CHAPTER EIGHT

SUFFER THE CHILDREN
THE IMPACT OF METH ON THE MOST DEFENSELESS

Sue Webber-Brown is an investigator for the Butte County District Attorney's Office. She also is the founder of the Drug Endangered Children program (DEC), which has become a national model for similar programs.
When police and socialworkers in other California counties, and even in other states, wonder why she spends so much energy advocating for children from meth homes, she shows them. Since she began DEC in 1991, she has collected photos that tell a terrible tale:

· In one Yuba City home, above a tidy bookcase of children's stories, a brewing pot of meth has overrun its container and dripped brown stains on the children's nightstand and onto the carpet beside their bunk beds. An infant is sleeping in a nearby crib.

· In an Oroville home where an 8-year-old lives with her mother and stepfather, there's a jar of meth and acetone in the ice tray in the freezer. On the spice rack, investigators find a small jar of iodine crystals. On the floor in front of the sink, drops of iodine have burned into the linoleum. The girl's parents told her they were concocting gasoline for their truck. Her parents were wearing gloves and breathing masks to shield them from fumes, but the girl had no such protection as she stood in the doorway watching them make meth in the kitchen sink. She tells a social worker she's had headaches, a sore throat and a queasy stomach for several weeks before her parents are arrested and she is taken into protective custody.

· In another Butte County home, raw meth sits in a 2-liter Pepsi bottle in the fridge. A piece of chicken wrapped in tin foil on a lower shelf tests positive for meth. Three children live in the home.

Before Webber-Brown came along, narcotics officers would arrest parents, then look for the nearest adult to baby-sit the children. Toddlers might be left with a neighbor; babies might go to a grandparent. Older children might stay with another adult living in the same drug-infested home. No one checked the children for medical problems unless they were readily apparent. Rarely did anyone call county child welfare services.

The mother of three children, Webber-Brown grew weary of the neglect and started the Drug Endangered Children program. Operated as a pilot program in seven California counties -- Butte and Shasta are the only ones in Northern California -- the program teams drug cops with social workers, doctors and other experts to evaluate and track children who have been exposed to meth, and provide care for them.

"They just tear at my heart when I see how cute they are," says Webber-Brown, whose team has removed more than 620 children from drug-abusing parents in Butte County since 1993. "I had one guy tell me, 'You shouldn't get so emotionally involved' . . .[but] if we all say we have our own lives, our own families, our own Little League, then who will take care of these children?"

Across California, thousands of children live with meth addicts behind shuttered windows in homes that often lack electricity, adequate food or proper plumbing. Many children are too young to understand the white powdery stuff in baggies. All they know is that Mommy and Daddy don't want to play.

"The older kids, over 10, will have a general understanding that there is drug usage in the home," says Marv Stern, Sacramento County's child-abuse special prosecutor. "But the more likely description of what life is like is: 'They started getting madder at me. They wouldn't let me go out and play. They never served food anymore. People would come over at odd hours. They always kept the house dark. . . . Why am I being treated this way? Why can't I have anybody over? Why am I not going to school anymore?' "

These are the children clogging the child welfare system. More than 120,000 kids in California live in foster homes. In some parts of the state, social workers estimate that up to 90 percent of their cases somehow relate to meth. Even officials reluctant to quantify how much child abuse and neglect may be attributed to meth are willing to say their highest proportion of serious cases can be directly linked to it.

"We look at methamphetamine as ancillary to child death and child abuse," says Sheila Anderson, director of Sacramento County's Child Abuse Prevention Council, which puts out an annual report on child abuse and neglect and oversees the county's child-death review team.

The council only recently has started cataloging the drugs involved in children's deaths, but Anderson says the anecdotal data about meth are overwhelming. Many of the Valley's highest-profile child deaths have come at the hands of parents who were high on crank.

"I've heard people say meth makes you violent, but meth doesn't make you violent. But I tell you when you come down, you get real cranky, real tense. When I came off my drugs, I hit Dustin. Maybe I did hit him a little too hard in the mouth."
-- Douglas Haaland Jr. from the Fresno County Jail.

On Jan. 12, 1999, the body of 4-year-old Dustin Haaland was found battered and buried in a shallow grave in a vineyard west of Fresno. Authorities believe he was beaten for months by his father, who was on parole for abusing Dustin's older brother, Dougie, four years earlier. Dustin's mother, Kathy Haaland, did nothing to stop her son's death.

Instead, she helped her husband bury the boy before the couple moved in with her sister. Kathy, then 23, was six months pregnant with the couple's third son.
Douglas Haaland Jr., then 25, had nursed a raging meth habit for years before landing in prison in 1994 for hurlingDustin's older brother to the ground in a rage. Dougie went to a foster home. Haaland went to prison, and Kathy went to jail. Haaland had been using meth for several months before the assaults on Douglas, according to a probation report:

"Haaland said he had not slept for eight days because he was snorting a lot of crank, and he ran out about three days before his arrest. He said he was very agitated and irritated."

Before he was convicted in 1995 for felony child endangerment, Haaland wrote a letter to Superior Court Judge Gene Gomes:

I want to start off by telling you that I'm sorry for doing what I did. I do need help for my drug problem so this or anything else won't ever happen. I've never been in trouble with the law before. . . . I'm never going to forgive myself for what I did to my son. We all make mistakes, and I made the biggest of all . . .
Sincerely,
Douglas Arthur Haaland

Nearly three years later, and two months after he was released from Corcoran State Prison, Haaland ran into a friend who had some meth. Haaland was hooked again.

Five months later, Dustin's body was found. Authorities believe the boy had been killed weeks earlier, and his parents convinced family members the child was visiting relatives during the 1998 Christmas season. Dustin's mother pleaded guilty to child endangerment and testified against his father, who contended he was not guilty. On July 13, a jury convicted him of second-degree murder in the death of Dustin, and he was sentenced to 44 years to life in prison.

· When Amber Walker died in her crib of starvation and dehydration, her tiny body was literally used up. "Particularly noteworthy," states the 1996 autopsy report, was "increased wrinkling of the lower buttocks consistent with the depletion of fat."
The skeletal 3-month-old weighed 5 pounds when she died, less than a pound above her birth weight. Amber was discovered lying wide-eyed and motionless by her mother, Theresa Walker, in the motel room they called home on Bakersfield's run-down Union Avenue.

Despite the volumes of tears she shed for her baby after Amber's death, family members said, the meth-addicted mother often left the infant in soiled diapers and rarely touched her. The woman's mother told reporters Walker had struggled with meth addiction since she was 14, about the same time she got pregnant with the first of her eight children. One earlier baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), also at 3 months of age.

Walker's three oldest children were living with their grandmother when Amber died. But a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy lived with their mother, Amber and Amber's twin, Adam. Neighbors said the 4-year-old often dressed and fed her younger brother and that both suffered from head lice that went untreated.

Theresa Walker was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1996 and sentenced to three years in prison.

· Alexia Real was just 5 years old when her mother and stepfather, delusional from their meth addiction, decided they must rid Alexia and her 13-year-old sister of the "demons and vampires" that inhabited their souls.
For eight straight days in the summer of 1997, Barbara Carrasco, for three meals a day, blended a special milk shake for her daughters: Clorox bleach, vanilla ice cream, garlic and other spices.

"It was horrible. It tasted chalky," the elder sister testified later at her stepfather's murder trial.

On the eighth day, the teen emerged from her bedroom in Elk Grove, a Sacramento suburb, and saw Alexia lying motionless in the hallway. Her mother was trying to resuscitate her. The next time the teen saw her sister, Alexia's body had been dismembered with a pruning saw and her mother was giving instructions on what to say if anyone asked questions.

Then, the girl told authorities later, Barbara and Larry Carrasco burned Alexia's body in the family's fireplace and dumped her ashes and the tools used to dismember her into the Sacramento River. Terrified and confused, the 13-year-old said nothing for months until one fall morning when she appeared at school with chemical burns on her arms, back and hips. She had been doused with bleach by her stepfather in another attempt to rid her of demons. When detectives grew curious about her missing sister, the story emerged.

Larry Carrasco, a former bus driver in Sacramento, was convicted and sentenced to 40 years to life in prison. Barbara Carrasco was sentenced to 15 years to life after a judge ruled she was legally sane at the time of the murder and that the evidence showed that she had a longtime "festering, loathing of the child."

Sacramento County prosecutor Marv Stern, who helped send the Carrascos to prison, says the combination of methamphetamine and parenting is as sinister as anything he's ever seen.

"If you have a child death case and there's a drug involved, it's more likely to be meth than any other drug," he says. "I don't know why, but I can tell you there is a clear link between parents who abuse meth and physical abuse."

There is no shortage of horror stories. In addition to being victims of murder, physical abuse and passive neglect, the children of meth users often are targets for sexual molestation.

At the Child and Family Institute in Sacramento near the University of California at Davis Medical Center, therapists encourage children to play in sandboxes or create families out of dolls so they can teach them how "normal" children interact with adults. Many never have lived in a family where parents are caretakers and child's play does not include explicit sexual acts.

Director Sandy Baker says it is common for child molesters to seek out meth-addicted mothers to date because they can have unsupervised access to young children: "Many of these kids have been repeatedly raped. It's happened so many times they just consider it a way of life."

Baker is a member of Sacramento County's child-death review team and was instrumental in helping revise a Sacramento Child Protective Services policy in 1997. Under the old policy, social workers were instructed to view drug addiction as a "culture" and to help parents work within that culture to fix family problems without removing the children. Under the new policy, social workers are instructed to place meth abuse high on their list of potential dangers in evaluating whether to remove children.

"When they're not addicted to drugs, they can be caring, decent parents. That's why it's so confusing to the kids," Baker says. "But when they're using, their primary relationship is with the drugs, not with their child."

For these kids, it's day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour, survival.
"They haven't got a clue what they're going to be facing when they get home from school each day," Baker says, "somebody who wants to exorcise their demons or somebody who says come on in and do your homework."

And that's when the parents pay any attention to the kids at all. Neglect is the most common manifestation of meth addiction, welfare workers say. They describe children who get up before dawn to go through garbage cans for food or don't go to school because they have only one set of clothing. In every group of siblings Webber-Brown has taken from meth-using parents, she says, the eldest child has assumed the role of parent, ensuring little ones are fed, diapered and kept quiet around unpredictable adults.

In many homes, children are malnourished. Almost always, they lack immunizations and medical care. Lice is common. So are fecal-oral infections, which are transmitted from filthy diapers or animal feces on the floor to children's fingers.
"They are invisible children," says Baker, the Sacramento therapist. "And they don't live in any one place long enough for anyone to take action."

The 5-year-old boy was borderline anemic ... 13 cavities, 6 root canals, 2 extractions. Needed caps on both front and back teeth ... displayed problems with sleeping ... talks excessively and at inappropriate times ... continued to be very stubborn and defiant."

-- From a case file of a child found in a meth lab home

There is little dispute that children who grow up watching their parents sell and use drugs are more likely to become drug users themselves. But, with the exception of a few anecdotal studies, the medical community lacks basic information about the effects of meth on both unborn children and those exposed passively in their homes.

Among doctors, educators and others who deal with meth-exposed children, there is growing concern about some specific types of problems that may result from exposure, such as learning disabilities they assume are linked to prenatal meth abuse.

"What we see is a syndrome that begins with attention deficit symptoms, looks like ADHD but begins sooner and is associated with more aggressiveness," says Dr. Hugo Biertuempfel, a psychiatrist with Sutter County's Mental Health Department who operates a clinic in schools.

While long-term effects are unclear, doctors do know something about children who appear at emergency rooms after taking high doses of crank.

"They are inconsolable," says pediatrician Wendy Wright, who has treated meth-exposed children at San Diego's Children's Hospital. "They have high blood pressure, high heart rates and high enough temperatures to make brain injury a concern. Many have a type of seizure that is particularly difficult to control and is resistant to seizure medication."

Wright has a vivid recollection of one boy, between 18 months and 2 years old, who was brought to the emergency room by a family member. Repeatedly, he traced the same steps: He put his Power Ranger doll under a pillow, covered it with a blanket and walked to the other side of the room. Then he came back, picked it up, moved it across the room and covered it up.

"He did this for hours, and he was sobbing the whole time because he didn't want to be doing it but he couldn't stop," Wright says. "These little guys are miserable. They're high. The meth has them amped up, and they can't rest, they can't sit down, they can't calm down."

In Sacramento, Dr. Michael Sherman, chief of neonatology at UC Davis Medical Center, has established a center for preemies who are born at less than 26 weeks gestation and weigh less than 2 pounds. And he has discovered a curious, new menace, unique among the tiniest Valley residents: "Meth is the drug of abuse for the fetus in Northern California." He believes that prenatal exposure to meth, unlike its sister drugs cocaine or PCP, causes serious and widespread birth defects.

"I have not noticed the occurrence of so many birth defects with cocaine," he says. "I've seen some really heavy users of cocaine, and certainly it has vascular effects, but it's not anywhere near the problem of meth."

Sherman looked at data on 358 mothers of intensive care unit babies who admitted using illicit drugs or alcohol between 1995 and 1999. Of that number, 202 babies, or 56 percent, were exposed to meth. Among them, 108, or 54 percent, were born preterm. Thirty-three of the 202 had major birth defects -- a rate of roughly 163 per 1,000 live births. The normal rate of birth defects is 30 per 1,000 in California's general population, which would naturally be lower than that of already-sick babies. Still, the rate appears significant.

"A lot of information needs to come out about this," Sherman says. "There are a lot of rat studies, but not what I would have expected ."

CHAPTER SEVEN

USERS
THE STORIES OF THREE METH ADDICTS

"I'm living up near Fresno
Just off Highway 99
Won't you come and pay a visit?
I'm here all the time.
Could wander up to Phoenix
And get a good construction job.
If the sunstroke don't kill me.
Dumb methamphetamine will."

-- Cracker, "Waiting for You, Girl"


Contrary to what many cops will tell you, many meth addicts have jobs, and not all of them are in illegal enterprises. A federal study found that almost 75 percent of adults who say they have used illicit drugs are employed. Those 8.5 million people represent about 6.4 percent of the entire work force.

After Congress approved the Drug Free Workplace Act, drug testing by major companies of new or prospective employees dramatically jumped, from 22 percent in 1987 to 80 percent by 1994. But more recently, those numbers have dropped, to about 60 percent. One reason, analysts say, is the booming economy has made it tougher to find new workers and therefore made employers less picky.

Still, there are drugs, and there are drugs.

Sue Ramsden, owner of a Sacramento company that conducts drug screenings for Central Valley companies, says employers most worry about the combination of meth and marijuana -- one to get up for work and the other to come down. Even though applicants are warned of upcoming drug tests, about 17 percent still test positive for meth.

Says Ramsden: "You're looking at those who are addicted or dumb."

Alan Jordan's employers didn't think he was addicted or dumb.

Every weekday morning for at least a decade, Jordan's routine was the same. His alarm clock awakened him at 4 or 5 a.m. He jumped into the shower, dressed, kissed his sleeping wife goodbye and left for work. Jordan, a 200-pound former Navy Seabee, drove backhoes and other heavy equipment for a living, a job that usually meant long hours and long drives to work.

So every morning, after grabbing a cup of coffee from whatever convenience store was on the way, he dipped his pocketknife into a baggie of white powder, scooped some crank onto the blade and dumped it into his coffee, adding it to the sugar and creamer -- "a little sweetener." Then he drove to work in his black, 1990 Chevy half-ton pickup, sipping from the coffee cup nestled in a holder in the center console.

Jordan, a 5-foot-10-inch bear of a man with a full beard and a barrel chest, says his daily habit never increased over time, never rendered him incapable of work or made him homicidal. The boost he got from his daily pinch of crank, he says, probably was akin to slamming down a pot of coffee. Sometimes, if the day was long or the work especially exhausting, he supplemented it with a quick line at lunch. Occasionally, he snorted it on weekends, as the social scene dictated.

"It doesn't turn you into a monster," he says, shaking his head at what he perceives is an overkill of anti-drug messages. "In construction, it's seasonal work. People are trying to get the most out of the day. They get up early, and they work late. I'd say is fairly common."

At least nine of Jordan's business associates would attest to the fact that he was a reliable, competent and tireless employee, even writing letters of commendation for him.

"He is a hard worker and does whatever it takes to get the job done," wrote the owner of Tony's Excavating, who hired Jordan for five years in the early- to mid-1990s to help build a subdivision near Calvine and Power Inn roads in Sacramento.

"He never complained about the long hours and/or weekend work," wrote Rick Eimers of RC Enterprise in Penryn, northeast of Sacramento. Others described him as a valued journeyman employee who drove massive backhoes that cost more than $100,000 and professionally worked with business owners and homeowners at job sites.
Those letters were written to a federal judge. In late April, Jordan was convicted of manufacturing meth in a sufficient enough quantity to earn him two life terms plus 20 years in a federal penitentiary.

"I hope they run concurrently," he quips, grinning as he rubs a giant hand across his beard. After four years in Sacramento County's jail awaiting trial, his skin has turned sallow and he has added 30 pounds.

The lab was discovered by county, state and federal drug agents in a tiny, wooden, rural home Jordan said he had rented and then vacated in Amador County. Behind the home, detectives found empty containers of Red Devil lye and Western Family lighter fluid and empty boxes of medications containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. An informant told cops that Jordan sent him to an Oakland company to buy chemicals for cooking meth and directed that the chemicals be dropped at the front gate of the Amador property.

When they got a search warrant, agents found 4 ounces of finished crank and about 80 pounds of the unfinished drug suspended in solution, plus a lab and thousands of dollars worth of lab glassware and equipment. Heavy staining on the walls and throughout the rooms indicated the lab had been operating for some time.

When detectives went searching for Jordan, they found him living with his wife in the Sacramento suburb of Orangevale. They also found 4.1 grams of crank in his car, an electronic scale, small clear plastic baggies and a hidden, loaded Ruger .357 handgun.

Jordan denies the lab was his. But even if it were, he questions how cooking drugs could be considered a greater public threat than murder or other crimes.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, the size of the lab was enough to earn him a life sentence for his first felony conviction. Adding to his troubles are enhancements for being the drug ringleader (an allegation he also denies) and for obstructing justice and several prior misdemeanor convictions for driving with a suspended license.

His point total -- the basis for federal sentencing -- comes to 44, just one less than that of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. Total sentence: two life terms plus 240 months.

In the same week, in the same federal courthouse where Jordan drew his double-life sentence, a 22-year-old man was sentenced to 18 years for the shotgun murder of another man in a civil rights case.

Jordan protests the disparity: "The guidelines were supposed to be set up to make things more uniform. It seems to me that in my case, it's backfired."
Need a little more irony? Jordan's parents gave him a nickname when he was born on Friday the 13th. They call him Lucky.

"Methamphetamine is the worst drug that has ever hit America. Ferociously addictive drug that is spreading ... it's hard to imagine overstating the magnitude of the the meth problem.
-- U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey

No one is certain how many meth addicts there are. Federal officials say meth is the fastest-growing major drug in the country.

The 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse estimated 9.4 million Americans 12 or older had tried meth. The actual numbers may be higher, experts say, because the survey didn't count people in jail, in homeless shelters or on the street, groups in which illicit drug use is more common.

California's rate of meth use was highest among the eight most populous states, the survey said, possibly reflecting the product's availability. One out of 15 Californians 12 and older had tried meth, whereas Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania had meth-use rates about half or less of California's.

Men were more than twice as likely as women to have used meth, and whites were more than twice as likely as African-Americans or Latinos, the survey estimated in 1998. And up to a point, the more educated people were, the more likely they were to use meth. Adults who didn't finish high school were less likely to use meth than high school graduates, who were less likely than adults who had attended college but did not graduate.

Because meth has figured in a number of high-profile violent crime cases -- Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Polly Klaas killer Richard Allen Davis were both meth users -- there is a popular perception that its users routinely resort to violence. Actually, statistics on people arrested under the influence of a drug show that marijuana users are more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than meth users. But there is no question that meth, like all drugs, contributes greatly to Valley crime, violent and nonviolent.

Sandy Miller flashes a toothsome smile when she says her name on the street was "Sunshine." She's wearing a tight-fitting flowered dress on her slender figure, with her dark blond hair pulled back into a bun. On the left side of her neck she wears a tattoo of a single word: "Dollar."

The attractive 30-year-old sits with perfect posture, talking eye to eye about her years as a prostitute and a pimp and a meth addict. "I did just about anything for money," she says. "I have a lot of terrible, terrible secrets." Her worst secrets involve the minors she used in her escort service. She doesn't say any more than that.

The daughter of a preacher, Miller first used meth at a high school party when she was 15 and attending Casa Robles School in Orangevale in Sacramento County.
"It always starts out as a social thing," she says. "You're young and trying to fit in. It progressed until I had to have it every day. Inside, it makes you feel you can do just about anything. It's false control. It's false pride."

After high school, Miller got a job as a property manager for a real estate group and did well ("I was a functional addict") for several years -- until they fired her because of her drug use.

At age 24, she opened an escort service. The first three years, she says, it was a legitimate service. Then she started going on calls herself and providing more than a date. Eventually, she had a full-scale prostitution service. But there was no way to do it without the drugs.

"You numb everything up around you," she recalls. "The only time I didn't use, I was asleep . . . The things I did I would never do sober."

First thing in the morning, Miller would drop a fingernail full of meth into a cup of coffee, then force herself to eat a candy bar and drink a glass of milk. She'd go on binges when she'd use and stay up for four to five days. She'd sleep for another four or five days and then start again.

Miller says she would use $40 to $50 worth of meth a day, snorting between five to 10 lines a day. "My life centered around getting and using dope, getting and using women, and getting and using men."

Most of the women who worked for her also used meth. Those who didn't, she tried to get started on it because they were more controllable with a meth habit. If she couldn't manipulate them into trying it, she'd put some into their soft drinks.

Now it is late spring, and Miller is sitting in a South Sacramento drug treatment center, trying to put behind her felony convictions for drug possession and escape from jail, trying to lose the meth demon. She shows off photos of her hugging and playing with her 10-month-old son.

They were taken when she last saw him a few weeks ago. She didn't know at the time that a court had approved his adoption by his foster family. The family didn't want to tell her during the visit that it was the last time she'd see her son -- at least until he was 18 and old enough to seek her out.

Her drug use has cost her dearly. Of three children, two have been adopted, the 10-month-old by strangers through child welfare services and her 3-year-old daughter by her brother who won't let her see the child. Her other daughter is with the father, but Miller isn't allowed contact.

"I have two daughters, and I can't have either one of them, and I just lost my son," she says. "I couldn't stop using to get my kids back."

"I'm on a roll, no self-control.
I'm blowing off steam with methamphetamine,
Don't know what I want, that's all I've got
And I'm picking scabs off my face."
-- Green Day,"Geek Stink Breath"

The front door opens slowly, and darkness and sunlight collide. The thin silhouette of Jacqueline Hughes appears in the doorway. A sliver of light shines inside the house and illuminates a half-empty jar of peanut butter resting in a pile of broken potato chips.

She moves onto a concrete step, squinting fiercely like a miner emerging from a hole in the ground. As Hughes struggles to acclimate herself, the details of her life give her away. Tragic hazel eyes. Missing teeth. Endless fidgeting.

Occasionally, she removes her hat to reveal patches of missing hair. Blood hasn't completely dried in the newest sores on her face. Hidden beneath a man's long-sleeve shirt are fresh needle marks in the fold of her left arm. A fresh dose of meth flashes through her body, leaving Hughes feeling awkward and naked outside the safety of her room. Daylight isn't as kind to her as it once was.

"I used to be a pretty gal, but now I'm a dog," she says. "I used to be a Sears model."

Without explanation, Hughes runs up the steps and disappears inside her home. She returns a few minutes later clutching a picture of two strangers. In the photo, a woman and her daughter are smiling. The woman has on makeup and is dressed in a nice jean jacket. The girl seems innocent and happy. Hughes looks at the picture and forces a toothless smile.

Five years ago, the woman in the photo was her.
"The reason I did drugs is to hide all the pain and suffering," she says. "It keeps you busy so you can't think about your childhood. It gets me away from depression."
She pauses, takes a drag on her cigarette, then works to remove stray strands of tobacco from her gums.

"Is that weird?" she asks, waiting sincerely for someone to give her an answer.
She doesn't have many of her own.

Spruce is a dead-end street in a low-rent district in west Modesto. There are no sidewalks; a heavy rain leaves the street flooded for days. Most who live on Spruce are hard-working and law-abiding, but poor. Many are lost souls who keep drug dealers in business.

Jackie Hughes moved here about two years ago, the exact date escapes her. She lives in the back unit of a duplex near the end of the street. There is no electricity or running water. The rooms are musty and smell of old clothes, body odor and cigarettes. Sheets cordon off every doorway for privacy because sometimes as many as 12 to 15 people, adults and children, have called the four-room place home. Flies and mosquitoes navigate the stale air while fat spiders wait at the windows.

Garbage has been swept into the corners and has long since been replaced by new detritus of crank life: hypodermic needles, empty Coke bottles, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, scattered books. Hundreds of boxes, some stacked to the ceiling, clog the walkways.

In the back bathroom, pieces of the wall tumble into the bathtub. Stacked in the sink are dried dirty dishes, rags and discarded plastic bags.
It's the cleanest room in the house.

Behind the sheet covering another doorway is what used to be a laundry room. It's roughly 6 feet wide and 6 feet long, dominated by a mattress lying diagonally across the floor. Sprinkled around it are cigarette butts, crinkled rolling papers, hacksaw blades and dozens of coffee cans full of everything imaginable.

The room is muggy, and the stench of lifeless air is unbearable. Another sheeted doorway leads to the largest room in the house. Hughes' room. The only one with no windows. Things are piled anywhere they'll fit. A propane lantern hisses like an AM radio caught between stations.

There's a mirror on her nightstand covered with flecks of powdered meth. Hughes' red pouch rests a few feet away, full of crank, needles, a burnt spoon and empty baggies. On a bookshelf, next to several burned-out candles, is a bill from the Health Services Agency seeking $278: "You have not responded to our previous billing . . ." the note announces.

Resting on top of the bill is an old syringe.
Hughes smiles, nervously running her hands up and down her legs. It would be easy to discount her as another unemployed druggie. The label fits. But trapped beyond the mess she's willingly made of her life is a lost, good-natured person.
She hugs everyone she sees, grateful for the contact. She's an odd mix of playful little girl and an old woman whose ravaged body aches.

Crank has tossed her memory, though Hughes still can recall scattered details of her 34 years. Most of these events probably shouldn't be remembered. Perhaps the saddest aspect is that she has no idea how the hell she ended up like this. Or how she'll make it out.

It's a terrible day in a small Louisiana town. Jackie, a seventh-grader, is raped by her friend's older brother and three of his friends. Afterward, they pour boiling water over her body, giving her second- and third-degree burns on her arms and stomach. When they're finished, they dump her in a ditch. A woman finds her and drives her to the hospital, where Jackie is treated for burns, broken ribs and a concussion.

"When I got out of the hospital, my dad got mad at me and broke my stereo," Hughes recalls. "He slapped me in the face and busted my lip. It's hard to explain my father."

Hughes was born June 6, 1966, in New York City. Her family moved to Louisiana, and she grew up there and in Texas. Childhood was rarely sweet. "My dad was always drunk, and my mom was always knocked out on Valium," Hughes says. "My dad used to hit me and my sister and my mom."

Hughes was in her mid-20s when she married a man who displayed emotions like her father.
One night, her husband pushed her down a flight of stairs, rupturing her uterus. She required emergency surgery. Shortly after that, Hughes and her youngest daughter, Jessica, moved to California. Her other daughter, Christina, 13, remained with her parents.

Hughes and Jessica arrived in Modesto in 1995. They found a small apartment not far from Modesto Junior College. The landlord gave her one piece of advice: Don't associate with your neighbors. She didn't follow it.

One day, a neighbor asked Hughes if she knew anything about crank. As the sun set the next night, Hughes found herself leaning over a mirror with a short straw in her right hand. Surrounded by a few strangers rooting her on, Hughes looked beyond the line of crank to the reflection of her face. She stared into her eyes, unaware the new her was looking at the old her for the last time. She bent down, and the line disappeared into the sweetest rush she'd ever felt. She immediately loved it.

Hughes made many new friends, and they ingested loads of crank. A few months later, everything was different. Her body started to change. One night, she woke up screaming.

As she held the side of her mouth, her companion, Bob Hicks, a drug veteran himself, dug around Hughes' purse until he found the only thing that can ease the pain of her rotting teeth.

"You put fingernail polish on a tooth, and it seals off the root," Hicks says. "Finally, a dentist pulled out the ones that remained."

It's a sunny Mother's Day in Modesto. Hughes sits on her bed with a pencil in her hand, looking down at a blank piece of paper. The words don't come easily even though she's written this letter before.

"To whom it may concern," she writes. A tear soaks into the paper. "When you find this letter, I'll probably be gone. Please don't be mad. I love you all, and you don't have to worry anymore about me letting you down."

Hughes signs it, then reads it several times before crumbling it and tossing it into the corner. She leans back and disappears into her pillow. Her thoughts drift to the conversation she had with her mother a few hours earlier.

Hughes had called to wish her mom a Happy Mother's Day and to ask if she'd be receiving anything special from her kids, who now live with her parents. Hughes' mother scoffed.
"You're not much of a mother."

There's a small house on the corner of Vine Street and Martin Luther King Drive. Located about a block from Hughes' home, it sat vacant for some time; then a flier circulated. "The Vine House presents: The Caring Coffee Café. M-F, 9 to 11 a.m. Free coffee, snacks and fellowship."

When it opens, two people wait at the door: Hughes and Hicks. The numbers quickly grow as the hungry, the homeless and the habitual straggle in. There's a popular table full of coffee, hot chocolate, potato chips, cookies and buttered toast. But what the Vine House really peddles is hope.

At 10:15 a.m., Hicks walks into the room with an odd, frustrated expression on his face. He whispers to Hughes, and the two walk outside.
Hughes reappears 10 minutes later. An old friend had come to the Vine House and asked Hughes to drive his wife across town. He said they'd make it worth her while. That meant crank.

"I told him no," Hughes says, her heart racing. "It's tempting. I'm not going to lie about that."
The Vine House is a sanctuary they visit for two hours a day to escape drugs. Yet, like the devil trying to sneak into church, meth follows them even here.

Hughes sits on the concrete steps of her back yard, talking about hope. Hers is to live with her kids again. And to be able to wear the dresses from the women at the Vine House. "Can I show you?" she asks, as she hops up and runs inside the house. Hughes reappears, cradling two new dresses wrapped in plastic. "I've never had something so pretty before," she says, her lip shaking uncontrollably. "I'm too ugly to wear them. I don't even know how to act in a dress."

Hughes walks back into her room and hangs the dresses in a closet. She grabs a cigarette, lights it and returns to visit with her friends.
"The landlord left us a note," she says. "He said he's going to evict us. Where are we going to live? Probably in the car, I don't know."
She folds her arms, then turns to go inside.
"Thank you for not looking down on us."

CHAPTER SIX

THE SPIDERS
WORKERS IN THE METH INDUSTRY

Not everyone who helps spin the meth web is from Michoacan, or from Mexico for that matter, and many of them are caught themselves by the drug's grip. And not all of the Central Valley's meth spiders make or sell the finished product. Some are specialists who operate subsidiary enterprises that keep the web operating.
Kevin used to be one of those specialists. Less than a year ago, he was among an elite handful of people in the meth web who knew how to manufacture hydrogen chloride gas, a critical ingredient in large-scale meth cooks.
"I had the Mexicans coming to me. I had independent cookers who could do five labs at different places," he says. "They needed me."
More precisely, they needed his product. Before Kevin, meth suppliers were forced to travel out of state or to Mexico to fetch the gas and bring it back to California. But Kevin's operation, in the back yard of a small home in Merced County, made better business sense for Valley traffickers -- no travel, no middlemen.
One 5-gallon cylinder of hydrogen chloride gas, Kevin says, would sell for $5,000. One customer paid him $15,000 cash up front; another wanted him to sell to his family exclusively. Contacts would bring him anything he wanted to make sure a deal went through. He had more than a dozen cars and dressed in Wranglers, dress shirts and boots. He never was too flashy. He always was low-key, in control.

Kevin was building refinery tanks in Bakersfield when his marriage fell apart in 1981. He spiraled into a world of all-night binges. A friend gave him pure crystal meth to snort. It was his first hit of "killer dope." Using the stuff cost him jobs in Bakersfield and Fresno. He drifted north to Merced County, eventually parking his trailer next to a house in the tiny town of Ballico.
Still hungry for meth, Kevin dipped into his savings to buy larger quantities. He needed money, so he started a welding service and converted a shed into an office. In a matter of days, the business was serving as a front for drug dealing. One of Kevin's drug-using friends became his "runner" and would buy, on average, 2 pounds of meth a week from Mexican distributors. Kevin never met them face to face; it was his policy.
The front didn't last. One night, Kevin's runner was tipped that agents were planning a raid. Kevin stuffed his dope into a small metal box and hid it behind a piece of broken machinery in a grease puddle. He and his runner left town. Narcotics agents busted in just before midnight. They didn't find the dope or evidence of drug dealing, but they seized hypodermic needles and guns.
"I had an assault rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .41 Magnum, a .45. They also seized a small-caliber handgun. I had the guns to protect myself. When I had a lot of money, people thought they could creep up on me and rob me," Kevin says.
The raid upset Kevin's sense of security. He stopped dealing the next day, transferred his customers to another dealer and retreated back into drug use. But not for long. In the mid-1990s, he noticed that the quality of street meth had degenerated, so he decided to get back into the business as a manufacturer.
He befriended a string of people who knew how to cook and invited them to use his kitchen. Soon he was introduced to other cooks who knew larger-scale cooks who knew chemical suppliers who knew distributors. He met a "friend of a friend" who would bring home buckets of red phosphorus from his workplace, an East Bay chemical plant.
"People used to come to me for anything and everything. I had the connection for red phosphorus, I had iodine crystals here and there, and I had the dope."
He had many contacts, but one would turn small-time Kevin into a big-time player. The contact knew how to produce hydrogen chloride gas. Drug agents were closing in on his contact's operation, and he was looking for another place in another town. They set up shop on the Ballico property.

