Niles police warn meth use is rising

Niles police are warning people about the rise of Meth found during drug investigations this year.

Investigations by the Niles Street Crimes Unit netted 11 total arrests this week. Niles Police Captain John Marshall says seven of those cases were linked to meth.

"A lot of this is the actual product that we're recovering from people who have it, sometimes in personal use quantities," Marshall said.

Other times, they find it ready to be sold in bulk.

While they have discovered some stationary and mobile meth labs, those operations are not found at the rate they once were in the early 2000s when homemade meth labs surfaced and were often shut down across Northeast Ohio.

Marshall believes meth is the drug users' turn to avoid deadly consequences linked to opioids and fentanyl.

"Because of the state those drugs put you in, there's so many overdoses and deaths related to overdoses from those drugs, they think this is a safe or safer alternative, and it just simply isn't," Marshall said.

He says the opioid epidemic is gravitating to other drugs and mixes of drugs.

"It's definitely not a problem that's going away, the problem is mutating a little bit and changing to another product, but the problem's still there," Marshall said.

While meth has been around for years, he believes its use is gradually rising and shifting from being found in more rural areas to more urban areas.