A young girl was walking the family dog in Canton Monday night on a dead-end section of Johnson Road in Canton when she saw something odd. Her parents called the police, who discovered the object was a locked trash tote. It contained chemicals, raw materials and apparatus for cooking meth.

The police are analyzing what they found, and looking for fingerprints and other evidence. St. Lawrence county sheriff Kevin Wells says that although meth-related crimes aren’t frequent in St. Lawrence County in comparison to other rural areas, the police here are on the alert for signs of meth production:

We’re always vigilant for it, we do a lot of training for emergency first responders just to make sure we’re always up on it because we know the other issues that have happened in other places in the country, and we want to make sure we’re ever-vigilant for those kinds of issues. 

Wells adds that this find may or may not be related to the discoveries earlier this month of meth lab remains in Canton and Rensselaer Falls—those resulted in the arrests of two men and one woman. For North Country Public Radio, I’m Nora Flaherty.