LIFE AND METH

Since the Arrival of Cheap, Homemade Speed in East Texas Five Years
Ago, the Drug Has Torn Apart Countless Families and Turned Kids Into
Addicts--and There's No End in Sight.

Until five or six years ago, Kent Graham, a narcotics investigator
from Nacogdoches County, could count on finding one or two
methamphetamine labs a year. Now, strangers stop Graham at the grocery
store or take him aside at Wal-Mart--one man even approached him when
he was hunting ducks--to tell him about the neighbors who are making
homemade speed or the house down the street where it is being sold.
Since 1999, while assigned to the Deep East Texas Regional Narcotics
Trafficking Task Force, Graham has tracked down more than 350 meth
labs in the Piney Woods. He has found meth ingredients in motel rooms,
car trunks, mobile homes, suitcases, sheds, toolboxes, and clearings
in the woods.

Some labs have been sophisticated operations equipped with
professional-grade glassware and surveillance systems; others have had
just a hot plate, a couple of Pyrex bowls, and ingredients bought at
the hardware store. "Pretty much any place you can think of, someone
has cooked dope there," he said. "It gets so bad that I'll tell my
partner, 'Well, I'm not on meth, and you're not on meth. So that's two
of us.'" One afternoon in March, Graham and I climbed into his pickup
and drove to an unincorporated community on the banks of the Angelina
River, the first of many places he would show me where meth has taken
root. It was one of the early days of spring, and the red-clay soil
and blue sky spread out before us. Graham turned off of U.S. 59 and
steered toward the river, down county roads where the pines grew so
densely that the afternoon looked as if it had turned to dusk. Graham,
who is 38, works in plainclothes; that day, he was wearing his usual
faded blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a beat-up ball cap pulled down over
his longish, sandy hair. His stories usually involve a hunting
feat--shooting a ten-point buck that he came upon unexpectedly or
stopping a wild boar in its tracks--but as he drove, he talked about
meth. "All along this river, you have the grandchildren and
great-grandchildren of bootleggers and moonshiners," he said. "In the
old days, they made their own whiskey. Now it's meth. Sometimes the
whole family is cooking dope." Graham drove farther into the woods,
until the roads began to dead-end. "Meth is the most destructive thing
I've ever seen," he said. Part of its allure in a region hit hard by
unemployment is that its high comes cheap: Twenty-five dollars buys a
dose, or about a quarter of a gram, that lasts for a full twelve hours.

The initial euphoria gives way to an exhilarating surge of energy,
making people feel powerful, self-assured, and capable of doing
anything--"like Superman," said one former user. That has a deep pull
in a place where logging jobs have become scarce and paper mills have
shut their doors.

Its wreckage was all around us as Graham drove toward the river; we
were less than two hours north of Houston, but the ruined landscape
seemed to have no point of reference.

We passed burned-out trailers and "No Trespassing" signs and
clotheslines that sagged with laundry. Yards were strewn with trash;
the hulls of junked cars sat rusting in the weeds.

Every so often, Graham would point out his window. "There was a meth
lab here . . . and in that trailer . . . and in that house over
there," he would say, gesturing toward an abandoned building or a
double-wide whose windows were covered with blankets. When he could go
no farther, Graham turned around, and we headed back to Nacogdoches,
where an investigation waited for him. Jessie Wolf, Tyler County's
newly elected sheriff, had recently called Graham about a suspected
meth lab, and Graham needed to pay him a visit.

Wolf was in a bind; he had only two deputies patrolling the entire
county at any given time, and no one on his payroll knew much about
investigating meth labs. Graham and his partner, Kim Courtney, went to
see Wolf in his office in Woodville, about seventy miles south of
Nacogdoches. "We've got some folks down in Spurger who are selling
meth out of a house right in the middle of town," Wolf told them.
"It's an old farmhouse, around the corner from the Baptist church." He
added that an infant had died in its sleep there a few months earlier,
of natural causes.

He had no other information except the name of the man in Spurger who
had first called the sheriff's department to report suspicious
behavior around the house. "See what you can do," Wolf said.
METHAMPHETAMINE IS EASY ENOUGH TO MAKE that a fifteen-year-old boy
from the East Texas town of Center, who had never taken a day of high
school chemistry, told me in less than five minutes exactly how to
cook it. The ingredients run about $100, and most of them can be found
at Wal-Mart. Cooking "old dope," or the speed that was used a
generation ago, took skill; it required a basic understanding of
chemistry, professional-grade lab equipment, and some land out in the
country where the strong cooking odor it produced would not attract
attention.

When its key ingredient, phenyl-2-propanone, became harder to buy
after a federal law was passed in the late eighties, speed cooks
invented an easier process that relied instead on ephedrine, the
active ingredient in non-drowsy cold medicine. Rather than needing
days, the new method took three hours and gave off a less acrid smell;
the only complication was that the process used highly flammable
ingredients and often sparked fires.

It first became popular in the Midwest, then migrated down to North
Texas and the Panhandle before making inroads in East Texas in the
late nineties.

Techniques vary from region to region, but most meth cooks in the
Piney Woods use what is called the "red phosphorus method." All it
requires are some pH strips, Pyrex bowls, coffee filters, a hot plate,
matchbooks, and six main ingredients: Sudafed, Drano, paint thinner,
acetone, muriatic acid, and iodine crystals. Because meth is made with
corrosive chemicals--some cooks also use lye or battery acid--the drug
wreaks havoc on addicts' bodies.

Teeth loosen, hair thins, skin breaks out in sores.

Chronic users look drawn and withered. "If we go into their old photos
of them when they looked normal," said Cheri Quick, the supervisor of
Child Protective Services (CPS) for Angelina County, which borders
Nacogdoches County to the south. "Now they're losing their hair, their
teeth.

They look twenty or thirty years older than they are. You can see how
the deterioration happened in such a short time." Addicts are usually
too wired to sleep and will stay up for days, or even a week or longer.

During these stretches, they have little interest in food or water.
Paranoia and delusions often set in. "I used to sit on my couch with
the curtains drawn, listening to every sound," said one former addict,
Michelle, a mother in her forties. "I knew there were people out there
in the trees watching me. I'd sit there all night and watch the
shadows come alive." She hadn't used meth in two weeks, she said, and
she was trying to quit for good. "I've done speed forever, and this
dope is different.

You didn't see or hear things on old dope. This kind makes you real
paranoid, and it's a hallucinogenic. You're schizzing all the time."
One dose of meth triggers the brain to release a rush of the
neurotransmitter dopamine, which quickens the heart, speeds up
metabolism, and creates a sense of euphoria.

Recreational use of the drug--which can be smoked, snorted, or
injected--often turns into full-blown physical dependency. After
continual use, the body stops releasing dopamine on its own;
withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, depression, and anhedonia, or the
inability to experience pleasure.

Because the chemistry of meth is similar to Ritalin, people who are
using the drug often turn their attention to one thing and tackle it
with fanatical concentration. "Whatever you're normally into becomes
an obsession: sex, fixing your car, cleaning your house," Michelle
said. Addicts will take apart old TVs or pick at scabs or have sex for
hours on end. A 48-year-old mother of two whom I met in a rehab center
in Lufkin told me that she became fixated with keeping house when she
was addicted to meth. She alphabetized the cans in her kitchen and
shampooed her carpet every single day, scrubbing away imagined dirt
until she wore holes down to the floorboards. Consumed by housework,
she was unable to do even basic parenting. "I looked up one day and my
house was spotless, but my kids weren't fed," she said.

Studies on rural meth use in Texas are scarce, but around the Piney
Woods, most people will tell you that they know someone--a friend, a
co-worker, a relative--who is addicted.

Drug recovery centers are overwhelmed; court dockets are backed up
with meth manufacturing cases; jails are filled with people booked on
charges of possession. "The first question we ask now when we get a
call about an abusive parent is 'Are they on meth?'" said Quick. "Meth
wasn't on our radar screen seven or eight years ago. Now it's
responsible for a third of our caseload." Family court is no
different. "Most of the divorce cases I see now involve meth," said
Angelina County court-at-law judge Lisa Burkhalter, who rarely heard
about the drug when she worked as a local prosecutor in the nineties.
"I had one child-custody case in which both of the parents--and three
out of the four grandparents--tested positive for meth. The only person
in the whole family who was clean was one of the grandmothers, and she
was on probation for cooking it." Because meth is made in the home,
the addiction sometimes takes hold of entire families.

The three teenage addicts I met were introduced to speed not by
friends but by a parent, an aunt, or an uncle.

One of them was a sixteen-year-old, Christina (her name has been
changed), who was under house arrest for meth possession. She had
recently failed both of her mandated drug tests.

She was a pale, moody girl with a blue tattoo on her arm. Her
family--and she, by extension--had a long history of substance abuse.
"I've never been a straight-up, happy person," she said by way of
explanation. "Meth helped me feel more normal." She had first tried it
when she was twelve years old. "A bunch of us were smoking weed and
playing cards at my aunt's house.

That was the hangout place.

My aunt wanted me to try it, but my stepdad's sister was the one who
gave it to me. I snorted a line, and I thought I was going to pass
out. My heart was racing so fast I thought it was going to pop out of
my chest.

My ears were buzzing and my vision was blacking out. I had to wrap my
legs around my chair to keep myself from falling down. I got sick, and
then I had this huge wave of energy.

I felt like I could do anything, like I was totally invincible." At
first, she used meth on the weekends, at her aunt's house. "When I was
fourteen, I started using it almost every day with my friends."
Christina lived with her grandmother, but her immediate family was
never far away. "My mom and dad both used," she said. "I'd stop by to
see one of them, and we'd do it together.

That was our way of connecting." She remembered one night she spent
with her father when he became so paranoid that he ordered her to
patrol the land behind his house. "My dad gave me a pellet gun and a
flashlight," Christina said. "He had me crawl around in this field,
Army-style, in the dark. He was yelling, 'Shoot those MFers in the
trees!' And I was right there with him, crawling on the ground, seeing
people in the trees, scared out of my mind." One of Christina's uncles
cooked meth, and sometimes he asked her to run to the store to buy
something he needed for it, like boxes of cold medicine.

Her boyfriend dealt it before he went to jail last year. "I started
hating the taste, the smell of it, but I still did it," Christina
said. "It was just something to do. My boyfriend and I couldn't even
stay awake on it after a while.

I guess that's pretty amazing, you know, two fifteen-year-olds with
such a high tolerance that we'd fall asleep after doing a line."
Christina was pessimistic about her ability to shake the addiction.

Her best friend, who was pregnant, was still using meth, and she felt
guilty for having introduced her to it. "There's no future for me,"
she said. "I'm tangled up in it. My family's tangled up in it." When I
asked her how many people she was close to who were addicted to meth,
she thought for a second, then reeled off a list, counting on her
fingers until she had used both hands. "My mom, my dad, my stepdad, my
best friend, my boyfriend, my aunt, and four or five uncles," she
said. She smiled, as if marveling at her own bad luck. "Misery loves
company." KENT GRAHAM AND HIS PARTNER left the Tyler County sheriff's
department and drove to Spurger. Graham knew the town--he had hunted
deer in the surrounding woods as a boy--but he had no local informants;
Tyler County had recently signed on with the task force, and he had
not had time yet to make contacts. Spurger is a town of 472 people, a
wide place in the road with one blinking yellow light.

The community was small enough that any investigation of the local
meth operation would be hard to keep secret for long. Graham turned
down its quiet, tree-lined streets until he arrived at the address of
the man who had first contacted the sheriff's department about the old
farmhouse.

A woman answered the door. Her husband was not home, she said, but she
could tell them what she had seen and heard around town. She, like
many others, had taken note of the house that lay just off the main
drag. On beautiful days, she said, the blinds remained closed.

Even when it was hot outside, smoke came out of the vents, as if its
residents were cooking something.

The lights were often on all night.

Nobody who lived there seemed to have a job, she said. There were
always lots of cars parked there for short amounts of time and then
gone. She had even heard talk at the beauty parlor that there was a
strange odor in the house that smelled like meth was being cooked.

Before Graham left, the woman handed him a list of license plate
numbers that she had stopped to jot down whenever she drove by the
house.

Graham needed to find a local resident who would agree to wear a wire
into the house; if the informant could make a buy, Graham would have
probable cause for a search warrant.

He contacted the Tyler County district attorney' s office, and in a
few days, he had located a man who was awaiting sentencing in a meth
possession case who would work undercover in hopes of getting a
shorter prison term. (Some details have been changed to protect his
identity.) For his trouble, he would be paid $100. "If you could get
Ward Cleaver to buy dope, that would be great," Graham explained.
"Unfortunately, you have to use a crook to catch a crook." The risk to
the informant was high; word travels fast in a small town. He and
Graham met in the parking lot of the Woodville Wal-Mart, a half hour's
drive away, and talked over the ground rules inside Graham's truck: He
was not allowed to do any meth during the buy and was to make up a
plausible excuse if he was offered any. The informant was a pale,
rangy speed addict in his early twenties, and he nodded morosely as he
listened to Graham explain exactly how he would help catch his
friends. "This is going to cost you," the informant said.

Later that afternoon, at a clearing in the woods outside Spurger, they
met again. The informant paced back and forth nervously under the pine
trees, dragging on a cigarette.

Graham put a wire on him and fastened an antenna to his truck that
would pick up the sound of the hidden microphone. Then Graham followed
him, at a safe distance, to the house.

From his truck, he monitored the brief transaction inside, sometimes
straining to hear the conversation through the static feed of the
informant's body wire. "You want a bump?" the dealer could be heard
asking, slapping his own arm as he searched for a vein.

"Nah, I'm fixing to do it with my girl," the informant said. He
emerged from the house a few minutes later, and Graham followed him as
he drove back to the clearing in the woods.

The informant dug a gram of meth out of his pocket and handed it over.
At Graham's request, he made a map of the interior of the house,
sketching out the layout of each room. "If my momma knew what I was
doing now . . ." he said, shaking his head. "You're doing good,"
Graham assured him.

The informant frowned, as if the cop knew nothing. "Well, if they find
out it's me, they will burn my house down," he said.

"NO ONE ELSE AROUND HERE was working meth five years ago; I was it,"
Graham said afterward as we drove back to Nacogdoches. "I didn't have
a clue how to even start.

None of us knew much about meth. We had to make it up as we went
along." In the late nineties, a string of house fires--accidentally
sparked by amateur meth cooks--heralded meth's arrival. "There were
houses going up right and left," he said. "We'd always find a jug of
muriatic acid inside or some iodine crystals and acetone." Graham had
already worked narcotics for five years in Nacogdoches County, first
as a patrol officer intercepting drugs as they were ferried north on
U.S. 59 out of Houston and later as an investigator for the Deep East
Texas Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force. After the rash of
house fires, he was told to devote himself to tracking down meth labs
full-time. His beat, which covered Nacogdoches County, where the task
force was overseen by the sheriff's department and the four counties
that helped pay for the task force's assistance--Angelina, Houston,
Shelby, and San Augustine--spanned five thousand square miles.

He had little to go on at first other than a handful of leads: a few
names of suspected meth cooks that neighbors had called in to a police
hotline. Wearing street clothes, Graham paid each one a visit.

He knocked on doors, explaining who he was and who he worked for.
"We've heard that you might be cooking dope around here," he would say
offhandedly, as if he were talking about the latest change in the
weather. "Would you mind if I took a look around?" Graham speaks
unhurriedly, usually with a wad of snuff tucked under his lip, and his
manner put people at ease; strangers, even those who shouldn't have,
usually let him in. Soon Graham had informants who were calling him
with tips. "If we didn't find three labs a week, it was unusual," he
said. "Once we did three in a day. The only thing that kept us from
busting more was that we'd get tired.

I'd drive home at night and think, 'Good Lord, this place is just
eaten up with this stuff.'" Graham needed a partner, and in 2001 he
found Kim Courtney, a third-generation cop from Palestine who had made
hundreds of cases by working undercover, from $20 crack buys to major
meth lab busts.

Courtney had been the valedictorian of her police academy class and
went on to receive one of the DEA's highest accolades, the
Administrator's Award of Honor, for her undercover work, but her
strength lay in her ability to make men think she was just a pretty
face. She had been a twirler in high school, and she knew how to play
the part. "When I'm undercover, I always act like a dumb blonde, and I
giggle a lot," she said. "If people start asking me too many questions
about who I am, I'll get up in their face and say, 'Why are you
getting all in my business?

I'm not getting in your business!' And they always back down." If
Courtney cocks her head to the side and lets loose a barrage of
abusive language, she can transform herself from the woman she is--an
attractive, fortyish mother of two who always double-checks the mirror
to make sure her lipstick isn't smudged--into a foul-mouthed,
strung-out crack addict in need of a fix. "Nobody's better," said
Graham. For both Graham and Courtney, undercover operations are
dangerous work. During one deal, a meth cook made a point of showing
Courtney his machine gun. "If any cops come out here, this is how I'll
take care of them," he told her. Graham had his cover blown during a
meth deal in Shelby County when the woman who came to the door
recognized him. "I said into my wire, 'It's not looking real good for
the home team right now,'" Graham remembered. "I was easing my hand
toward my back pocket when everyone in the room decided to clear out."
Graham has better luck working with informants who agree to wear a
wire while making a meth buy. This establishes probable cause, which
allows Graham to obtain a search warrant, organize a group of local
sheriff's deputies, and raid the house.

But that too can be dangerous.

The more advanced meth cooks have surveillance cameras, radio
scanners, night-vision goggles, guns, and explosives. Sometimes meth
labs are booby-trapped; the first one Graham entered, in 1999, had an
electric current running through its front doorknob.

Earlier this year, he called the ATF into a lab after finding a
homemade bomb. "We've been lucky," Graham said. "These people are very
volatile.

By the time we find them, maybe they've been up for ten days or
they're in a state of psychosis.

They spend a lot of their time thinking about cops." He recounted some
of their paranoid fantasies: "They'll say, 'We've been expecting you.
We saw you in the trees.' Or they'll tell us that they know about our
special hologram projectors or our helicopters that fly in 'whisper
mode.'" During a raid, after the entry team has handcuffed everyone
inside, Graham and Courtney strap on respirators and what they call
their "bunny suits": the white jumpsuits that are usually worn by
Hazmat teams.

Dismantling a lab is often more dangerous than the raid
itself.

If an amateur meth cook has mixed the wrong ingredients or heated them
too quickly, the air inside can be noxious or potentially combustible.
Red phosphorus is particularly dangerous; when it burns, it turns into
a lethal, odorless nerve gas. Federal law requires anyone who
dismantles meth labs to be certified by the DEA, and both Graham and
Courtney have received training at the agency's headquarters in
Quantico, Virginia. The polluted interior of a meth lab can look
otherworldly. "I had to take down a wall in a mobile home once, just
to get it ventilated," he said. "The air inside was cloudy." Inside
meth labs, Graham often finds children. "You've got a whole generation
of kids being brought up who are watching Mom and Dad cooking dope,"
he said. "This is normal life to them. Dad's in the trees with his
binoculars, looking out for cops. Meanwhile they have no food. They're
dirty and carrying around bottles of spoiled milk. They're exposed to
everyone who comes into their house to buy meth, people who will take
advantage of them in any way they can. These are people who are
oversexualized because of the drug, so we see a lot of incest and
sexual abuse." He can recite a litany of cases. There was the man who
got his teenage daughter hooked and then sold her body out for the
drug. The baby who was found crawling on a floor covered with dirty
needles.

The man who kept his son out of school because the teenager could cook
better speed.

The child who was brutally beaten when his addicted mother flew into a
rage. "It's the kids that get to you," Graham said.

Sometimes the futility of it all can get to Graham. Most of the people
he arrests plead out to lesser charges and see little prison time. For
each cook he puts away, there is always another guy who has decided to
start making speed himself.

Of the hundreds of people he has arrested, he knows of only fifteen
who have sought treatment and only one who has stayed clean.

He takes comfort in the fact that things could be worse. "If no one
had been working meth these past few years, there's no telling how bad
it would be now," he said.

A few weeks after the informant's meth buy in Spurger, Graham returned
to Tyler County with a search warrant in hand. He met with a county
judge, who read through the document, signed it, and wished Graham
good luck. Later that afternoon, behind closed doors at the sheriff's
department, Graham held a briefing for everyone who would help execute
the raid: Sheriff Wolf, his deputies, Courtney, two other task force
members, and the local game warden. Graham went over the layout of the
house and assigned officers to the entry team. Before heading to
Spurger, he fielded questions about the dealer they hoped to arrest.
"I don't know if this guy's going to be violent," Graham warned the
group. "We should assume he will be." "He got in a knife fight a
little while back," offered one sheriff's deputy. "Well, I want
everyone to leave the house the way they came in," Graham said. "I
don't know if there will be weapons, but expect them." "We have reason
to believe there will be children in the house?" asked a CPS worker
who had been asked to come along.

"Yes, a ten-year-old boy." "Any dogs?" one of the deputies
asked.

"I don't know. We do know that he has a police scanner, so no talking
on the radio. We need radio silence until entry has been made." At the
end of the meeting, the team suited up in bulletproof vests and loaded
their pistols.

The team piled into the backs of two pickups and crouched down out of
view. After a bumpy half-hour ride through the woods, the two pickups
took a hard left turn into town and pulled up to the white farmhouse.
Sheriff's deputy Elbert "Bubba" Sheffield led the entry team, running
up the front walkway with half a dozen officers behind him. "Police!"
he called out before kicking in the front door. "Search warrant!" The
door swung open, and deputy Sheffield saw a boy who looked to be about
ten years old standing motionless, halfway down the stairs inside the
house. His father was a few feet away, frantically trying to pull
something out of his pocket. "Get down on the floor!" the deputy
yelled at the man. "On the floor! Put your hands behind your back!"
"Please don't hurt my dad!" the boy screamed.

Behind him, inside the house, the entry team saw windows covered with
blankets and black plastic.

There was little light except for the glare of a bare bulb. Pink
insulation hung from the ceiling through cracks that ran the length of
the kitchen.

A pot of stew that was days old sat on the stovetop, rotting. Parts of
the floor were damp and covered in piles of unwashed clothes. Propane
bottles lay scattered across the living room. The tinny, magnified
sound of a police radio scanner echoed through the house. The man was
handcuffed and led outside. "What are they doing to my dad?" his son
asked, trembling. "I want to be with my dad." He looked up at the
officers in black bulletproof vests holding guns.

"What's going on?" the man's wife asked, incredulous, as she was also
led away by a sheriff's deputy.

She was in her twenties, but most of her teeth were
missing.

She was slight, and her skin was covered with sores. "I'm sorry,
baby," he said over his shoulder. "It's bullshit." Sheriff's deputies
fanned out across the house.

Closets were opened, drawers were emptied, the attic
searched.

The officers found no glassware or pH strips, no red phosphorus or
muriatic acid. The garage held nothing but empty boxes.

It soon became clear that the local supply of meth was being cooked
somewhere else. The house contained several grams of meth, a few glass
pipes, and more than $1,000 in cash but no lab. Outside, Courtney read
the handcuffed woman her Miranda rights.

The CPS worker asked her if she wanted to place her son in the care of
a family member while she was in jail. The woman became hysterical.
"What have I done?" she shrieked. Courtney held up a plastic bag of
meth that had been found. "You've got kids running around this house
and you don't know where this came from?" she said. "I guess it just
fell out of the sky." Her son sat on the back of a pickup, his head
buried in his lap. Every now and then, he wiped tears away with his
knees.

After a few minutes had passed, the CPS worker gently told him that it
was time to go. "I don't want to go," the boy said. "I want to be with
my dad." The social worker talked to him until the boy finally
relented. "I love you, Momma!" he called out, as he followed the man
to his car. Just before he climbed inside, he broke away and ran to
his father, hugging him around the waist.

His father stood rigidly above him in handcuffs.

The boy finally let go and walked back to the car. As the car pulled
away, he turned in his seat, craning for a view of his father.

LATER THAT EVENING, back at the task force office in Nacogdoches,
Graham sat under the fluorescent lights, studying the meth that was
seized in the raid. The powder was bright white and crystalline, as
jagged as broken glass.

He rarely saw meth that clean--the kind made with laboratory-grade
equipment, from a large-scale meth operation--and he knew that the
Spurger drug bust could lead him to meth cooks higher up the food chain.

All Graham could hope for was that the boy's father would start
talking and lead him to his supplier.

Before he turned out the lights and headed home, Graham asked the
question that had been nagging him all evening. "Who do you think that
kid thinks is the bad guy: his dad or the cops who hauled him off to
jail?" he said. "His dad is his hero. This is the only life he knows.

In ten years, we'll be looking for him."