crazy tøwn

Drugs, violence, sex and betrayal. Sound like the tagline from the newest Megan Fox movie? Maybe, but those components are also the basis for the book “Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth.” by Sterling R. Braswell. Published right in our own backyard by Wilkes-Barre-based Kallisti Publishing, Inc., “Crazy Town” is the true story of a man who thought he had it all, until methamphetamine destroyed the delicate house of cards he didn’t realize he was building. In addition to being based on true events, the book is an exploration of the rise of the meth epidemic in our country, offering some very interesting insight among the twists and turns of Braswell’s tumultuous past.

In “Crazy Town,” the author provides a first-person account of his life up to the present. In short, he reconnects with and marries his childhood sweetheart, Lucille. As is often the case in relationships, Braswell is too busy seeing life through his rose-colored glasses to notice all of the glaring red flags in their relationship. Not to mention the fact that his ranch hand Clyde is operating a meth lab right on his property. Eventually, though, the author is forced to face the bitter reality that Lucille is an addict, and with her addiction comes all of the baggage associated with substance abuse. What follows is a devastatingly depressing account of the dissolution of Braswell’s marriage and his personal battle with his feelings for Lucille, as well as some rocky years spent in divorce court.

At first, the way the book is organized seems to take away from the personal narrative Braswell is trying to give the reader. The chapters concerning his life seem significantly shorter than those relaying the development and evolution of meth use, and the reader is always left wanting more pieces of the puzzle. After getting a bit more in-depth, however, one can begin to see a direct correlation of the history of methamphetamine use to Braswell’s own story. For example, from the facts he unearthed pertaining to the development of at-home meth labs (a phenomenon with which our generation is now all too familiar), the reader is able to understand how over-the-counter medications came to be used in the homegrown meth operations around our country, and at about the same time the reader also is familiarized with the antics Clyde is up to on Braswell’s property.

Braswell also points out some very interesting facts that he discovered in his research. Adolph Hitler, Jim Jones, Charles Manson and Andrew Cunanan (Gianni Versace’s murderer) were all amphetamine users in one way or another. While it’s true that all of these people were probably unstable to begin with, it cannot be ignored that the addition of amphetamine to an already volatile cocktail probably took their degree of violence to an entirely new level.

“Crazy Town” is a startling look at how a drug can singlehandedly destroy a person and those who love him. Though depressing at times, this intimate glimpse into Braswell’s life allows the reader a new perspective on the meth crisis in today’s culture. His findings and the way in which he sums up the history of the problem also make it easier to understand how and why it is becoming an epidemic. It is obvious that this is an issue close to Braswell, and this book is his attempt to shed more light on the lurking crisis.

Rating: W W W

by Stephanie DeBalko
Weekender Correspondent.

http://www.theweekender.com/books/A_life_amid_meth_12-09-2009.html

The Midwest Book Review was kind enough to review Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth. Here is what they had to say -

Crazy Town

Sterling R. Braswell
Kallisti Publishing, Inc.
332 Center Street, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18702
9780967851464, $17.95, www.kallistapublishing.com

Meth, there is little good to say about it. “Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth.” tells the story of Sterling R. Braswell and his wife. Mrs. Braswell became a user of meth, and he tells the story of her downward spiral. He also speaks on the long and dark history of the substance, including use by notorious figures and how its dangers have been known for decades. Designed as a wake up call against the substance for Americans, “Crazy Town” is a tragedy and history in one, highly recommended.

I am proud of this endorsement for Crazy Town from Jim Barnes of IndependentPublisher.com –

“The cover says it all, depicting the bug-eyed, mush-mouthed drug addict at the center of this beauty-turned-beast story. Author Sterling Braswell weaves an insightful history of the worldwide methamphetamine epidemic into his cautionary tale about being blinded by love, and how it cost his fortune, his sanity — and nearly his life — to escape.”

Jim Barnes, Managing Editor

Independent Publisher Online

So, what are YOU waiting for. Read Crazy Town now!

www.crazytownthebook.com

CRAZY TOWN: Money. Marriage. Meth.

has been selected as a “Highlighted Title” by IndependentPublisher.com.

Just like the award says: “READ THIS BOOK!”

In Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth. I relate my personal story of my wife’s (now ex-wife’s) addiction to methamphetamine and the disaster my life became because of it. In addition to that story, I also tell the tale of the drug’s history. I felt compelled to make a few comments about the “War on Drugs” because what is happening there is directly influencing how peoples’ lives are being affected by the scourge of abuse.

Here is that chapter from Crazy Town, “War”.

Rarely does a day pass without bold-faced headlines or televised sound bites describing some significant effort or result relative to the U.S. government’s flagship program, the “War on Drugs.” On the political front, a candidate’s unconditional support of any of the “war’s” initiatives represents a stark, black and white litmus test of his or her commitment to the well-being and security – and even the survival – of our great society. To even question the fairness or efficacy of a given initiative all too frequently brands the questioner as being soft on crime or, worse, in cahoots with the criminal element. After all, who could possibly be against reducing the drug problem in our country, or protecting our children from addiction?

Someone who has been through a drug-related personal nightmare, whether it involves methamphetamine or some other substance, might be expected to have a somewhat militant attitude toward the problems directly arising from the use of some illegal drugs (and the illegal use of legal ones). A desire to see certain drugs wiped off the face of the planet would certainly be understandable. Yet such views might be tempered by having witnessed the efforts of regulators and law enforcement personnel, and having seen first-hand the damage that has been done by the spurious “war.” Given the dismal results of our efforts to battle drugs and drug addiction, it is tempting to wonder if we as a society aren’t actually exacerbating the problems in our very efforts to solve them. Perhaps a better perspective can be achieved by looking back to the origins of the drug war, and subsequent efforts over the years,  and then asking ourselves, honestly, what we have achieved so far.

The first battle in the War on Drugs was waged in 1880, when the U.S. and China signed an agreement to outlaw the shipment of opium from China to the U.S. The agreement had a modest effect upon the flow of opium into this country, but its most significant effect was the streamlining of the delivery process. While less raw opium passed into the hands of Americans, a more refined form – heroin – was introduced to replace it. Heroin had first been synthesized in 1874 by an English chemist named C.R. Alder Wright, and subsequently marketed – quite legally – by the Bayer company (of aspirin fame) as a pain reliever and even as a cure for opium addiction! In 1914, a law was passed to regulate its sale and distribution, but heroin remained available to the public until 1924, when legislation was passed making it illegal to import, manufacture, or sell the drug in the U.S. As we have long known, the legislative efforts have been quite effective, as there is no longer a heroin problem in this country, all those people who became addicts before the laws were passed have long since died, and there are no longer any Americans addicted to heroin.

For any reader who failed to notice, that last statement should have been flagged with a bright red “Sarcasm Alert.” Despite all the initial and subsequent efforts to eradicate heroin use in this country, heroin addiction remains a significant problem to both the law enforcement and health care industries. It has been estimated that during the 1970s, there were between 400,000 and 600,000 heroin addicts in the U.S. In 2003, that estimate had decreased to 345,000. While that sounds like a significant decrease, consider some additional numbers that actually overshadow these modest gains: heroin use by twelfth graders increased by more than 100% between the years of 1990 and 1997, the number of heroin-related cases in hospital emergency rooms increased by 64 percent between 1988 and 1994, and 1.6 million Americans were incarcerated for drug-related crimes during the same period, many for distributing or merely possessing heroin. Even as far back as 1926, a significant number of the prisoners in federal penitentiaries were there after being convicted of drug-related crimes. And it is worthy of note that, according to studies endorsed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), punitive enforcement may have little or no deterring effect on injection drug abuse.

As of this writing, the cost of the “War on Drugs” is in excess of $50 billion per year, when federal, state, and local enforcement programs are included. When you add the cost in property lost as a direct result of drug-related crimes, the number soars much higher. And it is impossible – indeed, unethical – to apply a value to the lives lost in what are commonly labeled “drug-related” crimes, which are more accurately crimes of commerce occurring when a drug deal goes bad: a direct result of the profit incentive that arises from the criminalization of drug manufacture, sale, and use.

To see just how effective criminalizing a recreational substance is in the effort to eliminate its presence in American life, one has only to look at the results of the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted on January 16, 1920, which began the period in American history commonly called Prohibition. Legal distillers and breweries ceased operation, only to be replaced by bootleggers and moonshiners who were more than capable of feeding the citizens’ thirst. While tax revenues dropped sharply, income from fines levied against the suppliers soared, as did the price of their products. When it became obvious that there were substantial profits to be made by producing and selling the illegal substances, a concerted effort was begun by organized crime families to get the biggest piece of the illicit pie. Gang violence became a near-daily occurrence, as individual criminal factions competed for control. The booze – and the blood – continued to flow, despite the best efforts of law enforcement, until finally the government realized the futility of their efforts, and on December 5, 1933,  passed the Twenty-First Amendment, repealing Prohibition and ending the “War on Booze.”

A secondary, yet significant effect of the criminalization of a substance is best summed up by Richard Cowan, former director of the National Association for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Cowan coined the term, “the Iron Law of Prohibition,” which states that “the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the prohibited substance becomes.” Indeed, history has demonstrated that as efforts to make a substance unobtainable – be it alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or meth – are increased, the potency of the substance itself increases. During the period of Prohibition, the “moonshine” produced by illicit distillers was typically not only higher in alcohol content, it was also much more frequently contaminated by chemicals that posed as great a health risk as the alcohol itself, if not a greater one. The government’s efforts to stem the flow of cocaine was the primary impetus behind the creation of a more addictive and potent form of the drug: crack.

As to the assertion that by waging a “war on drugs,” we can somehow remove them from existence – particularly by legislation – consider what Radley Balko, policy analyst at the Libertarian think tank The Cato Institute, said. In a 2005 piece about the new restrictions on over-the-counter cold medicines, he opined that the new laws would do little to deplete the meth supply. “Supply of controlled substances always rises to meet demand. It’s similar to the air in a balloon. You can squeeze the supply on one end, but the air inevitably pops up again elsewhere. The total volume of air in the balloon never changes.” The drug supply might relocate, or even change its form, but it can’t be squeezed out of existence.

Yet the passage of new laws seems to be the only “solution” the government can ever come up with. In a 2006 article, Toronto-based journalist Marni Soupcoff, writing about the “Combat Meth Epidemic Act,” came up with the “pufferfish analogy” to describe government. Pufferfish, Soupcoff noted, have the ability to blow themselves up by swallowing water or air when threatened. “Doesn’t that sound familiar?” she asked rhetorically. “Just replace the ‘swallowing water or air’ bit with ‘passing laws,’ and you’ve got a perfect match.” In other words, “Government is a giant sea creature, trying to swell itself up with new legislation to keep itself alive.”

This is not at all an argument in favor of making methamphetamine more readily available to the general public. Given my own experiences, it would be understandable if I were predisposed to locking every user away for the rest of their natural lives (well, perhaps one or two of them!). But while I desperately want the whole meth problem to go away, I am convinced that we have gone the wrong way in our previous efforts to solve the problem, and have, in fact, only made things worse. By making the penalty for simple possession so severe, we have greatly increased the incentive for criminals to go to the very profitable well of supplying the drug to others. By aggressively enforcing the laws restricting its use, we have created a cottage industry of do-it-yourselfers, who face lesser legal risks by making their own, while actually increasing the dangers they face in the form of lab fires and accidents, poisoning due to lack of expertise in formulating their drugs, and even retribution from criminal drug distributors who don’t want anyone cutting into their cash flow. Beyond that, we are creating an entire, huge class of criminals out of individuals who led otherwise law-abiding lives, and whose only crime was poor judgment.

To make matters worse, when we transform users into inmates, we have paid their tuition to the ultimate school for criminal training – the prison system. We pay to house them for years, in an environment geared not toward helping them overcome their problems, but rather toward molding them into real, hardened criminals. Once a prisoner is released, he or she has a new set of criminal skills, along with diminished opportunity to acclimate back into a lawful existence. It should come as no surprise that most of them end up right back in prison.

The War on Drugs is further stymied by the fact that the demand for mind-altering, or at least mood-altering, substances seems to be inherent in our species. The desire to get intoxicated or high may very well be hard-wired into our brains. In the late 1980s, Ronald K. Siegel, a research psychopharmacologist at UCLA, wrote a book called Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances. Re-issued in 2005, and as controversial at re-issue as when it was first published, the book postulates that intoxication is “the fourth drive” – that the desire to get drunk or stoned is the most powerful human drive, after hunger, thirst, and sex. This drive is not limited to the human animal by any means; some mammals and birds appear to seek out psychoactive plants, fermented berries, and the like for the sole purpose of getting a buzz.

More than one reviewer has taken issue with Siegel’s extrapolations from wild animals’ consumption of psychoactive plants to people’s use of, and addiction to, recreational drugs. Whether or not one agrees that the desire to get high is a “fourth drive,” however, it seems clear that it is fairly deeply rooted in our species. In view of this, the attempt to wipe out recreational drug use completely is a fool’s errand.

It is beyond the scope of this book, and certainly beyond my own qualifications, to attempt to establish the “right” way to deal with the drug problem in general, or the meth problem in particular. There are many people who are infinitely better qualified than I to determine the criteria for an effective drug program. However, I do have some small amount of common sense, and can see very plainly that what we have been doing for the last hundred years or so simply isn’t working, and never has. That common sense tells me that it never will. Until we put down the shovel we have used to dig ourselves into this massive hole, we will never get out. My hope is that we’ll at least stop digging long enough to look honestly at our “progress,” and put some real energy – rather than photo-op lip service – into healing ourselves, so that we won’t feel so compelled to medicate ourselves into oblivion.

 ~ from Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth. (Braswell, 2008)

In Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth., I describe how my wife’s addiction to meth took my by complete surprise. (Not to mention her affair with her drug dealer, who was my ranch hand.) Here are some things that, looking back on things, I noticed but didn’t put together until it was much too late.

• Inability to sleep
• Increased sensitivity to noise
• Nervous physical activity, like scratching
• Irritability, dizziness, or confusion
• Extreme anorexia
• Tremors or even convulsions
• Increased heart rate, blood pressure, and risk of stroke
• Presence of inhaling paraphernalia, such as razor blades, mirrors, and straws
• Presence of injecting paraphernalia, such as syringes, heated spoons, or surgical tubing

I got this list from this web site - http://www.freevibe.com/drug_facts/meth.asp.

I didn’t notice these signs until it was much too late. Please, don’t let that happen to you. Just read Crazy Town to see what can happen if you don’t act soon enough.

It is a drug with a history like no other. A favorite of an American president, a Führer, of soldiers, poets, musicians, and madmen, its subtle (yet ever more pervasive) presence delineates the twentieth century in caricature, warping and fraying the edges of the historical picture.

Amphetamine was first synthesized in Germany by a Romanian chemist named Lazar Edeleanu. The year was 1887, two years before the birth of the drug’s most notorious proponent and addict, Adolph Hitler. In 1919, a Japanese pharmacologist, Akira Ogata, developed a derivative of amphetamine by adding the methyl molecule, making methamphetamine, for which there was still no useful purpose; it was simply more potent and easier to make than its parent drug. For thirty years amphetamine was a substance in search of an ailment – until the 1920s when it was discovered that this crystalline powder was useful in treating asthma, hay fever and depression. Being water-soluble, it was ideal for injections. In 1932 the first amphetamine was marketed by the Smith Kline and French Company in the form of an over-the-counter inhaler. This was Benzedrine, a bronchial dilator designed for the treatment of respiratory congestion. The inhaler was a huge success, prompting the pharmacological community as a whole to come up with more than forty uses for the product. In 1937, for instance, it was found to be useful in treating narcolepsy, a spontaneous sleeping disorder.

That same year, amphetamine became available by prescription in tablet form. The American Medical Association’s Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry noted that, “A feeling of exhilaration and sense of well-being was a consistent effect, and patients volunteered that there had been a definite increase in mental activity and efficiency.”

But it was the bronchial inhaler that became the secret hit, one that would foretell the drug’s broader future. By the lights of one study, each inhaler contained the equivalent of fifty-six amphetamine tablets. During the Great Depression, people with no medical condition (such as jazz great Charlie Parker) found there was a pleasant, long-lasting high to be attained by pulling off the nasal strips and dunking them in their coffee. Prohibition may have made the sale and consumption of alcohol illegal, but amphetamine was as legal as a glazed donut.

During this time, a full spectrum of amphetamine’s medical uses were slowly being revealed, and in some cases, invented. An obvious use was found relatively early on in treating obesity, as amphetamine simultaneously lays waste to the appetite and fires the metabolism. Near the end of the 1930s it was also found to help a certain category of unruly children who fared poorly in school. Though known to stimulate the central nervous system, children with what would come to be known as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were actually calmed by small doses of the drug, and their ability to concentrate mysteriously improved.

Thus amphetamine and methamphetamine found their ailments. They also found the perfectly healthy fan, the recreational user among the down-and-out in a world growing ever bleaker. But it would not merely be an American drug. Amphetamine was a filament of pure light illuminating a globe on the brink of war. Among the ruins of the approaching Apocalypse it would establish for itself an entirely new role.

 - From Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth.

There is something inexplicably post-apocalyptic about the meth addict’s existence. The color seems to have washed out of his or her world. As a former addict once put it, meth compels its user to “live like a coyote” – homeless, and constantly foraging for mere sustenance. But this coyote is, it should be remembered, a human being who once lived among family and friends in a house filled with things she or he owned.

When thinking of the meth addict, it is also tempting to draw comparisons to Gollum, that nasty little creature in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m sure I am not the first to do so. Once upon a time, Gollum was a Hobbit named Smeagol, though fans of the books or movies know that even as Smeagol he was no exemplary soul. He did, after all, strangle his best friend in order to take possession of the Ring. But it was obvious from the beginning that the Ring had possession of him, and as the years went by, he forgot everything he had ever been, lost what little decency or conscience he’d had. As he tells it in the movie, “We forgot the taste of bread, the sound of trees, the softness of the wind, we even forgot our own name.” He became a scraggly, near-naked hunchback, until at the end he was nothing more than his deep hunger for “my Preciousssss.” He would gladly have killed anyone who got in the way of his retrieval of the Ring, but in the end, it was his own hunger that killed him. Lunacy, indeed, if not pure evil.

Beyond being about lunacy, this book is also about a very modern phenomenon, yet one with antecedents. Amphetamine was not first derived in the nineties at the dawn of the epidemic, as some might presume, but more than a century ago. Today methamphetamine is far and away the most prevalent synthetic drug clandestinely manufactured in the U.S. The trajectory is astonishing. In 1991 the DEA seized approximately 21 million dosage units of methamphetamine nationwide. The following year the number skyrocketed to 48 million. In 1996 more than 74 million units were seized, and in 2002 the number vaulted to an incredible 118 million dosage units. And they were seized in the most unlikely of places – the countryside. Here, supplies were plentiful and meth manufacturers and dealers knew small-town police were not ready for them. Turns out there was no safer haven than the bathtubs of doublewides tucked in amongst the verdant hills of southern Iowa, in machine shops on the edge of the scenic hamlets of eastern Kansas, or on the small farms of western Missouri. And they have moved far beyond the Heartland, leaving in their wake a blight of insanity and violence that can only be described as cartoonlike.

In 1995 a man suffering from amphetamine psychosis broke into a San Diego National Guard armory and commandeered an unarmed Abrams tank. He then went on a rampage through residential neighborhoods, crushing cars, fire hydrants, anything that stood in his way. After taking the tank onto a freeway, he was finally stopped but refused to surrender, whereupon a police officer climbed atop the tank and shot the man through the heart.

Sixty miles to the north in Aguanga, a mobile home caught on fire after a mysterious explosion. According to witnesses at the scene, a group of seven or eight men ran out, fleeing for their lives, while outside the trailer a mother, holding her ten-year-old son, screamed that her other three children were still inside. When neighbors came running up to see if they could help, they were threatened by the men and warned away. No attempt was made to save the children, and when authorities arrived, the men scattered. Twelve hours later, firefighters waded through the charred remains to find the bodies of the three children, ages three, two, and one. The cause of the fire was determined to have been a methamphetamine lab explosion. When the men who had fled were finally rounded up, it was learned that they were not only meth “cooks” and dealers, but heavy users.

Paranoia is a hallmark of the meth user’s lunacy. This is not the quaint and common form of the affliction whereby the neighbor lady thinks her phone is being tapped, but the eerily acute kind that causes users to become scared witless because they believe they are being chased by invisible spiders and plastic people. In their minds, they have enemies by the score who are plotting and moving against them, and it is this quasi-reality, permeated with a scent of threat, that lends the meth culture its extraordinary violence. Remarkably few people fatally overdose on meth (only a few hundred in any given year out of millions of users); what kills is the paranoia it inspires. The meth addict feels that, other than meth itself, his best friend is his automatic weapon.

But such an epidemic would not be possible were it not for recent extravagances in mainstream American culture, at the command of the determined individual blessed with access to boundless information. Though methamphetamine wasn’t first derived here, it is a drug tailor made for a nation of do-it-yourselfers relentlessly drawn to the prospect, or at least to the illusion, of controlling time. Separatory funnels, Bunsen burners, molecular bits of synthetics, automatic weapons, cryptic formulae hardwired into the synapses of an electrified brain –- such are the things that clutter the meth addict’s life, most of which are require the application of otherwise wholesome skills acquired in high school chemistry class and boot camp. A certain corner of the American psyche likes the idea of methamphetamine, if not the reality.

This book is also a story about people who have lived in the drug’s weird ether. To a certain extent it is my story, as it has cut a broad enough swath through my life that I feel uniquely qualified to expound upon it (more on that in a moment). In spite of this grim personal history, I would like to point out that I am not a prude when it comes to recreational drug use. Indeed, I have always been of the mind that, for many, life can be excruciatingly dull without something to give the day a little pop. But neither am I a flaming libertine who doesn’t recognize a bad thing when he sees it.

Methamphetamine has been characterized by many experts as the greatest threat to a civilization ever posed by a drug. The threat is unique because the substance is unique. First, methamphetamine is extraordinarily addictive. Experienced drug rehab workers say it’s the hardest drug to kick that they have ever come across, with ninety-five percent of the people who become addicted never able to quit. And there is a very specific reason for this. Meth operates at the most fundamental level of pleasure: in effect, it hijacks the body’s biochemical reward system by priming the brain with the neurotransmitter dopamine, and then prevents its “re-uptake,” essentially keeping it from leaving the system. This is why a meth high lasts so many hours or days, instead of the few minutes or hours typical of the effects of other drugs. Second, meth’s effects on the body are often permanent, and include psychosis and severe depression. Of course, some few die as a result of an overdose, and nothing is so permanent as death. Finally, and most terrifying of all, meth can be easily manufactured by the user, and even mutated into other drugs that produce a variety of effects. In essence, the user becomes the supplier, a kind of mom-and-pop pharmaceutical company. Within four or five hours, anyone with the equipment, ingredients and a recipe (all of which are readily available) will have enough of the drug to impart a strong appetite to the inclined set at a quiet rural high school – an appetite which quickly becomes ravenous.

As with all recreational drugs, meth has spawned its own unique culture, one complete with jargon and folklore. Being inexpensive to manufacture, it has become a favorite of the working poor, taking seed, as the stereotype would have it, in trailer parks and among the denizens of motorcycle gangs. Stereotypes of course are often little more than cruel exaggerations, but sometimes they contain a kernel of truth, or at least are not without substance. Like it or not, statistics bear out widely-held preconceptions of the methamphetamine culture. People arrested for manufacturing or possessing meth are overwhelmingly poor and white. They are also lacking in higher education, though the habit is gradually percolating up through the social-economic spectrum. The Hell’s Angels have trafficked in the drug for decades, distributing yellow-white crystals nationwide in the black leather pannier bags of countless roaring Harleys. It is, as the condescending white-collar coke addict might say, the drug of choice among white trash.

What makes the story of amphetamine and methamphetamine so remarkable is the unprecedented nature of the epidemic itself. Civilized society cannot simply scorch meth where it grows as it would a poppy or pot field. Meth is an idea applied to a mixture of things commonly part of our everyday lives, things we cannot simply annihilate. Even if we were capable of removing all the physical components, the idea would remain, and our inherent inventiveness would find a way to see the idea through to fruition. In the animal kingdom of human ideas, meth is the cockroach: omnipresent and indestructible.

And, as with the cockroach, it is a very old idea. Over the past half-century, amphetamines have drifted in and out of vogue, their popularity driven by the winds of fashion, youth culture, and necessity. Amphetamines have been a favorite of housewives, soldiers, working folks, and students. In the main, it has been a drug favored by the industrious, but the aimless ways of youth culture have certainly held their sway.

Imagine the life and work of Jack Kerouac without the influence of Bennies. Similarly, the prospects of the Mods of Britain, darting off on their Italian scooters to seaside towns to rumble on bank holidays, hardly seems likely without little pills they affectionately called Purple Hearts. The Northern Soul movement, also of Britain, combined amphetamine pill fare with a taste for exceedingly rare Motown forty-five records, and blended them into a very specific identity. Together, all of these micro-cultures, along with widespread use by mainstream American and European society, would foster the conditions necessary for the epidemic that was to come.

But unlike most drugs, meth has found a particularly enthusiastic market among women. According to the Koch Crime Institute, they are more likely to use methamphetamine than cocaine. There is a straightforward theory accounting for this fact, as meth is by far the less expensive of the two central nervous system stimulants, as well as a great suppressor of appetite. Meth is renowned for bringing a user’s weight down in dramatic fashion, and has become ever more popular in an age that celebrates the sleek profile so assiduously. But there is another less direct theory worthy of consideration.

Speculation in certain quarters has it that both men and women who are drawn to meth may be so in part as a result of various pre-existing psychological conditions. Many female users suffer from a controversial condition called borderline personality disorder (BPD). People with BPD – seventy-five percent of whom are women – lead wildly chaotic personal lives, and have the peculiar inability to really “see” themselves moving through their lives from day to day, moment to moment, in any meaningful way. More specifically, they don’t feel truly attached to the people around them, nor do they feel a part of the everyday ebb and flow of their own experience. Meth, however, may provide some temporary relief from the chaos of their tortured interior lives, allowing them – if only for a few hours – to feel intense personal attachment. Indeed, meth is something of a love drug.

But the story of amphetamine and methamphetamine (which is amphetamine with a methyl molecule attached) begins in earnest at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the military application of the drug. Amphetamine’s primary military value, of course, lay in its capacity to control, if only for a few days, the body clocks of fighting forces, an edge that has become a tactical necessity in modern warfare. Similarly, the current epidemic is a result of a civilian population that has become addicted not only to the physical ecstasy but to the temporary emotional bliss the drug provides. And that is the existential allure of meth: the illusion that one has conquered sadness and, indeed, time itself.

Time is a key element not only to the psychic effect of the drug, but to its rise in popularity. You may wonder why this book is structured the way it is, alternating between my personal journey and the global history of the meth epidemic. Beyond the possibility that I have been somewhat influenced by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s unique way of storytelling – those brief vignettes that flit from past to present and back again – there is a reason this rather unconventional structure is peculiarly suited to this book. The earliest moments in the history of meth are seamlessly connected to the effects it has upon the present, and thus it makes sense to present the two seemingly disconnected facets simultaneously. By alternating a contemporary tale of amphetamine’s veiled nature and devastating effects with the history of the drug itself, the epidemic can be seen in the immediate context of the forces that brought it to bear. What happened may not be nearly so important as why it happened. And that, of course, is open to interpretation.

My qualifications for telling the personal story will become all too clear in the early chapters, but the reader may wonder by what authority I recount the history of meth. After all, my background is in software. The truth is that I began this book in the first place because at the time I initially became aware of the nightmare unfolding right under my nose, there was very little accessible information on methamphetamine. America had not yet awakened to the enormity of the problem, and even the so-called experts – the doctors, the licensed chemical dependency counselors, and (especially) the law enforcement professionals – knew very little about it. These were the people I initially turned to for help, which they were more often than not unable to give. So I set out to do my own research, and, this being the information age, it was not, as they say, rocket science. At the risk of sounding a bit elitist myself, if a sub-literate, dentally deficient bumpkin can master the delicate and dangerous chemistry of meth production, is it not conceivable that a reasonably well-educated software professional could look up some facts about the product?

Even so, I do not pretend that what I offer here is a comprehensive history of the meth epidemic or, for that matter, an authoritative chronicle of the ill-conceived war on drugs. And no doubt my view of at least some historical events has been colored somewhat by my personal experience. However, the dates and events have been recounted as accurately as possible. And though, as implied above, historical events may be open to interpretation, this has always been the case with history. Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once wrote (and the metaphor seems apt here), “History is a needle / for putting men asleep / anointed with the poison / of all they want to keep.” At the very least, the “global history” I present in these pages is a starting point, and the reader is certainly encouraged to do further research. I have listed a few resources at the back.

I wrote this book because I strongly believe it tells a story that needs to be told. It is an open-ended tale, still unfolding on both the personal and global fronts, even as I write this. But from my perspective, it does have a clear beginning. The story begins close to home, with someone who was once very close to me. I won’t begin with “once upon a time,” as it has been thoroughly used up. And the vote is still out on whether a “happily ever after” will ever come to pass . . .