The drug once called speed has come roaring back as a powdery plague on
America's heartland...

BILLINGS--It's a full-moon Friday night, and Jennifer, 25, a hard-core loker
(smoker of methamphetamine, known as crank) has been wide awake around the
clock for almost four days. She isn't yet seeing plastic people, shadow men
or transparent spiders-just three of the fabled hallucinations of the
Billings, Mont., crank scene, a hyperstimulated subculture sickeningly rich
in slang and folklore. But she is feeling pangs of remorse about her
three-year-old. On Monday, when she left her parents' house, where she has
been living since dropping out of college, she promised the daughter she
calls "my angel" that Mommy would be right back. Sadly, though, crank
squeezes time like an accordion, and since Jennifer swore her solemn
maternal oath, approximately 100 hours have passed in a sleepless, virtually
food-free blur of hurried parking-lot drug deals, marathon bouts at the
video poker machine and frantic cigarette runs to the mini-mart.

Now, perched at the bar of a downtown dance club where her dealer boyfriend
ditched her ages ago with just $4 for drinks, Jennifer scratches at her
wrists and elbows; her eyes dart from pool table to door; and her butt
compulsively scoots around inside her baggy jeans. Crank kills the appetite,
just wipes it out, and while many women she knows view this as a selling
point, Jennifer doesn't want to lose more weight. Hoping to supplement the
child-support check that turns to drugs the day it hits her mailbox, she'd
applied for a job as a cocktail waitress, but her meth-shrunken breasts
didn't fill the skimpy costume.

"This drug makes you lose everything," she says, gulping a shot of bourbon
and root-beer schnapps to calm her freaking neurotransmitters. "I'm not
afraid, though. I've cranked for seven years," Jennifer says. (Her name has
been changed by TIME, as have the names and various identifying details of
other crank users cited.) "I'm getting pretty used to losing everything."

All over Billings (pop. 91,000), the scrappy hub city of the northwestern
Great Plains, home to oil refineries, regional medical centers and countless
smoke-filled fistfight barrooms where cowboys from Wyoming to South Dakota
come for some urban R. and R., people are losing everything to crank-their
families, their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts and, perhaps
irretrievably, their minds. The potent, man-made stimulant-invented 80 years
ago in Japan, issued to soldiers in World War II, prescribed to chunky
housewives in the '50s, known to '60s hippies as speed and now sometimes
passed out to antsy third-graders with attention-deficit disorder-is, at
least in its crumbly, powdered street form, an upper that leads straight down.

This isn't the carefully calibrated dose of methamphetamine dispensed by
pharmacists in pill form. This is crank-smoked, snorted or injected-and it
makes people live like coyotes, says a cop standing outside a south-side
Billings bungalow while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration toss
the place for drugs. "This town is coming unhinged," another cop says. As if
to prove their point, the suspected crank house whose street-side picture
windows are sheathed with tinfoil (sunlight is the cranker's natural enemy)
starts belching evidence of criminal lunacy-hypodermic needles clogged with
meth, automatic pistols of several calibers and an AK-47 with a loaded
100-round clip.

Next come the makings for amateur bombs: jars of gunpowder, lengths of pipe
and a homemade blasting cap fashioned from fuse cord and a rifle shell.
Given crank's capacity for rendering even casual users clinically psychotic
(the transparent spiders weave webs inside the brain long after the meth has
left one's system), the arsenal is probably unnecessary, real weapons
amassed for a figmentary showdown.

Marijuana and cocaine were this city's illegal substances of choice until
about four years ago, when a blizzard of crank swept in. "It's pretty much
all we deal with now," says Sergeant Tim O'Connell, who heads the city's
multiagency drug task force. For law enforcers, methamphetamine is a tough
drug to pin down. It's sold hand to hand behind closed doors, in homes and
motel rooms, in the style of a Tupperware party. Worse, its production
requires little overhead. Ephedrine, an over-the-counter cold medication,
can be combined with a shopping list of chemicals easily obtained from
stores and industrial-supply companies (common drain cleaners figure in some
formulas) and cooked in a kitchen sink from recipes downloaded from the
Internet. Billings cops call these homely setups "Beavis and Butt-head labs."

Why crank? And why now? The crank epidemic is new enough, and its mostly
white, often rural victims quiet enough, that those questions are just
starting to be asked. "The current culture is 'Keep going, keep moving and
do it all.' That would be the initial draw, I think," says Nancy
Waite-O'Brien, Ph.D., director of psychological services at the Betty Ford
Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Add to this the wannabe-supermodel factor.
"Women," observes Waite-O'Brien, "get into meth because they think it will
manage weight. Which I suppose it sometimes does-at first."

American drug warriors, welcome to your nightmare-a do-it-yourself guerrilla
narcotic spread by paranoid insomniacs who think they see federal agents
through every keyhole, even when it's just the Domino's Pizza man. In cities
large and small across the West and Midwest crank belt, from Oregon to Iowa,
where the drug is known as the poor man's cocaine in towns that barely had
cocaine in the first place, the drug arrives nonstop from every direction
and by every imaginable route. Wrapped by the ounce and the pound in
duct-tape eggs that can be stashed in the air vent of a car, crank comes up
the interstate from California and Mexico, where it's produced in massive
quantities by organized criminal gangs.

Sometimes it even comes by UPS. In one of Billings' biggest recent crank
seizures, O'Connell, wearing the company's brown uniform, intercepted a
5-lb. package at the UPS warehouse one morning (street value: a quarter of a
million dollars) and delivered it to the address on the label. The men who
answered the doorbell were arrested. Dennis Paxinos, the Yellowstone County
attorney, requested that the men's bail be set at $250,000, but the judge
involved reduced the sum to a mere $1,000. Paxinos publicly called the
decision "asinine." Within a few hours of his release, one of the suspects
was back in jail on another charge.

A lot of Billings crank has to travel no farther than across the street,
from the apartment building where it's made to the tavern or motel room
where it's sold. So pervasive is this bathtub crank that a Billings teenager
trying to kick drugs had to quit her job as a hotel maid because she was
constantly finding traces of meth in the bathrooms she cleaned. While on
assignment for this story, TIME's writer and photographer watched from the
lobby of their motel as a notorious Billings crank dealer, facing state
charges at the time, received a steady stream of predawn customers in a room
directly across the courtyard. ("You know he's in," the night clerk said,
"when the phone lines all light up at once.") Approached for an interview
about his trade, the wanted man, a tattooed giant on a bed surrounded by a
clutch of weary party girls, merely said, "I'm busy. I don't have time now."
Last week the alleged dealer was arrested in another Billings motel in a
raid that netted several ounces of what police identified as meth. Said a
motel employee about her fugitive lodger: "The only problem is that when he
leaves, the mirrors in his room are always broken and all the light bulbs
are missing." (Lokers without a pipe at hand typically smoke crank from a
broken light bulb.)

"How are you going to cut off the supply of something you can produce at
home?" asks Mona Sumner, chief operations officer of the Rimrock Foundation,
Billings' (and Montana's) largest drug-rehab facility. Sumner, in her 30
years at Rimrock, has seen many a drug craze come and go, but she has never
felt this frightened or frustrated. Crank admissions to her facility have
tripled in the past four years.

Crank is too cheap, too available and too addictive, Sumner says. "Honestly,
I don't know where it's going." The crankers who show up at the clinic
require, on average, four weeks of detox, often with the use of
antipsychotic drugs, before the counselors can even get through to them. On
a wall in the Rimrock recreation room hangs a homemade poster showing a
medevac helicopter like those that land at nearby St. Vincent Hospital. The
poster is intended to reassure paranoid recovering crankers, but many are so
unstrung that they fear the helicopter is after them.

Delusions about sinister aircraft are among the milder symptoms of the
Billings area's mounting crank plague. East on Interstate 90, in the town of
Livingston, the body of a young woman, Angela Brown, was found rotting in a
river, and local law-enforcement officials are investigating a Billings meth
connection. A few months earlier, south of Billings, in Hardin, an
admittedly cranked-out 17-year-old, Jonathan Wayne Vandersloot, whose head
hadn't touched a pillow in days, allegedly shot dead his sleeping
grandparents, scooped up some jewelry, guns and cash, and took off in their
pickup. Vandersloot's first trial ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors plan to
retry him this fall.

