A Turner man had pleaded guilty to trafficking more than 30 pounds of methamphetamine.
Brian Strout, 46, entered his guilty plea to conspiracy to distribute controlled substances on Monday in federal court in Concord, New Hampshire, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
His wife, Tara Christian, who was indicted alongside him in August 2022, had pleaded guilty to a similar charge on Dec. 7, 2023, the Justice Department said Monday.
Investigators were tipped off to Strout and Christian’s trafficking in July 2022 after they arrested a drug dealer who had just bought a pound of meth, according to the Concord Monitor. The dealer agreed to cooperate with police, naming Strout as a source of meth and arranging another purchase, the newspaper reported at the time.
On July 7, 2022, investigators surveilling Strout and Christian observed them loading bags into their car outside a casino in Everett, Massachusetts, according to the Justice Department.
They then headed north toward New Hampshire on Interstate 93.
When police stopped them, officers found just under six pounds of meth in Strout and Christian’s vehicle. Investigators subsequently intercepted a FedEx package containing nearly 25 pounds of meth before it reached their home in Turner, according to the Justice Department.
Chief Judge Landya McCafferty has scheduled a sentencing hearing for Strout for May 6, 2024.
Strout faces a maximum of life in prison, at least five years of supervised release and a fine up to $10 million.
It’s the latest case involving large quantities of meth moving across New England.
A crackdown on small-time meth manufacturing over the past decade has significantly reduced the number of labs encountered in Maine and other states. In Maine, meth labs have fallen from a peak of 126 in 2016 to just two in 2021, the most recent year for which the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency has published data. A similar decline has been seen nationally, with lab busts falling from a high of 13,657 in 2012 to a low of 890 in 2019, the most recent year for which data are available from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
But as labs have declined, the volume of meth being trafficking into Maine has skyrocketed, increasing 215 percent between 2019 and 2021. It’s becoming a common occurrence for Maine police to seize one, two, four, 14 or even 92 pounds of meth in a single bust, often being pumped into the state by more sophisticated traffickers drawn by undiminished demand.
