ETOWAH, Tenn. — The man stamped around the front porch, hands twitching, jaw grinding nervously as police questioned him. A black-and-white Chihuahua yipped at police as they searched a car, talked with the man’s girlfriend and looked through the house.

The officers lead the man across the front yard to a black SUV, where 10th Judicial Drug Task Force director Mike Hall searches his pockets and pulls out a paper with his name on it — Justin Crumley.

“So I’m going to jail today?” Mr. Crumley asked.

“Yeah, you’re going to jail,” Mr. Hall said.

Mr. Crumley was one of four people the drug task force arrested Thursday on charges of promotion to manufacture methamphetamine.

The task force is going after about 120 people in Bradley, McMinn, Monroe and Polk counties who are suspects in a meth manufacturing technique known as “smurfing.”

That’s when meth users visit multiple pharmacies and buy medicines containing pseudoephedrine, Mr. Hall said. The addicts either use the pills to make their own meth or give them to a meth cooker and get back some drugs for themselves.

Task force agents used a statewide database called the Tennessee Methamphetamine Intelligence System to find out who’s buying pseudoephedrine. The system was created in 2005 to accompany a new law limiting pseudoephedrine purchases.

Large purchases serve as red flags for investigators, who build cases by researching criminal histories and working with informants.

Under the law, someone who buys more than 20 grams in a given time period can be charged with promotion to manufacture meth, Mr. Hall said. Twenty grams of pseudoephedrine is about 25 boxes of pills, he said.

Morphing methods

The database has been invaluable for investigators as the nature of meth manufacture evolves, agents said.

In the last year, the task force made maybe two or three cases on people for smurfing, Mr. Hall said. The current 120 suspects came from just three months of investigation.

The 10th DTF recently was named the best narcotics team in Tennessee for the second year in a row. Mr. Hall has been elected president of the association for 2009.

Tommy Farmer, director of the Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force, said meth lab seizures dropped by nearly half after Tennessee cracked down on pseudoephedrine products in 2005.

At that time meth trafficking from Mexican “superlabs” ramped up, bringing meth to users and addicts across the United States, Mr. Hall said.

But recent restrictions on pseudoephedrine access in Mexico has meant more smurfing, he said.

Pseudoephedrine sale tracking varies by state, but Mr. Farmer said Tennessee shares information with some other states and is working to expand its network.

On the hunt, with warrants

When a crackdown comes, word spreads fast in the rural district, undercover task force agents said.

The group spent Thursday checking on a stack of 17 warrants. Some suspects weren’t home. Others had recently moved.

As the team bounced from one house to the next along sparsely populated county roads, neighbors warily eyed the black SUVs and bulletproof vests with POLICE spelled out on the back.

Most neighbors helped, telling officers who lived in the homes and when they’d last seen the ones police were looking for.

“That’s the one thing about meth, good citizens will help because it affects them tremendously,” Mr. Hall said.

Each contact led to more information on meth labs in other locations. But some arrestees were high on meth and wouldn’t talk.

“Some of them, you can’t get them to talk,” one agent said as he shook his head. “With cocaine or marijuana, they’ll talk to you, but tweakers (meth users) are different.”

Some people at the Etowah, Tenn., house where Mr. Crumley was arrested admitted they’d cooked meth in the home. Three school-aged children stayed there. Those children were taken into custody by child protective services Thursday evening.

“That’s the true victims, the kids. They always are,” Mr. Hall said.

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