Farther south, crank has decimated the Northern Cheyenne Reservation,
populated by descendants of the warriors who routed Custer at the Battle of
the Little Big Horn. "Crank will do to the reservations what Custer
couldn't," says Bonnie Pipe, clinical director of a tribal recovery center
in the town of Lame Deer. When James Walksalong, chairman of the local
school board, brought in a team of drug-sniffing dogs last year, kids
climbed out of classroom windows, and by the end of the day the dogs had
detected 30 instances of drug residue. On reservations throughout Montana
and Wyoming, the drug has led to increased domestic abuse, a flurry of
audacious daylight burglaries and overloaded medical facilities.

David Morales, a truant officer for Billings School District 2 and a
recovering addict, deals with the meth problem too often in the form of 10-
and 11-year-olds either on the drug or suffering abuse at the hands of
spun-out relatives. "I call them the ghost children," he says. "I see them
all the time."

Recently Morales called into his office a beautiful little six-year-old girl
who had been missing a lot of school. "I asked her if she needed an alarm
clock to help her wake up on time," he recalls, "and all of a sudden she
breaks down crying." It seems that under the nose of her allegedly
crank-addicted mother, the girl had been raped repeatedly by a teenage
relative, a sadistic sort given to dousing his hands in fingernail-polish
remover, setting them aflame and then blowing out the fire before he was
burned. He warned the girl that he would ignite her if she spoke out.
Morales tells of another girl, 11, whose meth-crazed mother prostituted her
for a onetime windfall of $360. The girl thought this was normal life,
Morales says. Mom needed the money.

The E.R. doctors at Deaconess Billings clinic have their own ugly tales to
tell. The crank casualties who appear in the E.R. break down into three
basic types, according to Dr. Larry McEvoy, who heads the emergency-medicine
department: "First there's the 'I've hit bottom' presentation. They've used
for 10 days, haven't eaten or slept and have run out of drugs. They're wiped
out, feel heavy and can hardly move. Type 2 is the acute public-disturbance
person. They start fighting with people or screaming in the street. Often
they're impossible to interview because they're so paranoid. Third are
people who use crank a lot and notice that their arms are numb or they're
having trouble breathing."

McEvoy has seen a radical increase in all three types: "The amounts we see
are overwhelming. As a physician, I regard it as the worst possible drug. It
really burns people out." And it can do so almost instantly, in McEvoy's
experience.

"One night a boy came in so out of control he thought I was the police and
the police were trying to kill or kidnap him. He was incredibly
violent-biting, slapping, grabbing doctors' private parts. We got hold of
his folks and found out he's usually a good student. Even if he does this
only once every two years, given his psychotic reaction to the drug, he
could end up killing someone.

"I've seen 14-year-old girls with infected arms who have been stuck a bunch
of times by people who aren't very good at hitting veins. And I'm frequently
surprised by the number of people who don't use it every day but don't feel
bad about dabbling in it. They seem to be unaware of the precipice they're
hanging over."

Janet Cousrouf, Rimrock's director of nursing, says crank carries with it
almost a two-week residue of paranoia. "Since the detox time is longer than
most companies are willing to pay for, our biggest problem is insurance."

Cousrouf frankly despairs about the crank plague and in particular its
spread from generation to generation. "A lot of the crankers are products of
crank mothers, or they have fetal alcohol syndrome. And we're seeing a whole
new era of fetal drug syndrome-underdeveloped brain stems, SIDS deaths."
Cousrouf believes crank is one of the main culprits in these cases.

But from their sober point of view, doctors and nurses can tell you only so
much. The best way to see what crank has done to Billings-and perhaps
understand the appeal of a drug made from drain-cleaning crystals-is to
spend time with crankers, both active and reformed. A group of them loiter
outside the Montana Rescue Mission, a private Christian charity that offers
a bed to crash in and, if they choose, a religion-based recovery program,
Reality and Christ.

