for the general public when you need them.”

“Offshore mussel farming is an up-and-coming industry,” Lang says. “A lot of other fishermen are looking at it to see if it’s going to be reliable.” And as for consumers, “You don’t know what you’re missing ‘til you’ve tried these mussels.”

By Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension writer/editor

		Learn more: Growing Seafood in the Open Ocean: Offshore Aquaculture in the United States Shellfish photo gallery - Click on “Photo Gallery,” then on “Shellfish Aquaculture”