Fighting drug cartels is a team effort

"Heavener, Heavener, Heavener,” Akagi recalls. "I said, ‘I want to see this with my own eyes and see what’s going on.’”

Akagi uses this as an example of the importance of law enforcement working together — in 2005, now and tomorrow — in the battle against methamphetamine.

DEA went into the Heavener area to assist the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control, the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies in dismantling a Mexican drug-trafficking organization "that was very, very active over there,” Akagi said.

"It’s no mistake that this organization set up shop there,” he said.

An organized cell of narcotics traffickers was identified. Undercover agents were used and large quantities of methamphetamine were purchased in and around Heavener in Le Flore County. Farley Ward, a district attorney at that time in the area, was quoted in 2006 as saying, "During the course of the investigation, officers found that over a quarter of a million dollars in methamphetamine was being trafficked in Le Flore County in approximately a month’s time.”