This book is about lunacy. More particularly, it is about a substance that makes lunatics out of the once sound-minded: the mechanic known to belly up to the bar for an hour before heading home, the hairdresser who always had a weakness, but rarely the money, for a line of cocaine. So often, they are people who previously harbored normal appetites for the release recreational drugs and alcohol provide, only to lose all sense of restraint to a mysterious and alien influence. This is to say the typical user does not begin sinless, but neither is he or she necessarily born doomed to some single-minded, self-destructive pursuit.
There is something inexplicably post-apocalyptic about the meth addict’s existence. The color seems to have washed out of his or her world. As a former addict once put it, meth compels its user to “live like a coyote” – homeless, and constantly foraging for mere sustenance. But this coyote is, it should be remembered, a human being who once lived among family and friends in a house filled with things she or he owned.
When thinking of the meth addict, it is also tempting to draw comparisons to Gollum, that nasty little creature in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m sure I am not the first to do so. Once upon a time, Gollum was a Hobbit named Smeagol, though fans of the books or movies know that even as Smeagol he was no exemplary soul. He did, after all, strangle his best friend in order to take possession of the Ring. But it was obvious from the beginning that the Ring had possession of him, and as the years went by, he forgot everything he had ever been, lost what little decency or conscience he’d had. As he tells it in the movie, “We forgot the taste of bread, the sound of trees, the softness of the wind, we even forgot our own name.” He became a scraggly, near-naked hunchback, until at the end he was nothing more than his deep hunger for “my Preciousssss.” He would gladly have killed anyone who got in the way of his retrieval of the Ring, but in the end, it was his own hunger that killed him. Lunacy, indeed, if not pure evil.
Beyond being about lunacy, this book is also about a very modern phenomenon, yet one with antecedents. Amphetamine was not first derived in the nineties at the dawn of the epidemic, as some might presume, but more than a century ago. Today methamphetamine is far and away the most prevalent synthetic drug clandestinely manufactured in the U.S. The trajectory is astonishing. In 1991 the DEA seized approximately 21 million dosage units of methamphetamine nationwide. The following year the number skyrocketed to 48 million. In 1996 more than 74 million units were seized, and in 2002 the number vaulted to an incredible 118 million dosage units. And they were seized in the most unlikely of places – the countryside. Here, supplies were plentiful and meth manufacturers and dealers knew small-town police were not ready for them. Turns out there was no safer haven than the bathtubs of doublewides tucked in amongst the verdant hills of southern Iowa, in machine shops on the edge of the scenic hamlets of eastern Kansas, or on the small farms of western Missouri. And they have moved far beyond the Heartland, leaving in their wake a blight of insanity and violence that can only be described as cartoonlike.
In 1995 a man suffering from amphetamine psychosis broke into a San Diego National Guard armory and commandeered an unarmed Abrams tank. He then went on a rampage through residential neighborhoods, crushing cars, fire hydrants, anything that stood in his way. After taking the tank onto a freeway, he was finally stopped but refused to surrender, whereupon a police officer climbed atop the tank and shot the man through the heart.
Sixty miles to the north in Aguanga, a mobile home caught on fire after a mysterious explosion. According to witnesses at the scene, a group of seven or eight men ran out, fleeing for their lives, while outside the trailer a mother, holding her ten-year-old son, screamed that her other three children were still inside. When neighbors came running up to see if they could help, they were threatened by the men and warned away. No attempt was made to save the children, and when authorities arrived, the men scattered. Twelve hours later, firefighters waded through the charred remains to find the bodies of the three children, ages three, two, and one. The cause of the fire was determined to have been a methamphetamine lab explosion. When the men who had fled were finally rounded up, it was learned that they were not only meth “cooks” and dealers, but heavy users.
Paranoia is a hallmark of the meth user’s lunacy. This is not the quaint and common form of the affliction whereby the neighbor lady thinks her phone is being tapped, but the eerily acute kind that causes users to become scared witless because they believe they are being chased by invisible spiders and plastic people. In their minds, they have enemies by the score who are plotting and moving against them, and it is this quasi-reality, permeated with a scent of threat, that lends the meth culture its extraordinary violence. Remarkably few people fatally overdose on meth (only a few hundred in any given year out of millions of users); what kills is the paranoia it inspires. The meth addict feels that, other than meth itself, his best friend is his automatic weapon.
But such an epidemic would not be possible were it not for recent extravagances in mainstream American culture, at the command of the determined individual blessed with access to boundless information. Though methamphetamine wasn’t first derived here, it is a drug tailor made for a nation of do-it-yourselfers relentlessly drawn to the prospect, or at least to the illusion, of controlling time. Separatory funnels, Bunsen burners, molecular bits of synthetics, automatic weapons, cryptic formulae hardwired into the synapses of an electrified brain –- such are the things that clutter the meth addict’s life, most of which are require the application of otherwise wholesome skills acquired in high school chemistry class and boot camp. A certain corner of the American psyche likes the idea of methamphetamine, if not the reality.
This book is also a story about people who have lived in the drug’s weird ether. To a certain extent it is my story, as it has cut a broad enough swath through my life that I feel uniquely qualified to expound upon it (more on that in a moment). In spite of this grim personal history, I would like to point out that I am not a prude when it comes to recreational drug use. Indeed, I have always been of the mind that, for many, life can be excruciatingly dull without something to give the day a little pop. But neither am I a flaming libertine who doesn’t recognize a bad thing when he sees it.
Methamphetamine has been characterized by many experts as the greatest threat to a civilization ever posed by a drug. The threat is unique because the substance is unique. First, methamphetamine is extraordinarily addictive. Experienced drug rehab workers say it’s the hardest drug to kick that they have ever come across, with ninety-five percent of the people who become addicted never able to quit. And there is a very specific reason for this. Meth operates at the most fundamental level of pleasure: in effect, it hijacks the body’s biochemical reward system by priming the brain with the neurotransmitter dopamine, and then prevents its “re-uptake,” essentially keeping it from leaving the system. This is why a meth high lasts so many hours or days, instead of the few minutes or hours typical of the effects of other drugs. Second, meth’s effects on the body are often permanent, and include psychosis and severe depression. Of course, some few die as a result of an overdose, and nothing is so permanent as death. Finally, and most terrifying of all, meth can be easily manufactured by the user, and even mutated into other drugs that produce a variety of effects. In essence, the user becomes the supplier, a kind of mom-and-pop pharmaceutical company. Within four or five hours, anyone with the equipment, ingredients and a recipe (all of which are readily available) will have enough of the drug to impart a strong appetite to the inclined set at a quiet rural high school – an appetite which quickly becomes ravenous.
As with all recreational drugs, meth has spawned its own unique culture, one complete with jargon and folklore. Being inexpensive to manufacture, it has become a favorite of the working poor, taking seed, as the stereotype would have it, in trailer parks and among the denizens of motorcycle gangs. Stereotypes of course are often little more than cruel exaggerations, but sometimes they contain a kernel of truth, or at least are not without substance. Like it or not, statistics bear out widely-held preconceptions of the methamphetamine culture. People arrested for manufacturing or possessing meth are overwhelmingly poor and white. They are also lacking in higher education, though the habit is gradually percolating up through the social-economic spectrum. The Hell’s Angels have trafficked in the drug for decades, distributing yellow-white crystals nationwide in the black leather pannier bags of countless roaring Harleys. It is, as the condescending white-collar coke addict might say, the drug of choice among white trash.
What makes the story of amphetamine and methamphetamine so remarkable is the unprecedented nature of the epidemic itself. Civilized society cannot simply scorch meth where it grows as it would a poppy or pot field. Meth is an idea applied to a mixture of things commonly part of our everyday lives, things we cannot simply annihilate. Even if we were capable of removing all the physical components, the idea would remain, and our inherent inventiveness would find a way to see the idea through to fruition. In the animal kingdom of human ideas, meth is the cockroach: omnipresent and indestructible.
And, as with the cockroach, it is a very old idea. Over the past half-century, amphetamines have drifted in and out of vogue, their popularity driven by the winds of fashion, youth culture, and necessity. Amphetamines have been a favorite of housewives, soldiers, working folks, and students. In the main, it has been a drug favored by the industrious, but the aimless ways of youth culture have certainly held their sway.
Imagine the life and work of Jack Kerouac without the influence of Bennies. Similarly, the prospects of the Mods of Britain, darting off on their Italian scooters to seaside towns to rumble on bank holidays, hardly seems likely without little pills they affectionately called Purple Hearts. The Northern Soul movement, also of Britain, combined amphetamine pill fare with a taste for exceedingly rare Motown forty-five records, and blended them into a very specific identity. Together, all of these micro-cultures, along with widespread use by mainstream American and European society, would foster the conditions necessary for the epidemic that was to come.
