A few years ago, agent Dennis Spruell served a search warrant looking for evidence a woman was selling drugs.
Spruell did not find the methamphetamine he was seeking, but he did find American Indian artifacts.
"We were trying to get her for meth but never did," said Spruell, who commands a local drug task force based in Cortez, Colo. "The Bureau of Land Management did get her for dealing in artifacts."
Spruell and some archaeological-crime experts maintain the theft of artifacts in the West is intertwined with methamphetamine, with drug addicts supporting their habits by stealing ancient relics and selling them to collectors. But direct links can be hard to find.
Of the 24 people last week charged in federal court with antiquities thefts and crimes, three have prior convictions for drug offenses. U.S. Attorney for Utah Brett Tolman did not link the alleged crimes to drugs, but he said an investigation is ongoing.
Federal land managers in a 2008 BLM report said a link has been discovered between artifact thefts and the methamphetamine trade.
In a high-profile artifact case in 2006 in Oregon, federal prosecutors said looting there was tied to methamphetamine. Thirteen people were convicted in the Oregon case; six were guilty of drug crimes.
Edmund Spinney, a Springfield, Ore., defense attorney, represented a defendant convicted of removing remains from federal land. Spinney said his client found an American Indian skeleton along the banks of the Deschutes River, tried to sell it 10 years later and would resent being linked to methamphetamine.
"He was just a hardworking kid," Spinney said, "not a drug dealer; not involved in the drug trade at all. He saw a chance to make a buck on something, on an object he collected as a kid."
The defendant received a 30-month prison sentence.
Martin McAllister, who runs a consulting firm called Archaeological Resource Investigations, said looting by meth addicts are so common in some parts of the West, police call them "twiggers." The name is a combination of "tweaker," the slang for a meth addict, and the word "digger."
"When you have a packet of artifacts in your hand, you might as well have a packet of money in your hand," McAllister said.
A looter might be paid $500 for a pot, tool or cloth but it sells for much more in New York, Europe or Asia, McAllister said. A pot stolen from New Mexico sold in 1992 in Paris for $400,000, he said.
"There are documented cases in the Southwest where looters and dealers have found Native Americans with substance-abuse problems, and they have hired them to steal artifacts from archaeological sites," McAllister said.
Spruell said his task force routinely finds artifacts while serving search warrants looking for drugs.
"They [drug users] dig artifacts because it's an easy theft item," Spruell said. "It's abundant here in southwestern Colorado."
None of last week's charges included drug crimes, and if there have been Utah cases in which someone stole artifacts to buy meth, law enforcement has not promoted them.
Doug Squire worked on a drug task force in Grand and San Juan counties from 1993 to 2004 and was the commander for most of those years. Squire said he could remember only one case involving drugs and artifacts. In that case, Squire said, the suspect was dealing in both.
"I don't recall [drugs and artifacts] being intertwined quite that badly," Squire said Monday.
A spokesman for the Salt Lake City office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration also said he was not aware of any cases involving the trafficking of drugs and artifacts.
Jeff Kent, a retired federal attorney who has prosecuted archaeology crimes in Oregon, said the most culpable people are collectors who pay money for stolen artifacts.
"I wouldn't call [drug users] victims but, I would say they are vulnerable to being persuaded by collectors to do these things so they can feed their drug habits."
