SWINGING AT THE SHADOWS: THE CURSE OF CRYSTAL METH

More Addictive Than Crack Cocaine, The Street Drug Is Sweeping Across
Canada Like A Toxic Wave

REGINA -- Rain, saliva and tears soaked the pistol in Mike Lund's
mouth. He stood alone in a field near a baseball diamond in Regina,
tasting the metal tip of the black .22-calibre Walther.

In that suicidal moment, he didn't think about the power of crystal
methamphetamine.

He could hardly remember his former life as a store manager who
negotiated wholesale deals across North America. He didn't understand
how meth had reduced him to an addict, a petty criminal, a small-time
drug dealer.

Now, seven months later, under house arrest, the 24-year-old stitches
together the memories from his two years on meth: the gang members who
threatened to kill him; the junkie who tried to cut off his own toe;
the friend who prowled a rooftop in a dressing gown, swinging a meat
cleaver at shadows.

Mr. Lund has decided to tell this dark story, first to The Globe and
Mail and then to anybody who will hear his warning. He's worried about
other people like him, he says, about the otherwise ordinary lives
shattered by meth's arrival in places that haven't seen such a
powerful new drug in decades.

"Right now, at this very moment, two Grade 10 girls are smoking meth
for the very first time at a house over there," he said, gesturing
down a street lined with mature trees. "These girls are coming out of
nice, peach-coloured homes. . . . They have these beautiful homes and
families who love them very much, they have brothers and sisters, they
drive nice cars, and they're probably going to be whoring themselves
on the corner so they can smoke meth, four months from now."

That's the heart of the fear about crystal meth. The drug is already
rampant among young B.C. street people. What alarms police, doctors,
professors and others who study methamphetamines, however, is the way
crystal meth has spread across Canada in the past few years.

It's a toxic wave moving from west to east, they say. A dose of the
white crystals often costs less than a pack of cigarettes, it's more
addictive than crack cocaine, and it's more likely to cause psychosis
than any other drug on the street.

The awful potential of meth has already been unleashed in the United
States, where the wave started in California and crashed into the
Midwest, plaguing small towns and making the word methamphetamine more
common than the words marijuana or cocaine in U.S. courtrooms.

Meth hasn't hit Canada so hard, but the emerging patterns are
similar.

Jennifer Vornbrock, a manager at Vancouver Coastal Health, chaired
meetings of meth experts last month and discovered that the scourge
among her city's young street people has become a problem for
middle-class neighbourhoods across the country.

"It's getting into suburbia and small rural towns that aren't used to
dealing with a substance of this magnitude," she said.

Two years ago, almost nobody in Regina had heard of crystal meth. Mike
Lund certainly had no idea what the stuff looked like.

He was raised in a comfortable house with his mother and brother,
earned good grades in school, played violin with a junior symphony,
took up classical guitar, and won trophies in hockey, basketball and
baseball.

His strongest talent emerged at age 17, when the long-haired teenager
took a part-time job at a store that sells bath products.

The young man rose quickly from clerk to manager. He cut his hair
short and was featured in a local newspaper as a promising
entrepreneur. Introducing the store's handmade soaps and bath bombs to
the wholesale and export markets, he negotiated deals with clients in
California, Nevada, New York and across Canada.

His first encounter with meth happened on a warm evening in June,
2002. He was finishing his day at the soap store and feeling tired
because he had recently started a second job at an auto garage.

A regular customer invited him to his apartment a few blocks away. He
had never visited this guy before, but he was impressed when he
climbed the stairs and opened a door into a pristine room with
cream-coloured carpets, suspended halogen lights, spare furniture and
a glass coffee table.

His new friend welcomed him, pulled out a small bottle and shook a
white rock onto the table. He said it would ease Mr. Lund's fatigue.

The rock was chopped into powder, and he snorted a line through a
glass tube. "This stuff burns, unlike any other drug. It feels like
your brain is going to explode, like it just hurts very badly. I'm
sitting there, I've got tears streaming down my face, and I'm looking
at him going, 'Why did you make me do this?' Two seconds after the
pain, though. . . ." He snapped his fingers.

"Ting! Your brain goes Atten-SHUN! Like boom, all right! You're
talking a mile a minute, you can't get enough air into your lungs to
say all the words you want to say."

The high lasted all night and into the next morning, leaving him
sleepless but alert. He started taking the drug almost every day. The
street phrase for turning people into meth addicts is "making
monsters," he says, and that's what happened to him.

"I ceased being a human being and became a monster."

Not everybody gets hooked on meth so quickly, and some users can
manage the cravings. But law-enforcement officials say Mr. Lund's
intense reaction to his first sample was typical.

"There is no recreational use of meth," said Douglas Culver, national
co-ordinator of RCMP synthetic drug operations. "You can't just use it
occasionally. It's like a disease."

The N-methyl derivative of amphetamine works like other stimulants
such as cocaine, except the euphoria can last eight to 12 hours. Some
experts say its addictiveness is pure chemistry, but others point to
the lure of heightened awareness in a fast-paced society. Club-goers
can play all night, while truckers, taxi drivers, prostitutes and
students can work longer hours.

"Unlike other drugs, crystal meth has spanned across all kinds of
demographics," said Caitlin Padgett, co-ordinator of an outreach group
for meth users in Vancouver. "There's just a seductiveness to not sleeping."

Although national statistics are scare, the number of Canadians
succumbing to the seduction seems to be growing. Data from Health
Canada's Drug Analysis Service, which tests the drugs seized by police
across the country, show the number of meth samples from British
Columbia increased 50 per cent between 2001 and 2003; Alberta rose 20
per cent; Ontario 108 per cent; Manitoba 141 per cent; Quebec 457 per
cent; and Saskatchewan 857 per cent.

"It's being seized on a regular basis now," said Corporal Kevin
Lamontagne of the Manitoba RCMP drug section.

The RCMP responded to the growing threat this year by assigning 26 officers
to search for clandestine meth laboratories, full time. Police on the
Prairies say they're particularly worried because of meth's low price, the
easy availability of farm fertilizer used as an ingredient and meth's
nickname among their colleagues in the United States: prairie wildfire.

Warnings are showing up in Prairie towns such as Prince Albert, Sask.,
which has a population of 40,000 and about 140 meth addicts in
counselling.

Those numbers are still comparatively low, however. Police didn't
uncover any meth labs in Saskatchewan last year. During the same
period south of the border, police in Missouri raided 2,858
laboratories.

Similar statistics flashed on-screen at the Western Summit on
Methamphetamine in Vancouver last month, and the figures puzzled the
international group of experts. The numbers have increased sharply,
but the drug still isn't common in Canada. Why has this substance
gained a reputation as a serious threat?

"The drug debate is always plagued by one moral panic or another,"
notes Cameron Duff, director of the Australian Drug Foundation's
Centre for Youth Drug Studies and a keynote speaker at the conference.
"Perhaps at the moment crystal meth is the drug generating that
anxiety, and it might be somewhat out of proportion to the actual
reality of the problem."

Mr. Duff paused for thought.

"But with crystal meth, it does seem to be associated with more
problems, more frequently, than any other drug," he continued. "If you
look at all the problems associated with this drug, you think, well,
maybe your priority should be on the drug that causes the most harm,
irrespective of the number of users."

The nasty side of meth emerged several months after Mr. Lund's first
taste.

His dealer became his best friend, and they travelled to Calgary
together to buy drugs. During his first long stretch of sleepless
days, he found himself hallucinating while driving along the
Trans-Canada Highway. He saw dragons, old women and children, and kept
screeching to a stop from 130 kilometres an hour because he thought he
had hit them. Later he blacked out and woke up, still driving, on an
unmarked dirt road with the gas gauge inching lower. The motor
sputtered to a stop just as he was coasting into a town with a gas
station.

The meth dealer moved into Mr. Lund's house that fall, and started
losing his mind. Mr. Lund noticed him standing in front of a bathroom
mirror with blood dripping off his face as he gouged imaginary
blemishes with a metal pick. Then Mr. Lund found videotapes of the
dealer using drugs to rape women in Mr. Lund's bed. He smashed the
tapes, kicked him out of the house -- and became a dealer himself.

"I'd met with all his connections, and I said, 'You're done.'"

Economics is the backbone of meth's popularity. Mr. Lund sold the drug
in Regina for about $140 a gram, or $14 a dose. Desperation sometimes
raised the price -- somebody gave him a rusted 1982 Nissan for two
grams, and another addict traded his 1980 Chevy van for 1.5 grams --
but it was usually cheap. Studies have found street values as low as
$4 or $5 a dose elsewhere in Canada.

Supply drives prices down. Amateurs make the drug with recipes from
the Internet, ingredients from the local pharmacy and hardware store,
and a healthy dose of courage for mixing volatile chemicals.

RCMP figures show the number of meth-cooking operations discovered by
police has grown in Canada, from fewer than 10 in 1998 to 39 last
year. U.S. busts during the same years were far more dramatic, rising
from 1,627 labs to 9,763 last year The sheer number of meth cooks
south of the border has forced many states to pass cleanup laws
requiring decontamination of homes before they're suitable for living.

Technicians such as Dan Hannan, of Assured Decontamination in
Minnesota, climb into protective suits with breathing masks and mop up
the puddles of solvents. The usual meth factory is a roach-infested
home with an overflowing cat-litter box, he says, but his crews have
also been called to motels, mobile homes, outhouses, tree-houses and
even an ice-fishing hut.

Understandably, Mr. Lund doesn't talk about the criminal organization
that supplied his drugs. But he laughs when asked about his T-shirt
emblazoned with the Big Red Machine logo, a trademark of the Hells
Angels. He wants to get something printed on the back, he says, such
as, "I screwed up my life for a criminal organization and all I got
was a lousy T-shirt."