But unlike most drugs, meth has found a particularly enthusiastic market among women. According to the Koch Crime Institute, they are more likely to use methamphetamine than cocaine. There is a straightforward theory accounting for this fact, as meth is by far the less expensive of the two central nervous system stimulants, as well as a great suppressor of appetite. Meth is renowned for bringing a user’s weight down in dramatic fashion, and has become ever more popular in an age that celebrates the sleek profile so assiduously. But there is another less direct theory worthy of consideration.
Speculation in certain quarters has it that both men and women who are drawn to meth may be so in part as a result of various pre-existing psychological conditions. Many female users suffer from a controversial condition called borderline personality disorder (BPD). People with BPD – seventy-five percent of whom are women – lead wildly chaotic personal lives, and have the peculiar inability to really “see” themselves moving through their lives from day to day, moment to moment, in any meaningful way. More specifically, they don’t feel truly attached to the people around them, nor do they feel a part of the everyday ebb and flow of their own experience. Meth, however, may provide some temporary relief from the chaos of their tortured interior lives, allowing them – if only for a few hours – to feel intense personal attachment. Indeed, meth is something of a love drug.
But the story of amphetamine and methamphetamine (which is amphetamine with a methyl molecule attached) begins in earnest at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the military application of the drug. Amphetamine’s primary military value, of course, lay in its capacity to control, if only for a few days, the body clocks of fighting forces, an edge that has become a tactical necessity in modern warfare. Similarly, the current epidemic is a result of a civilian population that has become addicted not only to the physical ecstasy but to the temporary emotional bliss the drug provides. And that is the existential allure of meth: the illusion that one has conquered sadness and, indeed, time itself.
Time is a key element not only to the psychic effect of the drug, but to its rise in popularity. You may wonder why this book is structured the way it is, alternating between my personal journey and the global history of the meth epidemic. Beyond the possibility that I have been somewhat influenced by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s unique way of storytelling – those brief vignettes that flit from past to present and back again – there is a reason this rather unconventional structure is peculiarly suited to this book. The earliest moments in the history of meth are seamlessly connected to the effects it has upon the present, and thus it makes sense to present the two seemingly disconnected facets simultaneously. By alternating a contemporary tale of amphetamine’s veiled nature and devastating effects with the history of the drug itself, the epidemic can be seen in the immediate context of the forces that brought it to bear. What happened may not be nearly so important as why it happened. And that, of course, is open to interpretation.
My qualifications for telling the personal story will become all too clear in the early chapters, but the reader may wonder by what authority I recount the history of meth. After all, my background is in software. The truth is that I began this book in the first place because at the time I initially became aware of the nightmare unfolding right under my nose, there was very little accessible information on methamphetamine. America had not yet awakened to the enormity of the problem, and even the so-called experts – the doctors, the licensed chemical dependency counselors, and (especially) the law enforcement professionals – knew very little about it. These were the people I initially turned to for help, which they were more often than not unable to give. So I set out to do my own research, and, this being the information age, it was not, as they say, rocket science. At the risk of sounding a bit elitist myself, if a sub-literate, dentally deficient bumpkin can master the delicate and dangerous chemistry of meth production, is it not conceivable that a reasonably well-educated software professional could look up some facts about the product?
Even so, I do not pretend that what I offer here is a comprehensive history of the meth epidemic or, for that matter, an authoritative chronicle of the ill-conceived war on drugs. And no doubt my view of at least some historical events has been colored somewhat by my personal experience. However, the dates and events have been recounted as accurately as possible. And though, as implied above, historical events may be open to interpretation, this has always been the case with history. Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once wrote (and the metaphor seems apt here), “History is a needle / for putting men asleep / anointed with the poison / of all they want to keep.”1 At the very least, the “global history” I present in these pages is a starting point, and the reader is certainly encouraged to do further research. I have listed a few resources at the back.
I wrote this book because I strongly believe it tells a story that needs to be told. It is an open-ended tale, still unfolding on both the personal and global fronts, even as I write this. But from my perspective, it does have a clear beginning. The story begins close to home, with someone who was once very close to me. I won’t begin with “once upon a time,” as it has been thoroughly used up. And the vote is still out on whether a “happily ever after” will ever come to pass…
1 “On Hearing A Name Long Unspoken,” st. 3, Flowers For Hitler (1964).