In the past year, he's helped take down Donald Brooks's historic meth lab. And while Brooks was middle-aged, Hill is also arresting plenty of college-age kids. In the big 13-member bust that snared Dillahunty, virtually all of the others were in their early and mid-20s.
Hill believes that while cops are supposed to report the discovery of a small-batch shake-and-bake bottle to federal authorities, few take the time to do more than mention it in an in-house report that never gets tallied by the feds. (And some don't even bother to do that.) He also thinks it's a "serious mistake" to underestimate the production capability of the shake-and-bake cooks.
"A one pot cook can make ten to 15 grams at a time and do so in just a few minutes," he e-mails to the Press. "That's over a half ounce at a time and they can do this many times a week easily surpassing the production of a large lab that makes 100-200 grams at a time and is only set up and used once or twice a month."
Hill loves Henson's openness approach, but thinks meth can be fought much more effectively at the national level. And there might just be a silver bullet. In 2006, Oregon, a state once so meth-plagued that it gave us the "Faces of Meth" mugshot series, enacted legislation making medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine prescription-only. Since that elegantly simple solution was enacted, meth lab seizures have fallen from 192 in 2005 to a mere ten last year. Meth-related arrests were half of what they were in 2006.
Hill acknowledges that the Mexican cartels would leap at the chance to try to fill the domestic void, but thinks that assets could be redeployed to partially check that flow at the border. (In 2010, Mississippi became the second state to pass such a bill. However, experts predict that lobbyists from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Merck, mindful of the collective $500 million a year these cold medicines bring to their coffers, would fight a similar national bill tooth and nail.)
Hill also believes that drug education should be mandatory in high schools. Kids will be exposed to drugs at some time in their lives, he says, but at least they would know what they were getting into. The 11-year-old catfish skinner James Durham certainly didn't have that wisdom. He went on to flunk three grades at school, and it took him seven years to get his GED in prison, and he says it was the only time his mother was ever proud of him.
And Durham says he is desperately seeking a way to make her proud again. Much of Lufkin continues to heckle and "jeckle" him even as he heads for his longest stint in the pen. They've heard his lies and broken promises before.
Durham doesn't care. He dreams that his sentences will be overturned and that someone will make a movie of his life, earning him millions and making his mama proud, he says.
Or failing that, he could serve his time and become a drug counselor, spend the rest of his days telling kids not to do as he has done.