Tom, 24, a husky blond kid who says he has been drug free for 17 days, is
fresh out of jail for stealing a handgun he planned to sell for drug cash.
The gun belonged to his girlfriend's father, who happened to be a deputy
sheriff. "How dumb can you get?" Tom asks. After flashing a driver's license
photo to show how much thinner he was in his meth days, Tom effuses about
his newfound love of Christ. A few minutes later he reaches into his jeans
jacket and pulls out a scorched, homemade glass crank pipe.

"To be honest," he says, "if I had some now, I'd smoke it."

Huddled on the ground against a wall, Justin and Kim, 24 and 18, scoff at
Tom's pipe. They're bangers-they shoot their crank-and anyone who does
different is crazy, they say. "We've been off it 11 days," says Justin. "I'm
trying to get my tolerance back down so it won't take me so much to get spun
out," he explains. As narcotics go, crank is famously cheap-a $20 bundle
keeps you buzzing for up to 12 jaw-grinding, heart-pounding hours-but
frequent users still have trouble affording it. For one thing, they tend to
get grandiose while high. A recovering addict (in his one year of crank use,
he went from reigning as high school homecoming king to serving a robbery
sentence in a state penitentiary) remembers buying drinks for the house
every time he set foot in a strange bar.

When asked how he's staying away from the needle, Justin produces a plastic
medicine dropper and pokes his arm with it. "Calms me down," he says. "I
quit smoking the same way, by sucking on a crayon." Like so many other
Billings geeters-yet one more slang term-Justin is a teller of wild tales.
He shows off the sunken veins in his arms and describes how he once had to
gaff his shot of crank-inject it straight into his jugular vein-while
watching himself in a rearview mirror. "The jugular," he says, nodding
earnestly, "the only vein in the body that won't roll over on you."

Hovering in the mission's doorway, a sweatshirt hood drawn over his pale,
thin face, is Dracula. That's what the others call him, and he answers to
it. Trembling, high and radically withdrawn, Dracula refuses to speak a
word, but he does show off an arm full of tattoos. The intricate, dense,
almost abstract blue-green filigree seems to say, "This is your brain on
crank." The next show-and-tell item is the eyeglass case in which Dracula
keeps his syringe and razor blade. The case's interior is obsessively
decoupaged with tiny, interlocking pictures snipped from magazines.

Dracula is a great artist, Justin says, and if art is defined as manic
patternmaking for no apparent purpose, he's right.

Across town, at a table in the modest apartment where she supposes she'll
have to go on living until she finds a job, Alicia is quitting crank. Once
an upwardly mobile employee of a FORTUNE 500 company based in a large
Southwestern city, Alicia is in her mid-30s but looks 50. Her face is pocked
and pitted from her attempts to pick out the crystals of methamphetamine
that, she swears, used to form under her skin. Alicia moved to Montana
several years ago in hopes of escaping the bigger city's crank scene. She
says the subcutaneous crystals aren't a problem now; the Billings meth is
not so pure. Not that it matters, because she's quitting.

Tomorrow.

Right now, however, she's lighting one last pipeful in a ritual as intricate
as a Japanese tea ceremony. She ignites a propane torch and holds the blue
flame beneath the smudge of powder in her clear glass pipe. Crank is smoked
differently than crack cocaine; it takes less heat and melts instantly
(burning away the impurities, Alicia says). Once the drug vaporizes in a
white cloud, Alicia inhales. She then repeats the process. The residues in
the pipe, called frosties, are infinitely valuable to crankers, and Alicia
keeps torching them until they're gone.

But such solitary crank use isn't the norm in Billings. Crank is a party
drug here, a social thing, smoked, injected and snorted by tight-knit groups
holed up in houses behind blacked-out windows, talking nonstop about their
hopes and dreams and smoking a joint now and then or drinking a beer to
mellow out the high.

