This Associated Press story about trouble in the oil fields was in the local paper the other day along with the somewhat related news that unemployment in Montana now stands at only 6.2 percent, two percent below the national average, but almost double what it is in neighboring North Dakota where most of the oil fields are.

GLASGOW, Mont. – Drug crimes in eastern Montana have more than doubled. Assaults in Dickinson, N.D., have increased fivefold in just two years. And the once-sleepy town of Plentywood, Mont., has seen three assaults with weapons in the past few months – a prospect previously unheard of in the tiny community tucked against the Canada border.

Booming oil production has brought tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenues to communities across a wide expanse of the northern Plains. But it also has brought more crime, forcing law enforcement from the U.S. and Canada to deal with spiking offenses ranging from drug trafficking and gun crimes to prostitution.

The region is emerging as one of the top oil-producing areas of North America. Officials say up to 30,000 more workers could descend on the Bakken oil fields of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan in the next few years.

The recent kidnapping and brutal murder of Montana teacher Sherry Arnold tragically underscored the changes brought on by the rapid pace of drilling. Two men are in custody, but the case has left residents shaken and led to a huge rise in applications to carry concealed weapons in Montana and North Dakota.

In the wake of Arnold’s killing in the town of Sidney, which is quickly being overtaken by the boom, federal prosecutors began a two-day retreat Monday in Glasgow for about 150 police officers, sheriffs, federal agents and other law enforcement to craft a common strategy to deal with rising crime.

Towns like Plentywood, population 1,600, were until recently places “you could send your kids to the pool in the summertime on their bikes and not have to worry about it,” said Sheridan County Attorney Steven Howard. “All those things are changing,” he said, adding that the Arnold case “has had a chilling effect on our people.”

We’ve heard a lot about the Sherry Arnold murder in recent months. In some ways, it’s probably like the 1860’s gold rush in this part of the country or when they built the railroad not long after with what they call “sprawling man camps” for all the workers who are being paid handsomely. Some small percentage of young men working hard and making lots of money always seem to get into trouble and, understandably, the locals don’t like it much.

I don’t know quite what to do with this blog yet…

Over and over I come across items that are not related to economics, finance, and investing that would surely be of interest to others, but I just never get around to getting them up as posts, a good example being this Associated Press story from before our trip to Las Vegas about the ongoing rise in prescription drug use across the country.

Sales of the nation’s two most popular prescription painkillers have exploded in new parts of the country, an Associated Press analysis shows, worrying experts who say the push to relieve patients’ suffering is spawning an addiction epidemic.

From New York’s Staten Island to Santa Fe, N.M., Drug Enforcement Administration figures show dramatic rises between 2000 and 2010 in the distribution of oxycodone, the key ingredient in OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. Some places saw sales rise sixteenfold.

Meanwhile, the distribution of hydrocodone, the key ingredient in Vicodin, Norco and Lortab, is rising in Appalachia, the original epicenter of the painkiller epidemic, as well as in the Midwest.

The increases have coincided with a wave of overdose deaths, pharmacy robberies and other problems in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Florida and other states.

Wow – New York, Florida, and Tennessee, an odd combination. A report the other day on one of the national news shows detailed how teenagers grab handfuls of their parents’ prescription drugs and throw them all into a big bowl at parties for their friends to grab handfuls out of in order to liven things up a bit. A sign of the times, to be sure.