In fact, "screwed up" hardly begins to describe Mr. Lund's short
career as a drug dealer. He once saw an addict offer to settle a debt
by cutting off his own baby toe with a serrated kitchen knife. The man
started sawing but only got halfway through the tough sinews, so
somebody else had to finish the job.

Mr. Lund says he was never so cruel. He remains proud of the fact that
he never introduced anybody to the drug, even though he jokes about
his own depiction of himself as the "Mother Teresa of the meth world."

He once visited an addict's house and found him in a psychotic state,
smashing telephones. The crazed man rushed outside and ripped wires
out of Mr. Lund's car, explaining that listening devices were
everywhere. Mr. Lund walked to a drugstore, bought sleeping pills,
slipped them into the addict's drink and helped the man's girlfriend
get him into bed.

Shortly afterward, he visited another friend and found him on the roof
wearing a dressing gown and wielding a meat cleaver, shouting that he
had cornered the "shadow people." Mr. Lund persuaded him to climb down.

It wasn't so easy dealing with the dealers, especially when meth made
them paranoid. One dealer secretly stashed $14,000 in an air vent in
the basement of Mr. Lund's rented house, forgot about it, and stole
Mr. Lund's car on the assumption that he had taken the cash.

Another dealer put a gun to his head during an argument about drugs,
and that's when Mr. Lund started carrying weapons himself. He was
still selling perfumed bath products during the day, but his addiction
was spilling into the rest of his life.

One day in March, two thugs parked a van outside the soap shop and
cranked their stereo so loud the display windows rattled. One of them
confronted him in the store about a drug debt, shoved him around,
threatened his life and stole some beauty products.

Mr. Lund took the threat seriously. "Somewhere along the way I'd
pissed somebody off. So I left my store and I never came back."

Without saying goodbye to anyone, he started camping in the basement
of a house belonging to his girlfriend's mother. His family reported
him missing and he saw his own photo on the evening news, but he was
too afraid to go home.

It got worse. His girlfriend cheated on him, he started laundering
money and police finally caught him with drugs, counterfeit cash and a
sawed-off shotgun in his car.

Shortly after his release from police custody he found himself
standing in a park one rainy day, after spending four days awake on
meth, fingering the trigger of a snub-nosed Walther he had traded for
$10 worth of drugs. He was utterly transformed, from a clean-cut
entrepreneur into a street tough who wore a leather skullcap, studded
leather cuffs, and a bracelet of bullets on his wrist. And he was
thinking about how a bullet would feel in the roof of his mouth.

"I just snapped," he said.

The list of health effects from prolonged use of crystal meth is long
and ugly, as with most other narcotics. What makes meth unique,
researchers say, is how often the drug drives people insane. Users get
violent and paranoid. They tend to stay awake for days, binging on the
drug, which can lead to psychosis.

Richard Rawson, a psychologist at the University of California who has
studied drug addiction for 30 years, said researchers don't fully
understand why.

"People get crazy on meth like they don't on other drugs," he
said.

At the brink, Mr. Lund pulled back. He threw the gun in a creek and
went to bed for two days. It was the most dangerous moment of his
struggle with meth, even though it would be months before he escaped
its clutches. He was arrested again in June, released on bail, and
arrested again in September. This time he wasn't released and spent a
month at a remand centre.

He wept for days as he lived without drugs for the first time in two
years.

The withdrawal symptoms weren't as awful as the full realization of
what had happened, he said.

"Going to jail, that was it, that was rock bottom. And then sobering
up and going, 'Holy fuck, I need help.' "

Mr. Lund pleaded guilty to what proved to be Regina's first case of
crystal meth drug trafficking, as well as to charges of weapons
offences and using counterfeit currency. The judge sentenced him to 18
months house arrest with an electronic ankle bracelet tracking his
movements.

When he got home, his mother, Wendy Winter, 51, showed him a
sketchbook of watercolours she did to express her frustration about
his addiction. The sketches formed an alphabet series, with captions
such as: "W is for weeping," "and wondering."

Ms. Winter still wonders about her son. "I can't say I'm 100 per cent
sure he's out of the woods," she said.

When asked whether he still craves meth, Mr. Lund took a long drag on
his cigarette and stubbed it out. He exhaled, and stared through the
smoke with his blue eyes. "Every day," he said, quietly. "Every day."

But he wants to rebuild his life. He spends most days back at his old
job in the soap store and several nights a week at Narcotics
Anonymous. He has started playing guitar again and he's been sober for
more than two months.

How many more Canadians will be transformed this way? Some experts say
meth isn't any worse than the heroin and cocaine that swept across the
country in recent decades. Others believe meth will burn through
Canada unlike any other drug.

Mr. Lund says there's no time for debate.

"It has to stop," he said. "These monsters are being created at such
high velocity that you can't contain this fire. If you try to contain
it, it's going to blow up in your face. You need to extinguish it
right now."