Medway booth provides educational picture of drug use

What can you do to combat a growing drug problem in Wayne County? Get a larger booth at the Wayne County Fair to educate the public during fair week.

That's what the Medway Drug Enforcement Agency has done at its booth underneath the grandstand.

Medway has more to offer at its 2014 fair booth to educate the public on the local efforts to combat drugs in Wayne County such as maps of the county -- along with Wooster, Rittman and Orrville city maps -- labeled with drug offenses, pictures of what using meth does to people through the years and a display with the ingredients used to make the problem substance.

One of Medway's chemical suits is on display coupled with a video showing one batch of the drug catching fire during a neutralization effort.

But the drug agency also had something new in a TV seized from a 2011 raid on a cocaine dealer's home in town, displaying pictures from past Medway raids.

Don Hall, director of Medway, said the dealer actually had about a dozen TVs set up in one room as his video game room, before Medway agents and other law enforcement officers paid him a visit.

Hall added "people love the maps" and check out what happens in or around their neighborhoods, as he explained the meth process to a few children who asked about the displays.

Patricia Bintliff, who is on the pharmaceutical diversion unit with Medway, said the pictures of the effects meth can have on a person's physical appearance are a top display fairgoers really liked, so it was back and bigger with more pictures.

And the fair booth really is just another component to get community input into solving the drug problem, as both Hall and Bintliff noted a new "Opiate Task Force" gets up and running to tackle one of the biggest concerns in Wayne County in the local drug trade.

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