PLAGUE IN THE HEARTLAND

Cheap, easy to make and instantly addictive, crystal meth is burning a hole
through rural America. A Hellish tour of a home-cooked drug crisis

It looks less like a crime scene - and still less like a farm - than it
does a tour of an unhinged mind. Out behind the barn on this
half-mile-square spread at the base of the Cascade Mountains in Washington
state, there is a riot of stolen cars and trucks, parts stripped and
chassis mangled. A months-old Lexus, its seats splayed beside it, lies
nose-down in mud. Two white Chevy sport-utes, their axles spravined, hunker
on bales of hay. Lawn mowers and dirt bikes sprawl, tires up, in poses of
mechanized porn. Thirty yards away, in a vast stockade, mill twenty of the
skinniest cows in the county. There were eighty head out there as late as
last month, then the bank came up and seized sixty of the herd to satisfy
unpaid debts.

"That's what happens when you start smoking meth - people repossess your
cows," says Chuck Allen, chief of the Granite Falls police force and one of
the dozen or so cops and Snohomish County
deputies buzzing around the grounds. In the five years since
methamphetamine entrenched itself in this former logging town north of
Seattle, Allen's work life has consisted of responding to one outrage after
another, each more numbing than the last. The month before, there were the
tweakers (as meth users are known) who clubbed to death seventeen newborn
calves. Before that, it was the boy, high out of his mind, who fancied his
thick skull bulletproof and blew much of it off with a .25. Like no other
drug before it - not crack, coke, Ecstasy or smack - meth has so swamped
this rural community that it has largely come to define it. Granite Falls,
a town of 2,600, is now notorious as Methville or Cranktown among the
hundreds of kids bused to school here. That is unkind, and in any case
unjust: There isn't a town from Tacoma to the Canadian border that couldn't
as easily have earned that mantle. Meth - cheap, potent and insuperably
addictive - is everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, and coming soon to a
town near you.

Allen, a stout man with Elvis sideburns and a thatch of ginger hair, walks
me around to the barn. The squalor inside rivals the scene outdoors, a
tumult of garbage and cow shit.. Additionally, there's a piercing stench
that scours the back of my throat. On a bench near the door is an array of
buckets rigged to a kerosene vat. This, says Allen, is where the
thirty-two-year-old farmer "cooked," then dried, his meth.

"Battery acid, ammonia, paint thinner, lye - that's what you're smelling,"
says Allen. "Take a bunch of the most toxic solvents there are, mix 'em up
with some Sudafed pills and put that in your pipe and smoke it. Your
teeth'll fall out, your skin will scab off, and a month from now you'll be
coughing up chunks of your lung - but hey, what the hell? Party on, right?"

That isn't so much bitterness as bafflement talking. Despite dozens of
local deaths attributed to meth, and a pitched campaign by school officials
to scare teens off the drug, it remains wildly popular on the party scene,
which starts as young as fifth grade.

"These aren't no-tooth yokels from trailer parks," says Allen. "They're
kids whose moms and dads work at Boeing."

We walk out back to where the other cops are taking vehicle-identification
numbers off the trashed cars. Passing the stockade, I spy something
peculiar stretched across neighboring pens. Black, brown and moist, it
seems to ooze sideways, like an oil spill encrusting the grass. After a
moment, it comes to me: These are the remains of two calves left to sicken,
starve and then melt.

Allen shrugs. "That's meth - a dairy farmer who forgot he had cows."

When we speak of the drug plagues of the last half-century - heroin,
the poisoner of postwar Harlem; crack, the deathblow to countless
downtowns - what comes to mind first is the chaos they've wrought, the
derangement of public and private life. But for all the pain and confusion
sown, drug epidemics were actually orderly things, obeying their own deep
logic. Invariably - until now - they began offshore, imported to America
from exotic locales such as Bolivia and Southeast Asia. Invariably - until
now - they took root in port towns, opening markets in New York or Miami
before hopscotching west to other cities. Invariably - until now - they
then radiated outward, moving from megalopolises to suburban towns, and
from there to the exurbs and farmlands. And invariably - until now - they
hit the poor hardest, entrenching themselves like rogue bacteria in the
playgrounds and stairwells of projects.

Now those rules are void: meth has rewritten the book. As the first
epidemic born on our soil, it is seeding the ground for future plagues
while confounding cops and drug czars. It is made, for instance, from legal
and easily obtained ingredients, not from opiates that must be smuggled
ashore. It flows inward rather than outward, beginning in small towns
before migrating to urban centers. (Having overwhelmed much of the
fastest-growing drugs in seven Western cities, among them Seattle, Denver
and Salt Lake City, and rivals crack use in Los Angeles and San Francisco.)
And where other drugs targeted the inner cities, meth for the most part
hits the middle class.

"Around here, crack and heroin have a ghetto stigma that doesn't apply to
meth, says Rick Bart, the personable sheriff of Snohomish County, who, as
the region's to cop, presides over a beleaguered staff of 230 deputies.
"The kids here think it's a rave drug like Ecstasy, or just some cool thing
they read about on the Internet. You can go online right now and find 300
Websites with recipes on how to make it, then go out to the drugstore and
home-supplies shop and pick up all the fixings. How in the world am I
supposed to stop that - post a man in the allergy aisle at Walgreens?"

Actually, that won't be necessary. Walk into a drugstore in Washington and
you'll find the Sudafed and Drixoral behind thick glass, padlocked like
vintage scotch; taped to the sales case is a yellow sign limiting shoppers
to two packs a day. This is the result of one of several new state laws
aimed at keeping meth ingredients out of the hands of cooks. Ephedrine,
found in most nonprescription cold drugs, is the key constituent of meth.
State officials have also put restrictions on the sale of compounds such as
anhydrous ammonia, a compressed liquid gas that cooks use to distill
ephedrine during the volatile cooking process. (Get a drop of the stuff on
you and it will burn through the skin, singeing right down to the bone.)
Two years ago, anyone with a tank and the right tubing could buy as much
chemical as he or she liked; now, it can be sold only to certified
licensees, and in amounts of at least 500 gallons. That hasn't stopped
thieves from raiding the plants or siphoning it into gas cans from rail
cars. Recently, someone botched a heist at a local factory and released a
cloud of ammonia that covered forty acres, forcing an entire town to evacuate.

"Understand that we're not dealing with the brightest bulbs; methheads
either start out dumb or get there fast," says Lynn Eul, the youth-violence
and drug-prevention coordinator for the Snohomish County prosecutor's
office. "The solvents used to make it literally gouge out their brain.
After only a couple of weeks, tweakers suffer permanent brain damage. And
that's not counting the neurochemical part. Meth addicts can't make
dopamine anymore, which sends them into such a depression, they want to
kill themselves or the people around them."

Eul would know; she was a tweaker herself during a horrible stretch in the
Eighties. Accepted on a scholarship to Stanford University, she got hooked
on coke, then meth. Within months, she was living in her car in Los Angeles
and being beaten up by pimps and dealers. Now fifteen years sober, a
curvaceous mother of three and a much-sought speaker on the intervention,
she still suffers mood swings that fell her for days and broad gaps in her
long-term memory. Still, she counts herself sublimely lucky; only six
percent of meth freaks get and stay sober, the lowest number by far for any
drug.

"It's impossible to overstate the hold it has - crack's like baby fod
compared to meth," says Eul. "It addicts folks, on average, the third time
they use it and permanently hijacks their judgement. They don't sleep for
weeks, they defecate on the floor and let their kids starve and go naked."

Since 1998, when meth use reached plague levels in Snohomish County, every
index of social misery has soared. The crime rate is up forty percent at a
time when it fell sharply across the country. Jim Krider, the former county
prosecutor, estimates that two-thirds of the violent criminals he tries use
meth, cook it or sell it. The prison near his office, built for 300, sleeps
500 inmates on an average night, most doubled and tripled up in cells. The
drumbeat goes on: Foster-care placements are up by a third, while
admissions to the state's drug programs have jumped tenfold. "I could hit
you over the head with lots more numbers - what's happened with ER
admissions in the last years; the skyrocketing increase in domestic
violence - but let's just put it like this: There isn't a single aspect of
life in this state that hasn't been drastically hit by this drug," says Jim
Chromey, the commander of Strategic Weapons and Tactics for the Washington
State Patrol. "A whole generation is being lost out here, and we'll never
get that back."

Like most deliriants, meth started out as something very different. Its
first appearance in the medical literature, in 1887, was as a Victorian
cure for narcolepsy. Fifty years later, a tableted version showed promise
as a bronchial aid and was prescribed by doctors in the U.S. and abroad
despite evidence that it was psychoactive. Then, as now, its core element
was ephedrine, which, taken in high doses, revved the nervous system with a
sharp, swift burst of adrenaline. Such, in fact, was its stimulatory kick
that by World War II, it was widely dispensed to both Allied and Axis
troops, with the dispiriting result that many came home with ravening
addictions. Thereafter, meth went underground, surfacing occasionally as
powdered "crank" with outlaw-biker drugs, or as an injectable fluid spiking
the pre-AIDs frenzy in gay clubs across the country. (During the first
phase of use, meth is as potent an aphrodisiac as any; within months or
even weeks, though, the brain's taste for pleasure is more or less
permanently shorted, leaving the user incapable of arousal.)

Finally, in the Eighties, the big bang: A smokable version appeared. "I was
running a clinic in Haight-Ashbury in '88 when ice showed up on the
street," says Dr. Alex Stalcup, a national authority on meth and a pioneer
in the treatment of its addiction. "It was so powerful that you had a rush
like nothing before it. In terms of dopamine triggered, it was the chemical
equivalent of ten orgasms at once - and you didn't need a needle to get it.
Once a drug bypasses the needle stage and induces a giant rush, you have
the twin preconditions for an epidemic, meaning it's so easily and widely
available that you can't stop it."

Stalcup, who runs a premier treatment center near San Francisco, has been
in the trenches of the drug wars for of four decades and says he's never
seen anything as pernicious as meth. "Forget, for a moment, what it does to
kids while they're in the binge-tweak cycle - the rage and delusions, the
spontaneous violence. The true hell starts when they try to get sober and
find that meth has stripped out their higher functioning, much of which
won't come back. They can't process words, can't think abstractly, can't,
in fact, remember what they did five minutes ago. Worse, their psychic skin
has been peeled away and they're indescribably raw. As we speak, there's a
twelve-year-old girl down the hall curled up on the floor, screaming, 'I
can't take it, I can't take it.'"

Dr. Alice Huber, a researcher at the University of Washington and a
frontline player in two landmark meth studies, says that the pain and
despair in the first phase of rehab make it all but unbearable to continue:
"The biggest hurdle to treatment is keeping them there. They're in agony
and we can't quell it. As a rule, you have to wait at least six months
before they can begin to understand what's being said to them. But with
managed care, you're lucky to get two weeks."

Given that kind of odds, it would certainly behoove local and federal
authorities to prevent the drug's spread to other regions. But there, too,
the news is disheartening. Meth, which began its run in central California
and took I-5 north to Oregon and Washington, has already traveled the
east-west corridors to the heartland and Southern states. Drug gangs
operating along I-80 have flooded the Corn Belt with crystal ice, the most
potent form of the drug. (There are three different grades of meth being
sold: Crank, a foul-smelling yellow powder, is generally snorted, not
smoked; lith, short for lithium culled from batteries to distill out
chemical harshness, is a smokable paste that induces a fierce rush and
costs about twice what crank does; and ice, triple-crystallized of all
impurities to create an unmatched high, sells for $150 a gram and is almost
instantly addictive.) Nebraska and Indiana are glutted with meth, and
Missouri has recently supplanted California as the number-one state for
labs seized. Down south, I-40 has become a superconductor for sales to
rural whites. Both of the Carolinas report full-on plagues, while in
Tennessee home cooks are so pervasive that child-abuse charges are being
added to drug counts if a minor is found on the premises.

"Meth is the number-one threat to rural America," says Will Glasby, the
chief of media relations for the Drug Enforcement Agency. "If you look at a
map, it's like a tidal wave moving east from California and the Northwest
states. Last year, we took down 7,000 labs, many in the middle of the
country. Some were in areas that had never seen crime before, let alone
drug gangs and shootouts. We're hopeful it won't reach Eastern cities.
Because if it ever does land in urban America …" Glasby stops a moment to
choose his words. "Well, let's just say there'll be major problems."

Pressed on what the DEA is doing specifically to stem the flow of meth,
Glasby cites its long-standing work with local cops as well as a series of
town-hall meetings that were attended last summer by the agency's head, Asa
Hutchinson. Told that this seems a faint response to the "number-one
threat" in the country, Glasby makes mention of harsh budget constraints,
saying the agency has "many priorities and limited dollars." Curiously, one
priority that's well-funded, however, is the DEA's war on medical
marijuana, featuring armed invasions of hospice co-ops in California and
elsewhere. If the agency can summon the resources to roust terminally ill
seniors and cuff them at gunpoint to their walkers, couldn't it find the
money and additional manpower to intervene on behalf of kids?

"According to published numbers, there are almost 10 million people who've
tried meth in this country, although the feds say it's only 1.8 [million],"
says Stalcup. "But even by their figure, that's a national crisis. We've
got a whole generation here whose lives are just over, even if they manage
to get sober. You see them in the streets now, sleeping in boxes and
hustling survival sex. These are our children, and the people in power
better start paying attention."

When a town is confronted by a social ill, it usually conducts itself in
one of two ways. Paralyzed by shame, it denies the problem until the moment
to effectively act is lost, or it comes together with candor and grace to
meet the crisis head-on. After a timid start, Granite Falls did the latter,
shucking its down-home modesty to admit it was swamped by drugs. A
coalition of businessmen and school officials formed to draft a plan of
attack, which included a youth meth summit that drew a thousand kids from
the area last summer. Congregrants from churches went door-to-door, passing
out packets about the epidemic in progress to parents of schoolkids. And
the police force joined cops from neighboring towns to take down
street-level dealers and buyers, assembling an informal SWAT team. Although
the yield of these efforts is hard to gauge, the passion that informed them
is front and center: This town is terrified of losing its children.

"I do have other duties, but this seems like all I deal with: another kid
tweaking out in class," says Bridgette Perrigoue, the psychologist at
Granite Falls High School. "They come in dirty, not having eaten or slept,
and sith there clawing at the skin on their arms 'cause they think there' s
bugs underneath it. Or they threaten the kids next to them and scream at
the teacher, then disappear for a week. And mind you, these are eighth- and
ninth-graders."

I had spent much of the morning with three such kids in a conference room
down the hall. Only months removed from the treatment programs that, for
the moment at least, broke their falls, the three, who happened to be
bright, verbal girls, described life in the thresher of meth. Heather,
whose4 friends turned her on at twelve and who was soon robbing houses to
support her habit, plowed a car into a tree at eighty miles an hour and
spent a year learning to walk again. Kale, who waited till thirteen to
start, ran away to sleep on drug dealers' floors and went missing, on and
off, for two years; her pretty face is fretted, still, with contrail scars
from gouging it during all-night tweaks. And Neva, 16, snorted a line three
years ago and soon found herself on the streets of Everett, a
rough-and-tumble city fifteen miles south. Running with a posse of older
boys, she was stealing and dealing and on the verge of being pimped out for
faster money when the cops took her in for loitering. After two stints in
rehab, which she describes as "torture" - months of round-the-clock drug
sweats and breakdowns - she is back in school and determined to shine,
though her old friends keep calling at night.

"That's the thing about this town - there's no escaping it; meth's behind
every rock and cranny," she says. "Go to the skate park, it's there; go to
Burger King, it's there; about the only thing you can do is run home. And
I'm getting along better with my mom and all, but it sucks that I, you
know, have to hide out. I mean, what am I supposed to do for the next three
years? Just 'cause I'm sober doesn't mean I'm a nun."

Neva has been clean now for nine and a half months. I ask if she still gets
cravings.

"Yeah, sometimes," she murmurs, casting a fugitive glance at the two girls
across the table. "Like, I taste it, still, in the back of my throat. You
never forget that taste."

"Me either," says Heather. "It's just super-intense, the most amped-up high
you've ever had. You think you can do anything, like fly a plane or beat up
dudes. I used to get real violent when I tweaked."

"But that's not why you do it - at least why I did," Kale intercuts. "It's
more of, your friends are all using and you want to be with them, so you go
ahead and smoke too. And at first I didn't like it. I mean, yeah, it was
all this energy and stuff - I was having the most amazing thoughts. But
later on that night, you know, the fear kicked in and I was totally bugged
out and wired. I remember running to the park and hiding behind bushes
because I thought everyone was a spy for my mom. Finally, I go so freaked I
was gonna die right there that I walked to the police station and said,
"Arrest me,' and wound up in jail for a while."

"And that wasn't enough to scare you off?"

"Well, for a minute, it was. I was in detention a month - they do that when
you run away here. But then I got out again and saw my friends and - well,
that's the problem with methheads. They're persistent."

Perrigoue, the counselor, hangs her head. Like most everyone I've talked to
in the course of the last week, she's closely acquainted with the burden of
meth. Earlier, we paid a call on a former student, a young kid living in a
house so fetid that the stench blew me back out the door. Peering inside, I
saw a gaunt blond girl lying face-down in her own filth. The student hadn't
bathed in days and melted when I offered to buy him a meal at the burger
place down the block. Stepping onto the porch in sweat-stiff jeans and a
mesh shirt that slid off his ribs, he stared exhaustedly into the morning
sun, looking somewhere between sixteen and sixty.

"Yeah, I'll smoke if it's around," he said, yawning. "But it ain't like I
run out to cop."

I could still smell the brown-water funk of the house, though we were ten
yards clear of the door. "Is that because you can cook your own?"

There were a couple of kids sitting in a green Chevelle, watching from
across the street. The one in the passenger seat shook perceptibly, as if
the car had a heavy idle.

"Nah, I'm just a popular guy," he said. "I got friends who help me out."

Not yet eighteen, he's long out of school. Reportedly, an adult lives on
these premises, but no one has seen him in weeks, and the place has been
put up for sale. That hasn't slowed the parade of visitors, say neighbors,
though none, apparently, is there to buy a house.

"What would it take," I asked, "to get yourself straight again and back in
school, where you belong?"

He was about to make a reflexive crack, but stopped himself short and
grunted. "What would it take?" he murmured. "I mean, I want to get clean.
I've got lots of plans still, and …" He broke off, scratching, eyes lost in
space. "I dunno, I guess something bad, like going to jail."

That fatalism, or an exhaustion that sounds just like it, is a tone I
encountered all week. At dinner one night with the plainclothes detectives
from the county's Regional Drug Task Force, the talk was of a wave of lurid
crimes and the system's futility to check it. There were first-person
recaps of deadly chases on the hairpin passes up north. There were
tight-lipped accounts of recent attempts at "suicide by cop," all involving
tweakers who, tired of living, fired a weapon at an arresting officer. And
there were grim testimonials to the power of meth as a catalyst for further
crime. "Put an ounce of it on the street, and in less than an hour it'll be
surrounded by stolen property," said Mark Richardson, the deputy commander
of the fifteen-member squad. "You've never seen people more motivated to
thieve. It's buy meth, use meth, repeat."

So, too, over lunch with school officials whose fatigue and distress were
palpable. "We've tried everything we could think of to break the denial,
but it's like beating our heads on a wall," says Kath Grant, the project
coordinator for the superintendent's office. "Our dropout and truancy rates
keep going up, and so do the number of kids in special ed because of
behavioral and emotional issues. You ask yourself, where are the parents in
all this? As urgent as this is, we have parent-teacher nights where just a
handful of parents come out, and never the ones who need to."

Indeed, the question of parental culpability is much on people's minds
here. Washington, like its neighbors in the Pacific Northwest, is a
left-leaning state with evolved views on drugs and a history of letting
certain things slide. "There's a lot of folks out here who were kids back
then and smoked, shot, tripped and what have you," says Butch Davis, a
burly sergeant for the Snohomish County sheriff's office. "They think, 'I
survived that and didn't do too bad - so what if my kid gets high?"

It's rare to talk to teens here, alone or in groups, without hearing some
version of that thought. "Seems like everyone smokes weed and drinks after
school, and it's no big deal to their parents," says Alycia Mills, a
pretty, red-haired junior who writes for the school paper.

Later, a school assembly, which is part of a series of scared-straight
symposia on meth, sheds a different light on the problem. Lynn Eul, from
the D.A.'s office, goes first. She begins by citing the local casualties
since her last school visit in May: an eighteen-year-old who was beaten,
then strangled, during a small-time buy gone bad. As Eul vividly parses her
own biography - honor roll at sixteen, meth fiend at twenty, a skeletal
single mother on the streets - there is a constant undertone from the
stands, a buzz of so-what impatience. Glancing behind me, I see a group of
boys taking hits off an imaginary pipe.

Eul is followed by a plump blond woman who trembles as she takes the mike.
She introduces herself as Tammy Sheary, the mother of two teen boys. One of
them, Tyler, is seated beside her; the other, Brady, she says, couldn't
make it today, but she brought along pictures to show. As the house lights
dim, a screen descends and a remarkable slide show begins. To the tune of
Puff Daddy's trite elegy to Biggie Smalls, "I'll Be Missing You," a cycle
of snapshots evokes the life of a lithe blond boy at play. He is a toddler,
kneeling in the surf; a ten-year-old pedaling a stunt-jump bike; a teen in
a tank top and cargo shorts, showing off a just-caught salmon. Boy-band
handsome, he is the pop ideal of every kid in here, the essence of their
stylized id. As the lights come up, many in the room are sobbing. "Five
months ago," says Sheary, "Brady was brutally murdered by a boy in a
parking lot. My son was brilliant, the jewel of my life, and the kid who
killed him was worthless scum who still shows no remorse. The only thing in
common was they'd both used meth that night …" She breaks off a moment to
steady herself, clutching at the chair behind her. "This kid stabbed by son
in the heart with a knife, but no, that wasn't enough. After he killed him
and dragged him up out of the car, he smashed his skull with a great big
rock, fractured it in three different places. That is hateful, that's
inhuman, and that's what I call meth. It took my son away forever and
handed me this box instead."

Bending for her bag, Sheary produces an urn, hugging it as she weeps. It is
a devastating coda and hits the mark flush. As we rise to applaud, though.
I hear the boys in back of me snickering into their sleeves.

"Yo, let's bounce," jeers one of them. "That just made me want to get high."

On Mountain Loop Highway, leaving Granite Falls proper and headed up the
swayback spine of the Cascade Mountains, the air is so rich with the musk
of trees that it intoxicates you in two deep breaths. Spruces and hemlocks
soar overhead, poking holes in the fat-bottomed clouds; it has rained all
morning, and ribbons of fog thread the ground cover like Christmas trim.

"Yeah, it's beautiful up here, but plain old scary when you're patrolling
by yourself at night," says Butch Davis, the Snohomish County sergeant,
from the back seat of Chief Allen's cruiser. "This is prime lab country
down these setbacks and trails. When you're out here alone, it could be
hours, even days, before anyone finds you if you step your foot on something."

Allen turns right on a gravel path. The road bucks crazily beneath our
wheels, like an earthquake in no great hurry. Here and there, hidden by a
stand of firs, is an RV pitched under greasy tarps, engine off and windows
blinkered. Allen slows, looking for signs of life; methheads park campers
along these roads and hole up to binge and cook. Tourists who happen by
have been stabbed and beaten by tweakers who mistook them for cops. And the
officers themselves have had guns fired at them.

"Just pure dumb luck that we haven't lost men yet," says Allen. "These
idiots are superparanoid, and most of 'em are armed to the teeth. You go
into one of these places and you always see three things: guns to the
ceiling, a boatload of porn and appliances with the backs taken off. TVs,
computers, even ovens and vacuums."

"And why is that?" I ask.

"'Cause Big Brother's in the icebox, taking notes!" Davis chortles.

Back on Mountain Loop, Allen wheels down lanes that take us into dirt-road
slums. On little clearings without lawns or yards sit random clusters of
saltbox shacks, aproned by a foot of mud. Husks of old cars rot glumly out
front; a dog barks from every door. On our left is a shed with a madman's
touch: a sunroom made from vinyl truck caps. The driveway beside it is
heel-to-toe with bombed-out Chevy flatbeds.

"Eh, this one's a prince; he cooks such skank meth that the fumes have
rotted his kids' brains," says Davis. "He's got four boys, and not one
could count to ten if you spotted 'em the on through nine."

Asked why he's not in prison, Davis rolls his eyes. "In this state, the
small fish don't do hard time. The jails are so full, and the D.A.'s
caseload's so jammed, that they kick it down to simple possession."

After a tour of several more grim redoubts, including something straight
from Heart of Darkness, a fortress built of deer skins and tree stumps, we
head down the mountain to the sheriff's office, where we're met by three
detectives in an SUV. Our destination is a remote brown sward on the
outskirts of city lines. Though landlocked by tree farms and highway
trestles, it's known as Smith Island for its isolation and anonymous air of
menace. No roads lead onto it, only gaps in the brush that grows as high as
canebrake. Jouncing over ruinous, foot-deep ruts under a drumbeat of
slanting rain, we come to a rise near the eastern edge and find a sprawl of
mud-logged trailers. The cop beside me unclasps his gun; reports from
informants say that meth use is rampant among the three dozen squatters dug
in here.

"Wanna speak to one of these clowns? They won't talk to us, but they might
to Rolling Stone."

Davis and the other cops hang behind, as I approach a white camper with
piebald tires and a peace sign moldering on the door. When I knock, a man
curses and lurches up from a makeshift dining table.

"What d'ya want?" he growls, filling the frame. He has broad logger's
shoulders, a chest-length beard and eyes that dart from side to side,
pulsing inside their sockets. Trailing him out the door is the hell's-bells
stench of oxygenated household solvents. I ask if he's been doing some
cleaning.

"Who are you?" He glares at the cops.

I tell him I'm writing a story about meth. Has he or anyone he knows been
personally affected by -

"Meth?" he snarls. "What's it, like some new-type insect?"

By now, the reek is so profuse that I have to turn sideways to breathe. "So
if you were to invite me in there, I wouldn't see anything involved with
making meth? No open jugs of lye or maybe paint remover, a bucket full of
allergy tabs?"

His pupils bulge; his shoulders mass; he seems to almost float with rage.
"Get out!" he screams. "You're on my property!"

"Well, actually," I note, "it's someone else's land. You're parked here
illeg - "

He steps back and fumbles for something behind him. I freeze; a couple of
the cops edge forward. But the object the man brandishes is not a gun.
Rather, it's a hand-blown crystalline pipe.

"You see this? I made this. I'm an American citizen who makes pipes," he
seethes. "As for what people smoke in them, that's their deal. Their right
as American citizens."

And with that, he gives the door a good slam, though it rattles and doesn't
quite latch. Dauntless, he winds up and slams it again, succeeding this
time in both closing the door and dislodging the tattered peace sign. It
flutters from its perch, rides the breeze a moment, then settles in the
weeds underneath the tire.

Back in the truck, I am wobble-headed, the van's fumes coast my throat.
"Are you telling me he's together enough to change his shirt, much less
peddle dope?"

"Well, I don't know about the shirt - he's probably worn that for months -
but, yeah, he can move some meth," says Davis. "What's worse is he'll teach
ten kids to cook, and each of 'em'll teach ten more. That's how it spreads,
you know, from numbskull to numbskull, and if I was to lock up all the
idiots, who's that leave?"

Paul Solotaroff wrote about weightlifters on steroids in RS 889.