Seductive Destruction

METH ADDICTION IN MISSOURI

When Leslie Roettgen graduated from residential drug rehab in
September - her seventh try at treatment - she had a plan. She would
move to Columbia, putting distance between herself and her hometown of
Marshall, an hour to the west, and between the meth cooks and users
she hung with there.

She would buy a car, find a nice little house to rent and have one of
her daughters move up to be with her. Never mind that she didn't have
any money. She would open a savings account as soon as she got a
paycheck or two from Steak 'n' Shake - her first job in years.

She landed the job just in time. Roettgen lives at Oxford House, just
off the Broadway bus line near the Columbia Mall. It's a halfway house
for women recovering from addictions. Residents are given 30 days to
find work after they move in. If they don't find a job, they are asked
to leave. Roettgen made the deadline by waitressing at Steak 'n'
Shake. She was already three weeks behind on her rent.

During her rehabilitation process, she says, a lot of that time she
felt like she was in the middle of a vast lake, dog paddling
desperately but never getting any closer to the shore.

As badly as she wanted to stay above water, sometimes it seemed it
would be far easier to give up, to simply stop swimming. When she
couldn't find a job, she got frustrated and slept many of her days
away.

But she pulled herself together and kept looking. Then she agreed to a
meeting with her ex-boyfriend, a meth addict who used to give her
drugs. She stayed strong and refused to use with him. At a baby
shower, everyone was smoking pot. She chose not to.

Roettgen, 39, says she's been addicted to drugs for 25 years. It
started with alcohol and pot when she was 12. Then she got into
painkillers and tranquilizers. For the past nine years, her drug of
choice has been methamphetamine - a cheap, plentiful high, as
destructive as it is seductive. She's been caught, high and in
possession of the drug, by police and sent to treatment again and
again. Within three weeks of leaving treatment, she would be using
again.

Now she's on probation for possession. And she spent four months in
prison for violating an earlier probation.

She's trying a little harder to stay clean. She checked herself into
McCambridge Center in August for a 30-day treatment program. When she
got out, she made it to week four and then week five, looking green
and irritated. By early November, she had held on for three months.
Temptation was still strong, but so was hope. She sat curled in a
chair at McCambridge Center, wearing jeans and a pastel sweatshirt,
and she spoke of meth as a personal demon.

"It's the devil in my head. It tells me I can get off probation in
(January) and then I can go get high," Roettgen says. "Meth is the
hardest drug I've ever had to get off of."

The Ingredients of Addiction

Roettgen's history with meth echoes across Missouri. Ten years ago,
the homemade drug was a small part of the state's drug scene. Now,
there are so many meth labs dotting rural Missouri that everyone from
legislators to drug enforcement officials call it the meth capital of
the United States.

In 2002, law enforcement agents found 2,743 labs in Missouri; in 1992,
the number of labs busted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency was two.
The Missouri Highway Patrol puts its unofficial count for 1992
slightly higher: 12. As of September of 2003, 2,206 labs were
collected, according to the Highway Patrol.

The amount of meth made per lab is relatively small, indicating that
it remains mostly a mom-and-pop industry in the state, where "cooks"
make the drug for themselves and neighbors or friends. For all the
labs found in Missouri in 2002, officials collected 11.2 kilograms of
meth. That's compared with 311.2 kilograms of meth found in California
from 1,718 labs, according to the DEA.

Backwoods meth labs are the 21st century version of the backwoods
stills that pockmarked rural America during Prohibition. Mark Shields,
a program specialist with the Missouri Division of Alcohol and Drug
Abuse, says that in Missouri people find meth more acceptable because
it doesn't involve any of the big city implications: It doesn't
require money, strangers or attention.

"It is more acceptable for individuals in those rural communities
because meth is more like the moonshine of the new millennium," he
says. "It is something that an individual creates himself with a
little bit of knowledge."

But although experts say meth likely won't lead to the kind of vast
drug trafficking that often goes with heroin or crack, it is becoming
an opiate to the problems of small-town, rural Missouri. Social
workers and mental health officials say that where jobs, schools and
parents fail, meth use picks up.

It's cheap and easy to make and gives a long-lasting high. There's
nothing to grow, and the ingredients are common - found in
convenience, hardware or garden stores, and farm cooperatives - making
it difficult for police to track. Research from the Missouri
Department of Mental Health indicates that the majority of users are
white; their ages range from 16 to 50, although older and younger
people have been known to use.

Although wide-scale meth use in Missouri can only be tracked back 10
years, it already is creating generations of addicts, leaving parents
unable to care for their children and babies physically and
emotionally disabled (see sidebar). Use often becomes a family affair,
passed down from parents to teenage children, from sibling to sibling.

City marshals used to patrol the roads of one-street towns looking for
vandals or drunks; now drug enforcement units search for labs in
soybean fields. The state has created drug task forces, cobbling
together local and federal funds and passing stringent laws for
possession and the intent to cook methamphetamine.

But drug officials say meth use has not yet peaked in Missouri. So
far, the drug has proved more powerful than efforts to combat it.

Life As a User

Roettgen fell in love with meth just as it was gaining popularity in
the state. She grew up in Marshall, population 12,300, a farm town
trying to go digital. It has become home to the type of mom-and-pop
lab community that epitomizes meth in Missouri. She has spent most of
her life as an addict - alcohol, dope, Demerol, Dilaudids, Valium. But
she always kept a tenuous hold on her life - until meth.

After her first year using meth, she became such an absent parent that
the Department of Family Services took her children away. That same
meth, she'd never want to stop. As a runner, the risk was less and her
drugs were free. She knew the cooks, so she could count on a quality
product. And if the dope cooks liked her, they helped her out.

"I never had a whole lot of money in my pocket, but I always ate, had
cigarettes, gas in my car," she says. "And my kids always had money,
cigarettes. The dope cooks, (if) they liked me, they had to take care
of my kids, too."

Criminal Addiction

James Thacker, known as Benny, is the other half of the meth culture:
the cooker. He got the recipe in prison, while he was serving time for
selling marijuana.

Thacker, 36, traces his criminal history to his teenage years in New
Madrid, a rural town in the Bootheel, when he says he threw a rock at
a man's head for no reason.

Thacker says he was the black sheep of the family. His parents owned a
roofing business that he worked for; his brothers didn't do drugs. But
Thacker got into - and stayed into - drugs, even after his family
moved to central Missouri. His father fired him when Thacker was
arrested for selling pot and took him back when Thacker was released
from prison in 1999.

That same year, he started cooking in the woods, partying all night.
He'd get back home just in time for work the next day. He was thin and
ragged with dark circles under his eyes and tattoos on both his arms.
His dad called him a vampire. Thacker says when his dad finally
discovered what he was doing, he gave Thacker an ultimatum: his job
and family, or meth.

Thacker chose meth.

"You get addicted to making it more than doing it," he says. "It's the
thrill - not getting caught while you do it, and it gives you a
strange sense of power. You get real popular, and everybody's looking
for you."

He wasn't out cooking and using for long before he was arrested again,
this time for possession of pseudoephedrine, or cold pills. He tells
his story from the visitors' room at Licking State Prison, where he is
serving 15 years for possession and intent to manufacture meth.

He's been here since January 2003, and his gaunt face has filled out.
He leans back in his seat, seemingly proud, and brags that he was a
good cook. He says he never got burned and never let anyone who was
high near his lab. He says he could make meth in the middle of town,
and no one would be the wiser.

Meth labs have a pungent and lingering chemical odor from the
anhydrous ammonia and ether used to make it. A cook can freeze his
lungs by inhaling the chemicals. Some cooks cover the stench of meth
with the stench of manure, hiding their labs behind a small hog farm
or chicken coop. Some go deep into the woods or cook in their garages,
masking the odor by putting their equipment in coolers.

Thacker kept his lab in the cab of his truck. Sometimes he would drive
through the woods cooking with the rear cab window open to create a
draft and dissipate the smell.

"I won't stay in one place for long and never cook in the same place
twice," he says. "I go out in the middle of the woods, in the middle
of nowhere, in a four-wheel drive. No one's looking for you out there,
and if they do, you can make your own road."

Thacker blames one of those chases with the cops for the loss of his
baby.

When Thacker's then-girlfriend got pregnant, he says, she also got
jealous. She would go with him to the woods when he cooked to keep him
from sleeping with other women. She would stay in the car to try to
avoid the worst of the fumes.

Four months into her pregnancy, they were driving back from a cook
when Thacker spotted a cop car. He took off, going 90 mph over muddy,
rutted roads.

"I floored it, and you know I hit them low-water bridges and it jarred
her," he says.

She had been cramping badly for a couple of weeks. The rough ride was
too much, and she miscarried a day later.

"She left me after that," he says. "She told me she didn't want to
have nothing to do with me or that shit or anything else
again."Thacker swore off meth for a while, and she came back. But it
wasn't long before he was cooking again to pay for the rent at his
mom's or to take care of his 16-year-old son. The police kept watch
and, despite Thacker's proclaimed prowess, gathered enough evidence to
convict him.

Now he says he's finished with meth. It has cost him too much. He says
his son was using drugs. His father doesn't speak to him. Even the
veins in his arms are ruined. "I'm done with that stuff. I feel like
I'm 90," he says. "If you actually want to change, you can change."

But for all his conviction, Thacker still speaks of his meth days in
the present tense. He gets jazzed just talking about them. And last
year, right before he was picked up to start serving his sentence, he
shot up five doses of meth.

He wasn't trying to commit suicide rather than go to prison, he
says.

He just didn't want to waste the drugs.

Read Tuesday's and Wednesday's Missourians for Part Two and Part Three
of "Seductive Destruction."

[Sidebar:]

WHAT METHAMPHETAMINE CAN DO TO THE BODY:

Risk to a fetus exposed to meth in utero:

High blood pressure that leads to brain hemorrhages

Premature birth

Clubfoot, partially formed arms and legs

Gastroschisis: a hole in the abdomen, causing the intestines to be
outside the body

Risk to infants exposed to meth in utero:

Hypersensitivity to touch and light

Difficulty swallowing or sucking

Learning disabilities

Hyperactivity

Unprovoked fits of anger

Potential physical effects on addicts:

Severe dehydration

Tooth loss

Lead poisoning

Insomnia

Hyperthermia

Convulsions

Stroke

Transmission of HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C

Potential mental effects on addicts:

Paranoia

Hallucinations

Violence

Schizophrenia

Weakened memory and slowed motor skills

Decreased reasoning skills

Reduction in dopamine transmitters in the brain: The brain can no
longer end dopamine, a chemical that creates the feeling of happiness,
to the nervous system.

Sources: North Dakota Department of Health, Missouri Department of
Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse