 Would you rather pay $650 or $66 for a smartphone? Simple. With the Appalachian Advantage Plan, pay less upfront and then just a few dollars more every month. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The arrival of meth into Pike County has brought about more changes than just the type of drug that's listed on the arrest citation. Like the police chief, Chris Edmund says there are no simple arrests if meth is involved. If you go down for a normal shoplifting case, you'll find a meth on somebody now. So it's going from a misdemeanor's theft to a felony possession too. So that goes to the grandeur and it all goes with it. So everything we're dealing with now is a felony case when it comes to drugs. And the entire process through the court system is much more time intensive for an officer when he or she charges someone with a felony. So they have to do their case reports on it, they have to do their indictment memorandums, they have to get emailed about a grand jury, they have to show up on a grand jury day, go to the grand jury and wait until they die all of them. And typically we got about 12 to 13 each month, 14. You're taking a lot of times 12 to 13 officers on a Wednesday during grand jury that they're coming here just waiting to go over to the grand jury. If Edmund says if the number of meth related arrests continue to rise, the Pikeville Police Department will find itself understaffed. We push ourselves in so many directions, you know, we push ourselves to the schools a lot, try to spend a lot of time there. We don't want this meth epidemic to take us out of the schools because we need to be there. We need to be in our neighborhoods, you know, we get down in neighborhoods then we're right back out there for three or four or five hours because of that. So yeah, it's a big flux of workforce that we've never had before. The Pikeville Police Department isn't the only department feeling the pinch. Every other police agency in eastern Kentucky is unfortunately fighting the same battle. In Pikeville, I'm Shannon Deskins, EKB News.