"You think you're with your best friends in the whole world," remembers the
toppled homecoming king. "You stay up all night saying things like 'Man, I'd
die for you,' and then in the morning everybody crashes and you realize you
hate these people. They disgust you."

Paula, 19, who has been clean for six months following a stay at Rimrock,
remembers crank parties as surreal blendings of light and darkness, reality
and dreams. "The sun goes up and down and you lose track, and pretty soon
you're hearing laughs and whispers and seeing things dart around on the
floor. Then the other people turn into monsters."

Boyish, sardonic and stunningly intelligent, Paula, who has never been
anywhere else, calls Billings the crank capital of the universe: "The people
in my neighborhood all learned crank from their parents. I mostly hung out
with 13- and 14-year-olds. It's getting younger and younger every year."

Part of crank's appeal to Paula, and apparently to most users, is that it
helped her get things done. It made her feel capable, on top of things. She
could party into the wee hours (often having sex with virtual strangers
because, as she puts it, once you've stayed up all night with someone, you
feel pretty close to them), go to work the next day, then come home and
clean her room. "I even started depending on it to go to school," she says.

Then came what paula claims was a three-month-long, nearly sleepless crank
run that left her homeless, expelled from school and seeing ghouls behind
every tree. Crankers tend to exaggerate, but her memories of the streak have
that patented methamphetamine exactitude. "I knew I had to get nutrition, so
every day I had a pudding snack, an applesauce and a little carton of milk,"
she says.

Her diet wasn't all so wholesome, though. "Also, I was smoking tons of pot
just to calm my nerves."

For Jennifer, the conscience-stricken mother, the party's still not over.
Another crank-warped week has passed; another Friday night has rolled
around; and though she's thinner, paler and less coherent, she's feeling
considerably richer owing to the arrival this morning of her monthly
child-support check. Swaying nautically on her favorite barstool, she
reports that she has made some changes in her life in the past few days.
She's moved out of her parents' place, leaving her daughter behind, and has
taken up residence in a rented house with two male roommates who share her
taste for meth and, unlike her family, don't "make me feel guilty every time
they look at me."

That's where the party continues when the bars close. The tiny house, across
the tracks and across the freeway, is supernaturally tidy. In the spotless
kitchen, at a spotless table next to a box filled with hundreds of empty
beer cans all conscientiously rinsed and crushed (when crankers decide to
clean house, they clean house), Jennifer and her roommates smoke and jabber
while clock hands turn from 3 to 4 to 5. The oldest roommate-his fortyish,
gaunt face so stiff and lifeless it looks taxidermied-veers from a fond
recollection of a camping trip to a paranoid rant about "hidden cameras" and
warnings to TIME's photographer and reporter that "we know how to protect
ourselves in this house."

With daybreak nearing, disaster strikes. Jennifer discovers she has lost her
purse, child-support check and all. A panic ensues. The house is searched,
and the driveway. Someone hatches a plan to drive downtown and retrace
Jennifer's steps, which won't be easy. "Where did you leave it?" her friends
keep asking, but she just sighs and insists she can't remember.

Probably the same place she left her looks, her education, her jobs, her
little angel. Somewhere out there in crank city, in the dark-a dark that, no
matter how hard Jennifer tries to stop it, always turns to dawn.

- -With reporting by Patrick Dawson on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation

CRANK BREAKDOWN

- -METHAMPHETAMINE HYDROCHLORIDE (a.k.a. crank) can be smoked, injected,
snorted or swallowed. It stimulates massive release of the pleasure-causing
neurotransmitters adrenaline and dopamine in the brain and inhibits their
breakdown

- -IMMEDIATE EFFECTS (lasting from 2 to 14 hrs. per dose) include euphoria,
sexual arousal, elevated heart rate, tremor, dry mouth, loss of appetite,
insomnia and paranoia, followed by agitation and irritability

- -LONG-TERM EFFECTS include malnutrition, psychosis, depression, memory loss
and possible damage to the heart, brain, lungs and liver

- -PHARMACEUTICAL VERSIONS of the drug (Desoxyn Gradumet) are approved for
treatment of obesity and attention-deficit disorder
---------------------------

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett