No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth - Hardcover

Frank Owen has been a journalist for fifteen years, writing for Playboy, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, The Washington Post, Spin, Details, and Vibe, among other publications. His critically acclaimed book Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture, was published in 2003 by St. Martin's Press. He lives in New York.

Chapter One The Rise of Nazi Dope Springfield, Missouri  Stanley Harris trundles up to meet me in an oily old truck that spits out a trail of exhaust fumes. I'm staying at a local "meth motel," one of a string of fifty-dollar-a-night establishments arranged along a neon corridor on Glenstone Avenue, on the northern edge of town. The motels are often frequented by methamphetamine manufacturers, so-called cooks, who sign in under false names and pay in cash, then go up to their rooms where they cover the door cracks with wet towels to mask the smell and then they start making the drug. Harris is here to show me some of the sights and give me a tour of some of the local meth landmarks. "I used to sell meth out of that motel across the street." He points to another hostelry on the other side of the highway, one slightly swankier than the threadbare place where I'm staying. Harris is a walking meth history lesson, living proof that sometimes speed doesn't kill. A roofer by trade, he's only forty-six, but he's been shooting up methamphetamine for thirty-five-years, ever since at the age of eleven he eased a spike into his arm in the school playground while trying to impress an older crowd of boys. "I was real scared at first," he says in a raspy country accent, sounding as if his vocal chords have been rubbed raw by sandpaper. "But after I did it I felt like I was on top of the world." In the following three and a half decades, Harris shot up meth when he was happy and he shot up meth when he was sad. He shot up even when yellow puss was oozing from gangrenous holes in his arms and his doctors told him if he didn't stop injecting himself they might have to amputate them. He continued to shoot up after twice flatlining during heart attacks. He spent half a lifetime pumping gram after gram of methamphetamine into his veins, in the process creating chaos in the lives of everybody he loved. But six months before I met him in early December 2005, Stanley Harris quit. Harris is a stocky man with graying hair and big black circles ringing his eyes that give him the appearance of a demented panda bear. His big, hairy, tattooed arms resemble gnarled and rotted-out tree trunks. A hyperactive chatterbox, when he speaks the words come flooding out of his mouth accompanied by a barrage of facial ticks and herky-jerky hand gestures. When he does pause for a moment, he doesn't so much take a breath as wheeze like a puff of wind. Even though at the time I spoke to him he had just pled guilty to drug manufacturing and distribution charges and was facing life in state prison as a persistent offender, Harris was a happy man. "I'm real happy because thanks to Jesus I'm not a servant to meth anymore." He smiles, revealing a dental disaster zone. Harris doesn't have bad teeth, he has practically no teeth; some of them he lost in bar fights and motorcycle accidents, he says, but most of them fell out because of his meth habit. As world-class dope habits go, Stanley's was a monster. At the height of his addiction, he was shooting an eight ball (an eighth of an ounce) of meth a day. But in early 2005, Harris finally hit rock bottom. He'd tried to kick the drug a number of times, but within hours of completing a treatment program he'd shoot up again. He was on parole and had already given two dirty urine samples. He was sure he was headed back to jail. It was then he decided that he was going to go on one last binge and either kill himself or let the police do the job. On his fourteenth day without sleep, Harris collapsed and was admitted to Sigma House, a local treatment center. After detoxing for a couple of days, an Alcoholics Anonymous counselor came to see him and they had a conversation about God that awoke long-dormant religious feelings in Harris. "I used to hate Jesus Christ," says Harris, who as an impressionable teenager was so influenced by the movie The Exorcist that he used to get down on his knees and pray to Satan. "I thought he was a pussy. What had he ever done for Stanley? But by this point I was ready for something to work in my life because if it don't work, I might as well blow my head off."  Missourians have been mainlining methamphetamine since the 1950s. In a 1959 article, Time magazine reported about a new drug craze among some Kansas City, Missouri, high school students who had learned how to extract and then inject the methamphetamine contained in Valo inhalers, which could be bought at the time in local drug stores for seventy-five cents apiece. The magazine highlighted the case of Gary A. Hamilton, aged twenty-two, who was arrested after ordering tea at a lunch counter, pouring the hot water into an inhaler, and then taking pictures of himself in an automatic photo booth injecting the liquid into his arm. A Kansas City narcotics detective was quoted as saying: "There are at least two hundred known users in the city, and at least twice as many that we don't know about." Meth in Missouri isn't a new phenomenon, then, but a persistent and entrenched problem that has been around for decades. But something happened in the Ozarks in the early 1990s, something that dramatically changed the local meth landscape and turned a manageable problem into a genuine crisis, something that by the end of the decade had transformed the southwest corner of the state into a meth-manufacturing Mecca. To call Missouri the meth lab capital of America is a little misleading. The phrase "meth laboratory" summons up images of foaming beakers, flaming Bunsen burners, and bubbling three-necked flasks, the sort of elaborate glassware and equipment found commonly at so-called superlab sites in California and Mexico. While it's true that Missouri has reported more "meth lab incidents"--a catchall phrase that includes not just working labs but also abandoned labs, stockpiles of ingredients, and chemical dump sites--than any other state for four years in a row (2002-2005), most of the labs seized are what the Drug Enforcement Administration calls STLs (small toxic labs): do-it-yourself operations that employ everyday household items like coffee filters, plastic bottles, Pyrex dishes, and liquid blenders to produce small amounts of the drug. To an outsider who stumbles across one, these so-called mom-and-pop labs would seem like little more than a messy garage or an untidy garden shed. A better way to describe Missouri would be to call it the kitchen chemistry capital of the United States, a place that in the mid-1990s saw an extraordinary fivefold increase in the number of hobbyists churning out homemade meth, a phenomenon comparable to the heyday of moonshining during Prohibition and an illicit drug manufacturing boom that is only now beginning to subside. In 1992, local authorities raided nineteen meth labs in the Ozarks and the DEA raided only two in the entire state. By 2004, there were more than 2,800 meth lab incidents--that's roughly one meth lab for every two thousand Missourians. While the State Highway Patrol reported a 44 percent decrease in meth lab busts in the last six months of 2005, a drop largely credited to a new state law making it harder for local cooks to acquire the supplies of pseudoephedrine-containing cold medicines they need to make the drug, it wasn't enough of a decrease to prevent Missouri once again leading the nation in meth lab incidents.  Bathed in a late autumn glow, Springfield doesn't seem like a community ravaged by meth despite its reputation as a paradise for tweakers (chronic users). The Battlefield Mall--named in memory of Wilson's Creek, a famous Civil War battle--is packed with shoppers buying jeans at the Gap and eating hamburgers at Ruby Tuesday. Students from Missouri State University throng the coffee bars in the newly revitalized downtown area, tapping on their laptop computers and sipping cappuccinos. Minor-league baseball fans catch a game at the new $32 million Hammons Field. Springfield is a medium-sized city with the feel of a small town, the sort of place that pandering politicians have in mind when they talk about "the heartland" and "middle America." If meth has spurred a serious crime wave across rural America, as is often claimed in newspaper editorials, it hasn't hit Springfield. Crime is low here, astonishingly so given the city's standing as a major center for meth manufacturing. On average, about a half dozen murders are committed each year within the city limits, which is about half the national average for a place its size. Armed robbery is about a third of what it is in the rest of the country. The only crime categories in which Springfield exceeds the national average are burglary and property crimes, which local police blame on meth addicts looking to feed their habit. The Ozarks has long had the reputation as an economically depressed region--a backwards and backwoods place. Like something from the movie Deliverance. But the Springfield I encountered seemed like a flourishing city with a diverse economy, low unemployment, and steady job growth. Any simplistic theories I had about poverty being the root cause of methamphetamine abuse in the Ozarks dissipated after a few days in Springfield, a city that seems to have successfully shed its roughneck past--the drinking, whoring, and gambling cowboy town of yore, the place where in 1865 Wild Bill Hickok shot to death David Tutt over a pocket watch--to become a thriving community, a great place to live and raise a family. The other feature of Springfield life impossible not to notice is the overwhelming atmosphere of hellfire-and-brimstone religiosity that permeates the city. An apocryphal story has H. L. Mencken calling Springfield "the buckle of the Bible Belt," though he might as well have. Welcome to Jesusville, U.S.A., where the American genius for down-home, cornpone religion is on full display and where even the waitress serving you a cocktail quotes scripture. The city features dozens of different fundamentalist and evangelical denominations. Outside of Detroit, Springfield is probably the churchiest place I've ever visited in America. And we're not talking roadside tabernacles here. Shiny new houses of worship are everywhere. These are not august edifices sanctioned by time and tradition, but buildings that look like shopping malls or technical college campuses more than anything else. Springfield is the main base of the Assemblies of God, the church that spawned both Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, and the world's largest Pentecostal Protestant denomination, with more than fifty million members worldwide. The organization's headquarters over on Boonville Avenue occupies ten city blocks and includes a publishing plant that pumps out sixteen tons of gospel literature every day. Engage ordinary people in conversation here, and you'll find many of them hold strange beliefs that sound more like political conspiracy theories than articles of faith: Star Wars is satanic; for instance, or Hillary Clinton, if not exactly the Antichrist, is at least his handmaiden. In the week I spent in Springfield, I got used to fielding questions from the locals like "Have you accepted Jesus as your personal lord and savior?" and "Do they believe in Jesus where you come from?" At a bible study class, a preacher asked me in what religion I was raised. I told him I was brought up Irish Catholic. "Ah, C.I.A.," he smirked. "Catholic, Irish, Alcoholic." As opposed to P.A.T., I suppose: Protestant American Tweaker. And that's another thing: don't call them Protestants. It seems that "Protestant" is a term invented by Papists. Springfield looks serene and content enough. But scratch below the surface a little--peer behind the image of industrious piety--and you see another side to the city. Driving in from the airport, the taxi driver, wearing a trucker cap and sporting a ponytail, wanted to know what this English-sounding dude was doing in the back of his cab. I told him I was here researching a book on crystal meth. "Sheeet," he laughed. "You've come to the right place. In this city, it's easier to get meth than a woman." According to Nick Console, who in December 2005 was days away from retiring as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Springfield office, the blame for the dramatic increase in amateur meth manufacturing in the Ozarks can be traced back to a single individual: Bob Paillet, a local meth cook who in the early '90s began casting around for a new, cheaper, less bothersome way to make the drug. When the DEA raided Paillet's Springfield home in 1994, agents were initially baffled. They'd received a tip from an informant about the stockpiles of cold medicines, so they figured Paillet must be operating some sort of meth lab. But the presence of other chemicals puzzled them. Anhydrous ammonia? Sodium metal? "We found things we didn't think could be used to make methamphetamine," says Console, a colorful Jesse Ventura-type character right down to the shaved head, black turtleneck, and cowboy boots. "We sent the recipe and the ingredients up to the DEA lab in Chicago and they told us: 'We've never seen anything like this before but we'll try it.' They tried the recipe, and bingo, they produced methamphetamine." John Cornille, the DEA agent who arrested Paillet, says: "I remember the chemist's exact words: 'There is a basis in the scientific literature for such a formula, but it hasn't been seen in the United States before.'" Though he never received any formal education in the subject, Paillet knew a lot about chemistry and spent many hours researching in the library at Missouri State University, even though he wasn't a student there. After his arrest, Paillet told Cornille that during the course of this research he came across a copy of a document stamped with a swastika that revealed how the Nazis made the methamphetamine they supplied to their battlefront troops during World War II. Unlike the other ways of manufacturing meth, the Nazi method didn't require an open heat source. Instead, the cooking process was started by dissolving the ephedrine into a solvent and then adding a mixture of the common farm fertilizer anhydrous ammonia and a reactive metal such as lithium or sodium. This new recipe had the advantage of reducing the number of stages in the process and was therefore easier to make, although the method yielded smaller amounts of the drug than usual. You could now produce a little supply of the drug in a couple of hours instead of the twenty-four hours normally needed. Whether Hitler's chemists really used this way of manufacturing methamphetamine remains unclear. DEA chemists looked into the matter and could find no connection to the Nazis. Some scientists believe that what Paillet actually dug up was the Birch reduction method, named after the Australian scientist Arthur Birch. Whatever the truth of the matter, the "Nazi" moniker stuck. Paillet gave five of his friends fishing tackle boxes containing materials and detailed instructions on how to make meth using this method, and from there, the recipe spread, and Nazi dope labs began sprouting up all across the Ozarks like toxic mushrooms. "I knew we were in a lot of trouble," says John Cornille, "when the first sample of Nazi meth we sent to the lab turned out to be 92 percent pure methamphetam...