CRYSTAL IN THE COUNTY

Cheap, dangerous and highly addictive, crystal methamphetamine has hit the
small towns of Perth County hard. Police claim it started when Dan McCool
brought the recipe from Texas. He says meth would eventually have made it
here without him.

Stratford, Ont.--Dan McCool is the picture of a hard-working
jack-of-all-trades. Lean, muscled and curly haired, he gets up at 6 every
morning, throws on jeans and a ball cap and doesn't usually get home to his
mother's house until after 10 at night.

He hustles for seeding work from a handful of farmers. He does repairs for
a swamp-side millwright operation. Some employers know of his past. Some do
not.

Most who do know won't give him a job, because McCool, 42, is the man
police around here say brought crystal methamphetamine to Perth County.

Crystal is one of the most addictive drugs, with a host of properties that
also make it one of the most appealing. It's cheap, between $50 to $100 a
gram, which means for as little as $5, users can get a high that lasts
longer than most other drugs.

And it is now the biggest drug problem here, police say.

Stratford, a small city 150 km southwest of Toronto, is a tourist
destination known for its Shakespearean theatre festival, fine restaurants
and elegant Victorian architecture. Yet in the city and the tiny towns that
radiate from here, crystal meth is hooking hundreds and it's on the rise.
It's in the schools, on the streets and addiction has soared.

It's also one of Stratford's best-kept secrets.

"I don't think people want to think it's happening here," says Catharine
Hardman, director of Choices for Change, the local addiction treatment
centre. "Stratford is a very nice, very beautiful place to be. People don't
like to think there's this side of it."

In the last five years, the number of people seeking treatment for
amphetamines has increased from just six in 2000 to 62 in 2004.

Meth seizures and arrests by the Stratford Police Service during that time
went from one to 19, while the Ontario Provincial Police, laid 100 drug
charges and 72 criminal code charges related to meth since 2002. The OPP
clandestine lab team dismantled 17 labs.

"We're getting killed with it right now," says a detective with the
Stratford police drug unit who is active in undercover investigations. "We
spend most of our time on it. In fact, I said the other day, 'Wouldn't it
be nice to just do a weed grow again?'"

Crystal methamphetamine, also known as ice, glass, jib and tina, is a more
pure and potent form of speed, the drug that became all the rage in the
1970s until a series of tragedies led to the famous tagline: Speed kills.

Users tend to feel euphoric, alert and awake. But it is also extremely
addictive and comes with some frightening side effects. Aside from the
cardiac and stroke risk, users can end up psychotic, hallucinating or
violent. Some see bugs on their skin and try to pick them off, leaving
sores. Highs are often followed by deep depression.

Cheaper than crack cocaine, meth is now a major presence on the streets of
the western provinces. Police and medical experts are mobilizing for its
onslaught in Ontario. But that has yet to happen.

Except in Perth County, two hours drive southwest of Toronto.

The area is ideally suited to meth-making: It's farm country that allows
meth cooks to work without being noticed. They've placed portable labs in
the corners of farmers' fields and most recently, in the backs of trucks.
Many of the products needed to make meth -- like anhydrous ammonia, a
fertilizer -- are in good supply, says Ontario Provincial Police
clandestine lab coordinator Det. Sgt. Paul Henry.

Police say meth is spreading. Already it's popping up more often in
Waterloo region, and police there say it comes from Perth.

"It's a sad, sad thing," says Sgt. Ray Massicotte, who heads the Waterloo
Regional Police drug unit. "Once it hits like it did out west it's not
going to be pretty,"

But where did it come from? Police point to the man who was living in
Texas, where he was convicted of meth possession in 2001. He was deported
back to Canada and began to cook it here.

That man is McCool. His was the first clandestine meth lab to be discovered
in Perth County, in Nov. 2002.

"You were the person who brought the method to Ontario and were described
as the chemist," said the Stratford judge who sentenced McCool to two years
in prison.

"Okay, so I brought the recipe back here. But there's been meth here a lot
longer than when I got here," says McCool, taking a break from grinding a
metal plate inside the millwright's farm shed, and pulling out a
hand-rolled cigarette.

"They've gotta pin it on someone," he bristles.

"It's big in the U.S. It's big out west. Just 'cause I brought it in at
this day and time doesn't make me the only one. If I didn't, someone else
would."

He was caught, he says, because a friend turned informant. He was making
the crystal in a barn in Monkton, west of Stratford.

Police staked the place out. Armed with a warrant, they barged in wearing
camouflage, sticks sprouting from their helmets. Police also searched
McCool's apartment, and the raid rounded up nine people and a reported 280
grams of meth, worth about $25,000.

He spent 15 months of a two-year sentence in two Kingston jails for
possession, production and trafficking of meth. He was released on parole,
but sent back after he failed a surprise urine test, he says. He was still
smoking crystal meth.

Now fresh off parole, he's trying to find work, in factories, a cab
company, but no one will hire him steady: "They likely think I'm cooking it
up still, but I ain't got nothing to do with it anymore. It just shows you
can't change what people think."

He'd open a business if the sandblasting equipment and vehicles he bought
before he was arrested were returned. But it's on the property of a former
friend who won't give it back and he doesn't have receipts, he says. The
police won't help, he says.

McCool, an experienced auto wrecker, says he just wants to be productive.

Young people, the biggest crystal meth users, don't have to go far to get
the drug in Perth County. Chances are they can find it in school.

The town of Listowel, in the county's heartland, is surrounded by cow
pastures and Mennonites dressed all in black, driving horse-drawn buggies.

"You can find meth in two minutes at the school and, if not, have a list of
numbers of people who will bike down and give it to you," says Kelly, a
Listowel District Secondary School student who asked her real name not be
used. "There's never a day you can't get meth."

Some students said that meth is readily available.

While Kelly says students do not use the drug at school, she's aware of
dealers who make use of bicycles and cars to hook youth up with the drug.

One young man even runs a "meth taxi." He drives into town every day to
pick up a few students. They buy and smoke the meth in his car and later
return to school, Kelly says.

School principal Jackie Campbell said there is a zero tolerance policy
toward drugs at school, and that police are invited to search lockers once
a year. There have been no meth incidents at school, either.

Even so, she says, "I'm sure if a student wanted to find it they could find
it."

She said the school established a student-led anti-drug committee last
year. While crystal meth hasn't been its focus, Campbell says, "Maybe we
should be looking at this issue."

At one "meth party" in a sparse apartment in Listowel with but a bare
mattress, dirty dishes and flickering television on the floor, people were
snorting endless lines of crystal, Kelly says. She watched as one teenager
thought he was still playing a Nintendo game, even though it had been
turned off. "That really scared me," she says.

A number of students -- who tend not to go to school -- also do it in the
town of St. Mary's, says Nickey Muma, 18, who says she has smoked meth six
times. There is a house they usually party at, where the speakers pump out
loud music. One man has sores all over his body, some oozing, she says. She
has seen users shuddering and shaking.

"It's a dirty drug," says Muma, who will graduate this year. It's been a
few weeks since she smoked it last, but she still feels the crystals in her
lungs. It hurts all the way into her back.

She says the price of meth makes it appealing to students, but also that
there are few other options.

"There's nothing to do. No mall, no movie theatre."

McCool grew up in a farmhouse in Wingham, north of Stratford. He left home
at 16 after a fight with his father, who died shortly after. He now lives
with his mother in Mitchell, another picturesque town in Perth whose
best-known resident was one of hockey's first superstars, Howie Morenz.

While working in the U.S. 14 years ago, McCool met a woman and settled in a
small town south of Fort Worth, Texas. They had a son who is now 10, hunts
imaginary Antarctic animals and loves Pokemon.

Immigration caught up with McCool and deported him back to Canada in 1999.
Undeterred, he flew to Mexico and crossed back into the U.S. on foot.

He was in the auto wrecking business, and it was after a client offered him
drugs instead of cash as payment that he began his crystal meth odyssey.

The client taught McCool how to cook the stuff and McCool started making it
for himself.

In 2001 he was surrounded in a Wal-Mart parking lot by immigration and
narcotics officers. McCool had a small baggie of meth in his pocket, he
says. After months in jail, he was shipped to Toronto.

McCool found himself back where he started, in Perth County. Without his
family. Without his possessions.

And also without work. So he started cooking meth.

The recipe, known as the "Nazi" or Birch Reduction method, requires no heat
source. Some of the ingredients are readily available in rural settings:
Anhydrous ammonia, sulphuric acid, lithium from batteries, ephedrine from
cold medication. It is mixed in large pails until translucent, rock-like
crystals form.

There are other recipes, but police claim that, from McCool, dozens of
others learned how to cook meth in Perth County, starting an epidemic.

"What do they think? I had a class every night at 7?" McCool responds,
shaking his head. "Other people learned, sure that's what happened. But I
didn't teach them. Look at the hundreds making it now. They get the recipes
off the Internet."

For Mike, a 41-year-old addict Stratford, the move from crack to meth was easy.

"Crack is far more expensive. The high lasts only a few minutes and soon
your $100 a gram is gone. But crystal will send you flying to the moon and
keep you there for hours," says Mike, who asked that his last name not be
published. He recently finished an addiction treatment program and hopes to
return to work.

"The first time I tried crystal, there was no need for anything else. For
the next six months it was just me and crystal."

Every day he fights cravings for the drug that he first smoked at a party
and looked like a crushed chandelier. "You can romance the stuff and start
salivating. The word itself is such a trigger."

Except that in his darkest days, he saw faces in the trees and bugs
crawling on the walls.

Dr. Miriam Mann, chief of emergency medicine at Stratford General Hospital,
says she is seeing the effects of meth in her emergency room: Young people
psychotic or freaked out. She knows when police have broken up a meth lab,
because users come in experiencing withdrawal and depression.

"A lot of meth users end up in emerg," she says. It's also one of the most
difficult drugs to kick, she adds.

And with so many people abusing it in the area, some find it hard to stay
away from crystal.

Shannon Clark, 22, and Ryan Dekker, 24, used to party with meth in her
garage in the tiny village of Ethel.

Clark would sit, spaced out, while Dekker, his shaggy hair bouncing, would
play his electric guitar non-stop. Along with their friends, they would
spend hours scrawling brooding poetry on the clapboard table. Dekker would
often write, inexplicably, about goats.

They smoked it, swallowed it whole -- wrapped in a piece of tissue, a
method called "parachuting" -- and snorted it. "It felt like glass going
through your face," Clark says.

"I used to think putting things up your nose was glamorous, like Marilyn
Monroe," she says. It was only after her younger sister told her she no
longer looked up to her that Clark stopped. She now works at a gas station.

Before Dekker stopped, he had already been in treatment twice and in jail
for a night.

He and his friend were swarmed by cops who mistook them for suspects in a
gas-bar robbery. So he swallowed his entire pocketful of meth -- a full
gram. He doesn't remember it, but he was swinging from the jail cell bars
and frothing at the mouth.

The next morning, he walked up a stranger's driveway and asked a hanging
flower pot for a cigarette.

Dekker was also a dealer, a job that made him feel powerful and needed.
"You got so much attention; you had what everyone else wanted." He says his
customers had been getting younger.

Last summer he began living in his car so he could more conveniently get to
his customers and suppliers.

His world revolved more and more around meth.

"I accepted that one of my friends or I was going to die. I was waiting for
it to happen. Then I decided I didn't want it to be me, so I quit."

Now both have to stay away from meth. Clark is about to be married. She is
faced with the unpleasant task of barring friends who still do meth from
her wedding. Dekker visited a pal recently only to find him weighing his
stash of crystal on a scale. After hesitating, Dekker turned on his heel
and left.

In the five months he's been "clean," he's fallen off the wagon a few
times, but not with meth.

"I still think about (meth), think about doing needles. It makes my mouth
water," he says, rapidly balling and opening his fists.

"It gets intense."

But McCool disagrees. "I don't think it's highly addictive at all," he
says. "All it did for me is keep me awake. Didn't make my head spin or make
me see stars.

"If you're seeing spaceships," he adds, "you probably shouldn't be doing
it. You're not supposed to hallucinate off the shit."

It made him more himself, he says. "You just fit in with the rest of the
world and you actually get work done. So I don't see anything wrong with it."

In fact, he adds, it should be legalized.

McCool is just taking life day by day. He works relentlessly, and scrapes
by. He talks to his son on the telephone every so often. He doesn't much
speak to his wife. He was deported before a divorce was finalized, he says.

His past still haunts him though.

No one will give him permanent work. And, since he returned home from the
pen, the meth chemists have come knocking. He's been bombarded with
requests to start cooking again, or to offer advice on fixing bad batches
- -- something he says he won't do.

"The cops are watching me," he says, his eyes narrowing. "I'm not going
back to jail."