"The hazards they create not only for themselves but the adjoining property is just tremendous. It's a bomb waiting to happen."
-- Josh Pino, chief building inspector for the city of Sacramento code enforcement team, speaking on the dangers of meth labs.

The process to make the gas, Kevin says, is mind-numbingly simple, and the chemicals are available over the counter: "It's amazing. It's about a $100 investment. My return is $5,000." It typically would take two hours to make the gas, even less time after he perfected his technique.
But at first, Kevin made mistakes. The valve on a cylinder got stuck, and pressure started to build. Kevin started to sweat. A few seconds later, the valve shot into the air. A 30-foot-long column of acid and rock salt followed.
"The liquid acid shot clear past the roof of my house and came close to this walnut tree," he says. "Then it started to rain acid. It rained on my house and shop, in the orchard, a little on my head."
Another time, moisture seeped into a cylinder he was preparing to deliver to a customer. He had placed it in the truck bed, then gone back into the house. When he returned, he noticed a dense fog forming. The truck's windows had cracked.
"Mexican field-workers were trimming the trees, and this cloud just kept on getting bigger and bigger, and there was nothing I could do to stop it." The cloud mushroomed into the size of a small house, drifted through the orchard and rolled over the workers.
Mishaps in the lab were rare. But just as business started to boom, a partner became Kevin's undoing.
The partner and his girlfriend moved into Kevin's home, and they fought constantly. Kevin repeatedly warned them to calm down lest they jeopardize the business by drawing attention to the house. One night, an argument spilled into the front yard, so Kevin told his partner to leave. The man packed his supplies and left the next morning in one of Kevin's 13 vehicles, a Ford Galaxy. He drove less than a quarter mile east when he stopped the car.
Around 8:30 a.m. Aug. 25, 1999, Merced County deputies received a report of a suspicious person near a Ballico intersection. The man was rummaging through items in the back seat of the car when a deputy arrived. He agreed to a search. Glassware, tubes and other equipment used to manufacture meth were found in the trunk.
Narcotics agents were contacted, and Kevin's partner gave him up. Authorities found about 20 gas canisters, air conditioning pumps, rock salt and sulfuric acid on the property. Kevin was arrested; a chemical buyer at the house was questioned, then released.
"They thought they had a real wizard when they busted me," says Kevin, who was sentenced to five years' felony probation and mandatory drug rehabilitation. "The day I got busted, I would have made $30,000."

Rick McIntyre was a recreational drug user for 20 years, dabbling in cocaine and marijuana. He held a good job as the operations manager of a trucking firm. He had a wife and a house in Fowler in Fresno County on property his parents owned.
But early in 1997, at age 43, McIntyre started snorting crank. He kept his wife and job, but his habit was costing him a lot of money. So he started dealing.
He started with ounces, buying from a man he had known for years. Business was good, so he moved up to pounds. His friends had contacts with a group from Michoacan, so they began to deliver a pound at a time to an orange grove near Sanger in Fresno County -- fourth tree from the road.
McIntyre paid $4,600 for a pound, then sold it by the ounce to street dealers for $500 each. Sixteen ounces at $500 per comes to $8,000 a pound. In theory.
Reality, however, varied from theory. McIntyre "fronted" the dope to some dealers, who then failed to pay him back. His own meth use skyrocketed. Profits dwindled. He started to skid. In one 19-day stretch, he didn't sleep.
Despite the lack of rest, however, he remained cautious. He sold only to people he knew personally, friends. "I mean they were dope friends," McIntyre explains. "Once I got in trouble, they didn't want to talk to me."
Through his addiction, McIntyre remained a reliable customer to the men from Michoacan. They were intrigued with the property he lived on -- a large plot on a dead-end street, accessible only through an electronic gate -- a cooker's paradise. So in December 1997, they made a deal. They would cook in a barn a few hundred feet behind McIntyre's house and pay him a weekly rent of $40,000. They gave him a $6,000 down payment.
McIntyre told his wife they were using the barn to "chop up" stolen cars. The Michoacan men set up a super lab capable of making 100 pounds a cook. In a week, they made up to 400 pounds. McIntyre got only a pound.
Soon after the lab began operations, drug enforcement agents acting on a tip from a money-jealous relative busted the lab and arrested McIntyre. The cooking crew wasn't on the property when the bust went down and got away. McIntyre hired a high-priced lawyer and, after a month served, got probation.
Now, he says, he sometimes reflects on the damage the dope he sold may have caused. Maybe his customers ended up in prison. Maybe they became violent and hurt someone. Maybe they exposed their kids to the ugly web of meth. But when he was dealing, he says, he thought he was doing them a favor.
"I was providing a service. I was in the commodities business," he rationalizes. "It was like people need their sugar, their coffee, their meth."

CHAPTER FIVE

METH AND THE DRUG LORDS
BIG-TIME OPERATIONS

Meth has a cost/profit ratio that would engender envy in almost any business. Before it's sold, a pound of meth is usually "stepped on," or diluted with another agent. Diluting meth increases production: A pound of pure meth can become 4 pounds, and a $2,500 investment can become $20,000 in two days' time.
When you make a lot of meth, it can bring in big money, a fact not lost on some of the most powerful members of the worldwide drug trade.
In the early 1990s, drug agents reported that drug groups based in the Mexican state of Michoacan were overwhelming the meth trade by flooding the market with a superior and cheaper product. Biker groups, which once controlled the trade in California, were vastly outnumbered and unable to put up a challenge. Speaking in Fresno in April, Robert Brady, a member of the State Department who studies drug trafficking, mocked the bikers "for letting outsiders come in and take over. It would be like some outsiders going to Medellin, Cali or Bogota and taking over the cocaine trade."
Indeed, most of the meth in the Central Valley -- and most of the meth in America -- isn't made by Beavis and Butt-head, cooked in a coffeepot or strained through someone's kidneys.
It's made and distributed by loosely organized "families" in California who have roots in Mexican organized crime groups. Some groups operate merely as investment bankers, bankrolling operations for a percentage of the profits, or they exact a price for meth ingredients smuggled into the state through their territories in Mexico.
"The dominant 'families' in meth in California [one based in the San Jose area, the other in Orange County] aren't truly organized crime groups in the sense that there is in the Mafia," says Ron Gravitt, chief of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement's clandestine lab unit. "There is no real hierarchy with them. ... The standard is they are tied together by familial and geographic ties in Mexico.
"It's our belief, based on our experience in the field and talking to other states, that 90 percent of the meth manufactured in this country is manufactured by Mexican national drug organizations," says Gravitt, who has been fighting the drug trade for 13 years. "The majority of that is being manufactured in California, and some is being manufactured in Mexico and smuggled into California and then shipped throughout the U.S."
Meth became attractive to Mexican cartels in the early 1990s. Groups such as the Amezcua Contreras cartel in Guadalajara and the Arellano Felix brothers in Tijuana already dominated marijuana and had joined with Colombian drug lords to distribute cocaine. But because coca leaves, the key ingredient in cocaine, aren't grown in Mexico, they had to split profits with the Colombians who controlled production. With meth, they soon figured out, they could control every aspect, from manufacture to sale.
"From a business standpoint, they came up with a brilliant idea," says Guy Hargreaves, a DEA special agent and meth expert. "Methamphetamine allowed them to cut out the South American percentage. They put meth in with their cocaine shipments, and people developed a taste for it because it lasts longer . They can make it themselves in the United States, and they don't have to pay millions of dollars in overhead for planes and pilots and boats and smuggling bribes. All they need is $10,000 in chemicals, and they can make $100,000 worth of meth."
They make far more than $100,000 worth. Precisely how much is anyone's guess, and law enforcement officials refuse to make one, at least not for the record.
"I could tell you that we bust maybe 25 percent of the big labs," says one federal agent, "but I could be way off. If we do, that means there are 800 super labs making at least 10 pounds . . . at $5,000 a pound . . . well, do the math."
So let's do the math: 800 super labs at 10 pounds each at $5,000 a pound equals $40 million. Assume they cook 10 pounds a month -- a conservative estimate -- and you have $480 million a year. Then factor in that $5,000 a pound is the wholesale price, and that grams sell for $90 each. There are 28 grams in an ounce, and 16 ounces in a pound . . . and it's just a guess, but it sounds like a multi-billion-dollar business the size of California's retail book and record, florist or jewelry industries.
To keep the industry booming, meth manufacturers need supplies, workers and cooking locations, and from a drug lord's perspective, the Central Valley is a prime place in which to operate. Mexican operators can blend into the large Latino population. The Valley offers a rural setting for manufacturing without drawing attention, and yet it's close to major population centers and transportation routes. Chronically high jobless rates ensure a ready work force for what amounts to highly lucrative, if exceedingly dangerous, work.
Big-time Valley meth makers run efficient operations. They control their own supplies, such as red phosphorus, hydriodic acid, iodine, Freon and hydrogen chloride gas. Though many are either illegal or closely monitored in the United States, they are widely and legally available worldwide, and big syndicates have established pipelines to gather and transport them.
In the 1990s, the Amezcua Contreras cartel established a network that included suppliers from the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, India, Thailand and Japan. Lax chemical controls in Mexico and Canada make obtaining chemicals relatively easy. In Los Angeles and Oakland, some chemical companies provide supplies to meth manufacturers through elaborate schemes that make sales appear legitimate.
And they control a network of workers: runners, chemical manufacturers and meth cooks. Often a family operation will specialize in one chemical and deal with a chemical broker who deals with specialists. Specialists often deal only with the organizer. The organizer orders chemicals, usually by phone, and runners transport the goods to a cook site.
Depending on the operation, a cook can do it with one helper or 10. Larger labs try to limit the margin for error by the cooks, or "mopes," by prepackaging ingredients in premeasured, idiot-proof containers.
The average Mexican national lab, says the BNE's Gravitt, makes a minimum of 20 pounds and as much as 100 in one cook cycle. Sometimes they do one cook and then move. Or they may cook at a site for a couple of years.
That variation aside, one common ingredient in many Mexican national meth labs is the origin of the chef: the state of Michoacan.

The young man is nervous during interrogation.
The detective senses it. The story just doesn't add up. Why would anyone pay someone $1,000 just to drive three men from Long Beach to Porterville in Tulare County?
"I'll tell you this right now, once you tell me the truth you're gonna feel like a man," he tells the suspect.
"All I want to do is go home to my wife and kids," he replies.
The suspect, who claims he was on his way to visit his uncle in Fresno when he was caught up in a meth bust, begins to cry.
"Why are you treating me like a criminal?"
A long minute passes. Backed into a corner, the suspect gives something up: He was paid to bring the two men up "to cook."
"To cook what?"
"I don't know. They just say to cook."
This dance is about to come to an end.
"You told me you are from Michoacan. What part of Michoacan?"
"Apatzingan."
Now the detective knows for sure. Javier Ochoa is part of the meth trade.
It's 45 minutes before midnight, and traffic is heavy on the sidewalks of Apatzingan. Bumpy, paved streets in the city's center are lined with hundreds of narrow storefront shops selling everything from new clothes to washing machines to caskets. Sidewalks are crowded with strollers.
A dressmaker watches the foot traffic. "I love living in Apatzingan," Rosalba Conchola says. "It's full of life. It's not dangerous, unlike the United States."
Music, Mexican and American, blares from passing cars, many of them new- or late-model American pickups or BMWs. There are obvious signs of money here, but there are no obvious signs as to why. It's simply understood. The chief products in this gritty farming town are mangoes, papayas, watermelons and meth. And a steady supply of meth makers.
Like some rap music in urban America, much of the popular music in Michoacan romanticizes the drug dealer. Sidewalk booth vendors in Apatzingan do a good business selling "Druga Corredos," the Mexican equivalent of gangsta rap. One song begins: "I am here across the border in America, and I have drugs for you . . ."
Apatzingan anchors the "Michoacan Trail," a pipeline that moves north through Guadalajara to Tijuana, pumping not only the product, but the people who cook it, across the California border and into the Central Valley.
"Yes, it is true," says police officer Ramon Lopez-Valencia as he slowly shakes his head. "The young people want to be crystal dealers."
Says Mike Huerta of the DEA in Arizona: "It's like they have some kind of mini academy down there in Apatzingan where they train people to cook and send them to California."

Apatzingan's police department is in the partially abandoned Palacio Municipal, a tattered two-story colonial with peeling paint, fresh graffiti and plenty of men with automatic weapons. (Across the street is the main plaza, the cathedral and the shining star of the city -- the building where on Oct. 22, 1814, Mexico's first constitution was signed.)
Fernando Fernandez-Castaneda, Apatzingan's police chief, is 23, stands about 5 foot 5 with his boots on and weighs about 130 pounds. His silver ballpoint pen sticks out of his white, blue-striped dress shirt. He wears gray slacks. Atop his burgundy vinyl-topped desk is a Samsung computer loaded with Microsoft Word. He wears no gun, but 3 feet to his left is an AK-47.
Fernandez-Castaneda smiles frequently and talks softly. He says he is determined to do something about meth in his town. "Crystal is a gigantic problem here. It has been for years," he says, as police officers armed with machine guns and pearl-handled revolvers amble outside his office. "We just used to take it all out of the country, but now the locals are consuming it, and it is very worrisome.
"We can spot the obvious drug men, and they don't care that we know what they do."
Their hair is neatly cropped, he says, and they wear gold chains and bracelets and ostrich-skin boots. They drive new pickups with fancy wheels.
During a routine raid of what Fernandez-Castaneda calls meth-rich neighborhoods, the chief runs into 23-year-old Jose Manuel. The two grew up in the same barrio. For the last six months, Manuel has a new passion -- snorting crank.
"It makes me feel excited," Manuel says, "makes me want to move."
"Is it hard for you to get it?" he is asked.
"I'll will show you how hard it is. I'll be back in 10 minutes." But Manuel, on a bike, needs a ride to score, and the chief, eager to show how common meth is, orders an officer to give Manuel a ride. After a few minutes, the chief is eager to continue the raid, so he and 22 officers in four pickups cruise along bumpy dirt roads, randomly stopping to search young men, who submit quietly.
Three crucifixes mounted with suction cups hang from the chief's windshield. A fourth lies near the gearshift -- to ensure his safety, he says. Jesus takes the place of seat belts. "It's like a university for crystal down here," says Fernandez-Castaneda, who estimates there are 10 major labs in Apatzingan and countless smaller ones. "They learn to cook and go to California."
After searching suspects in three neighborhoods, the police come up empty.
When the police arrive back at the station, Manuel shows off what is left of the quarter gram of meth he has copped for about $5. As he extends the dope, half covered in plastic wrap, the wind blows. The dope and the plastic wrap swirl out of his hand in a graceful arc, floating like a parachute to the pavement. Manuel grabs at it but misses, and the drugs fall to the concrete. He is last seen trying to sort the crystal from the dirt.
A short while later, a 17-year-old boy wearing a worn Cleveland Indians baseball cap sits on the chipped front steps of an apartment building. His old green bike rests next to him. He delivers for a nearby pharmacy but admits he wants his own type of pharmaceuticals.
"Yeah, I want my own organization one of these days," says Pablo Hernandez Rodales, taking off his cap to wipe sweat off his forehead. "I'm going to have me a new truck and five girls.
"You know, they are never going to stop the crystal now."

Rigoberto is hanging out at Aldo's, a nightclub near Roeding Park in Fresno. Several men surround him, bragging about Michoacan. "Arriba, Michoacan!" several shout.
Rigoberto says he has helped out on several meth cooks when work was hard to find in the citrus fields. "When your family is starving and they are offering big money, what are you going to do?" he asks rhetorically. "You think about taking care of your family."
The man who approached him, he says, was from his hometown, Aguililla, in Michoacan.
Traffickers, midlevel dealers and cooks look for people from their hometowns, places like La Ruana and Tepalcatepec and Apatzingan, because they know their families -- and they know how to get revenge if workers talk to cops.
At Aldo's, the fellas are getting a little boisterous as they think about Michoacan. Beer is guzzled, a few chests are punched, shots are downed. Sometimes they drink to the memories of all their friends and relatives who are locked up for cooking and transporting meth.
And sometimes they drink to the guys who get away with it, to the guys who make big money, hold onto it and get out of Central Valley fields. To the guys who make it back to Michoacan.

For months, in the spring and summer of 1997, a joint drug task force in Des Moines, Iowa, tails a suspect. With near biblical patience, they wait and watch, watch and wait.
July 7 is the lucky day. Bobby Stockdale, a 54-year-old Fresno native, parks at a Motel 6 on Des Moines' south side. For the past two years, he has racked up 94,000 miles on his van, making runs from California to Oklahoma to Iowa. Stockdale hands over the van's keys to Frank Amezcua Jr., (a member of the Amezcua Contreras cartel, one of the four biggest in Mexico).
Among the van's other features: It's loaded with 15 pounds of meth. Agents move in.
Three years later, they still brag about the arrest. "Yeah, we took down one of the Amezcuas," boasts a police lieutenant named Jobe.
So much meth is produced in the Central Valley by large syndicates that supply outweighs demand.
"It used to be that almost all of their product stayed in California," says the BNE's Gravitt, who estimates that less than half of the meth made in California by big organizations stays here. "The organizations . . . started filtering their meth into the established pipelines, and the pipelines tend to be the old farmworker routes. It went from California into Oregon and the Yakima Valley in Washington . . . and then it moved east. They are in at least 30 of the 50 states now."
"They sold to everyone they could in the western half of the country, and now they're looking for new markets," says Brent Eaton of the DEA in Miami, who estimates 90 percent of Florida meth has a California connection. "The demand is growing."
And it's growing, say Eaton, Gravitt and others, because meth makers followed a traditional marketing process -- flood new areas with their product so users develop an appetite for it. In the mid-1990s, California traffickers first snaked along freeways into the heartland, where cornfields and cow pastures spill from the horizon.
They began dropping meth into Iowa, a state perceived to be solidly rooted in traditional values, insulated from the drug-soaked excesses of either coast. Here, the children of farmers have led the country in standardized test scores for nearly two decades. The state has one of the country's highest literacy rates and one of its lowest unemployment rates.
Thanks to California's Central Valley, it also has a major meth problem.
More than 85 percent of the processed meth in Iowa is channeled through an intricate, organized pipeline from California. Investigators believe six families in the Des Moines area are connected to meth syndicates in California, coordinating shipping schedules, quantities and prices.
It's profitable. "A pound . . . purchased in California for $5,000 sells for at least $18,000 in Iowa," according to the DEA.
"These people are businesspeople," says Bruce Upchurch, a former DEA agent who now serves as Gov. Thomas J. Vilsack's drug policy coordinator in Des Moines. "It's not a haphazard operation. In terms of organized crime -- meth -- I don't think there is any place [in Iowa] that hasn't had some cases."
The rise of organized Mexican meth trafficking coincided with a demographic shift in the state. More Hispanic immigrants were arriving in the early 1990s to work in the meatpacking plants of Marshalltown, Waterloo, Columbus Junction and Storm Lake.
Workers and their families formed distinct communities separated from the rest of Iowa by language, race and culture. These areas became convenient covers for Hispanic distributors, providing fertile ground for recruiting traffickers. Some immigrants who travel the Midwest to work in the meatpacking plants are paid thousands of dollars to transport meth.
"The traffickers who were highly organized effectively used that cover to come in with large amounts of dope," Upchurch says. "To some degree, they're still doing that."
But that hasn't been the only approach. A Des Moines restaurant owner, Roberto Gallardo Chavez, operated an interstate distribution ring that imported at least 480 pounds of meth into Iowa from California during a two-year period. He also gave a few customers who frequented his restaurant samples of imported meth, hoping they would come back for more.
Chavez, a federal grand jury said, coordinated the pick up and delivery of California meth using "load cars" and "mules" -- family friends, customers, people off the street. He also worked with his nephew Esequie Gallardo, who joined the operation a few months after he moved to Iowa from California in 1998.
In a 1994 case, Des Moines narcotics agents who searched the home of a newly arrived Bolivian man found $75,000 in cash -- and the man started talking. He told police he was the accountant for Alfredo Arroyo Cervantes, a Fresno drug-ring leader who later was convicted. The ringleader, he said, hired "mules" to smuggle pounds of meth from the West Coast into the Midwest. A 60-pound delivery had been selling for $2 million.
The agents followed the man's directions to a "stash house" -- a trailer in North Des Moines. Buried in the back of the trailer, underneath a pile of baby clothes, hampers and diaper bags, they found 55 pounds of meth tightly packed in boxes. It was the largest meth seizure in Iowa history.
Investigators traced it from the Des Moines trailer to Fresno. Less than two months later, Fresno police and DEA agents raided two labs and seized assault rifles, bulletproof vests and more than 300 pounds of chemicals -- mainly ephedrine and red phosphorus. Half a dozen people in California and Iowa were arrested.
"This one case really opened our eyes," Upchurch says. "In the early '90s, we were behind the eight ball. Since then, we have scrambled to catch up. We're still catching up."

While initially America's heartland was hit hardest by the expanding meth trade, California's meth tentacles are reaching nationwide, according to DEA reports obtained by The Bee under the Freedom of Information Act:
In 1999, a meth lab capable of producing 80 pounds per cook was busted in Opelika, Ala. It was the first super lab bust east of the Mississippi River. Four men from Michoacan were convicted and sentenced to federal prison.
This year, the DEA reported a "significant increase" in meth availability in western Michigan, increased meth smuggling by Mexican traffickers in western Kentucky and meth becoming the "drug of choice" in rural Oklahoma, western Colorado and North Dakota. In Colorado, the majority of the meth seized came either from Mexico or "from large-scale laboratories in California," according to the DEA.
In the first three months of this year, no Mexican meth traffickers had been encountered in Greensboro, N.C., "but by the second quarter of 2000, the prevalence of Mexican trafficking organizations in Greensboro was unmistakable."
In 1991, none of the women arrested in the Omaha area tested positive for meth, but in 1998, 13.6 percent tested positive. In Missouri, two meth labs were seized in 1992; in 1997, 421 labs had been seized.
Meth cases in the Washington, D.C., area "increasingly show evidence of ties to Mexican or California-based Mexican methamphetamine traffickers and producers."
And, the DEA reported, "methamphetamine continues to be abused by nearly all social classes in the Fresno area."

If the meth trail were linear, disrupting it would be far easier for law enforcement. But as soon as one branch is discovered, it seems, another sprouts.
The newest, narcotics agents say, is the Middle East connection: groups or individuals with ties to Syria, Jordan, Israel, Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries, who supply pseudoephedrine tablets used to make meth, usually through the ownership of convenience stores, wholesale grocery supply companies and distribution outlets for medical supplies. Middle East tablet dealers buy a case for $600 to $800, then sell it to meth makers for $3,000 to $4,000.
This year in Fresno, the DEA says, there have been 10 major pseudoephedrine cases involving connections from the Middle East. "We currently have two major cases where we are continuing the investigation because the money trail leads back to Syria and Israel," says DEA agent Ed Cazeras in Fresno.
"It's probably the hottest topic for us right now," says Craig Hammer of the BNE in Orange County. "Middle Easterners are public enemy No. 1 in the meth trade."
In a 1998 case, a Sacramento-area businessman, Abdel Razzaq M. Daas, was sentenced to eight years for selling more than 2 million tablets used to make meth. From his Rose Garden Distributing No. 2, he sold silk roses, condoms and 262 cases of pseudoephedrine to convenience stores. The tablets were enough to make 130 pounds of meth.
`On July 29, an eight-month DEA investigation culminated with arrests nationwide of eight men from Syria, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, who drug agents say ran a nationwide ring that supplied pseudoephedrine tablets to Mexican meth organizations in California.
"This is the most substantial, most important thing we have done to combat meth since we started battling meth," says Jack Riley, a DEA official in Washington.
Five days after the bust, tablet prices had risen in the Central Valley.
"They were like OPEC, setting prices, detailing the transportation of the pseudo," says Riley.
Authorities became aware of the group when they discovered records showing several distributors were shipping more pseudoephedrine than would be necessary if everybody in the United States came down with a cold.
During the investigation, called "Operation Mountain Express," the DEA arrested 160 people (including some in Fresno), seized $8 million cash, 83 pounds of meth and 10 metric tons of pseudoephedrine capable of producing 18,000 pounds of meth with a wholesale value of $100 million.

CHAPTER FOUR

BEAVIS, BUTT-HEAD AND
THE MAKING OF METH
SMALL-TIME COOKS

It's a dangerous marriage: uneducated drug addicts making meth with chemicals that burn to the bone, blow off limbs or produce toxic clouds of poisonous gas. But meth making is fraught with such perils: hydriodic and hydrofluoric acid, lye, Freon, potassium chlorate, anhydrous ammonia.

The explosions and white-hot fires that sometimes follow should come as no surprise. Over the years, narcotics detectives have hung several nicknames on the laboratories of these amateur chemists: "Beavis and Butt-head labs," a reference to the moronic cartoon characters, or "coffeepot labs" because that's what crank often is cooked in.

More recently, drug cops have taken to calling them "user/dealer labs" -- those where the meth cooks make fairly small batches of crank, use most of it themselves, then sell portions to buy the ingredients to make more.

Whatever they're called, there are lots of them. In the entire Central Valley, more than 260 small-time labs were busted in 1999, an average of five a week. In Stanislaus County alone, 53 such labs were taken down in 1998. The number jumped to 70 last year, and in the first four months of this year alone, 50 meth-manufacturing arrests were made.

A standard Beavis and Butt-head lab involves three or four people who pool money to buy supplies. They manufacture about an ounce at a time, which costs roughly $140 to produce. Ten boxes of pseudoephedrine pills cost $80, and 2 ounces of iodine and red phosphorus run about $40 combined. There are several other ingredients used, such as Coleman fuel, sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid.

The mixture is cooked from four to eight hours, often in coffeepots, though a few cooks graduate to glassware. Once it cools, other chemicals are added to help separate the meth from toxic liquids. Red phosphorus and iodine are filtered out, leaving an ounce of crank worth about $400.

Valley cops say there are common elements to many lab sites, from the preferred brand of beer consumed by the cooks (Bud Light, followed by Corona), to the linens of choice used to strain the meth (the Martha Stewart line because of its high thread count and availability). But there can be decided variations in the process, depending on how resourceful -- or how pathetically desperate -- the meth makers are.

One variation is called the "Nazi method" because it supposedly mirrors a meth-making procedure followed by the Germans during World War II. Instead of hydriodic acid, the Nazi method uses anhydrous ammonia, a nasty substance that can produce a poisonous gas if its liquid form is released into the air. Central Valley drug fighters say they have taken down maybe eight of these labs in the past two years. Five of them were traced to a man from Missouri who had moved into a trailer park near Fresno and was teaching this method, which is popular among small labs in the Midwest.

Another method is more earthy. In some areas, so much meth by-product has been dumped into the soil that cooks are excavating hundreds of cubic yards of earth from the sites to process the dirt and extract the chemicals to make meth. "It looks like a moonscape," says Bill Ruzzamenti, a DEA special agent and director of a Valleywide meth task force. "It's mining for meth."

But Ruzzamenti can top that for stomach-turning absurdity: In some sites -- appropriately, if inelegantly, dubbed "pee labs" -- agents are finding that the ingredients include human urine.

"If you take the urine of a speed freak, and process it , you get back about 40 percent of the meth he used because the body only absorbs so much," he says. "So they are processing their own pee. It's unbelievable."

Suspending disbelief, however, is part of the job in hunting down small-time meth makers.

"We were surveilling this guy one night who kept coming out of the house to smoke, so we figured he was cooking," says Stanislaus Drug Enforcement Agency detective Steve Hoek. "The next morning when we hit this guy, we find him upstairs. He's surrounded by about 70 or 80 open quart jars of ether and acetone he was using to separate this meth. And he's sitting there on the floor smoking. The whole place should have blown up. I've seen a lot of stupid s*** in this job, but that was amazing."

Hoek tells of another man who hid containers of red phosphorus in the attic over his garage. The chemical is heat sensitive, so it began to turn to white phosphorus, which is air reactive. It started a blaze so hot the fire department had to give up and let the house burn.

Some meth makers don't reserve all their stupidity for chemical mistakes but save some for poor geographical choices: In the past few years, four labs have been taken down within three miles of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department. One lab hidden in a bamboo field on the same street turned out to be one of that county's largest lab busts.

"Once in a while, I'll be standing in the [Sheriff's Department] parking lot, and I can smell it," says Stanislaus County sheriff's Sgt. Doug Leo. "They'll cook anywhere. Nothing is sacred anymore."

What small-time meth makers lack in smarts, however, they make up for in numbers. On a day in late spring, narcotics detectives Mark Ottoboni and Pat Sullivan put on white suits, old shoes and two pairs of gloves apiece and begin sifting through the ashes of a house on Paradise Road in west Modesto.

Just outside the burned-out frame, they stack the evidence: charred metal containers of Coleman fuel, blackened glass flasks, a heating mantle and several partially melted, 5-gallon buckets of white and yellow powders. The yellow powder is crank; the white substance is something used as a cut.

This has become a typical day for Ottoboni and Sullivan. There are so many lab mishaps, the detectives spend most of their time searching charred labs and lab dump sites for evidence instead of combating manufacturers.

"I've been working labs since I got here four years ago," Ottoboni says. "There are so many now, it's hard to proactively work them. When I go to a lab, it takes about two days to do the reports, process evidence and run background checks on to see if they've bought chemicals."

No one was at the Paradise Road residence when firefighters arrived at 2 a.m. the night before, the house fully engulfed in flames. Those responsible have, more than likely, moved somewhere else to cook. Crank labs can be moved quickly from place to place. The coffeepot and chemicals fit into a square, plastic storage tub that easily fits into a car trunk. Meth cooks can drive to a new location, set up shop and leave six hours later with a fresh batch.

The landlord is largely uncooperative; he tells Ottoboni he rented the house to someone named Guadalupe. No last name. No rental agreement.

"Take one down, three more pop up," Ottoboni says, as he picks through the remnants of a back bedroom. The floor is covered in blackened soot, burned folded clothes, pots and pans, magazines and propane bottles. He picks up a broken piece of a glass beaker, and the toxic red sludge eats through his first layer of rubber gloves. This hadn't happened to him before. The sludge is a mixture of red phosphorus, iodine and pseudoephedrine.

Sullivan walks around the house, looking for clues. He examines the mangled tin sheeting that walled the largest room. The force of the fire, or an explosion, sharply indented the sheeting, shooting rusty nails across the yard. The only thing left standing is a charred gas water heater, which probably helped start the fire.

"We've seen it a few times the last couple years," Sullivan says. "Gas water heaters have a flame. Acetone and denatured alcohol are extremely flammable. The fumes are heavy and hug the ground."

CHAPTER THREE

FATHER TIME
THE HISTORY OF METH IN THE VALLEY

"Father Time" fondly remembers the good old days of meth.

He lives on the third floor of the Stanislaus County Jail in downtown Modesto, and the nickname comes from jailers who've been letting him in and out since anyone can remember. At 63, he's the elder statesman of Central Valley meth chefs, a walking encyclopedia on the history of cooking crank in the Valley.

He's a big man with thinning, shoulder-length hair and a white beard touched with patches of brown. He has a piercing stare, and he coughs frequently. His teeth are missing, a feature made more noticeable by a tongue that moves wildly about his mouth. He gives the appearance of being ruggedly unhealthy.

Father Time grew up in Modesto and has used drugs since he was 13. But he didn't start cooking meth until he was well into his 30s. One day, a friend who had run out of gas showed up at his front door with a copy of the "Doctor's Referral Book" that he'd stolen from a medical office. Father Time didn't want the book but gave his friend $10 for it.

Two weeks later, as he sat in his living room, bored with television, he began thumbing through the section on pills. At the time, he worked as a bodyguard for a pill dealer who sold drugs between Fresno and Modesto. When the pill section ended, Father Time started to close the book, but the next section caught his eye. Methamphetamine. He turned the first page, and there was a recipe.

"I thought, 'Why the hell should I pay $2,000 an ounce for this stuff if I can make it?' "

He and his girlfriend drove to Modesto Junior College and purchased some chemistry textbooks. They bought used glassware. Then they stopped by drug and farm-supply stores for the ingredients. That night, they set up their lab and began cooking 4 ounces of meth.

Two days later, he approached his girlfriend with the finished product and said, "Here, try this."

They laughed because they both were afraid to try it. So they drove to a small Modesto biker bar and found some friends who liked crank. And they loved Father Time's crank. They paid him $2,400 for 3 ounces. The entire batch, including glassware and books, had cost just $200 to make.

"When I started, it was for fun more than anything," he said. "At first, it was just something to do on the weekends, if we had a run or something. Then we got playing around with the s***. Making Halloween crank. St. Patrick's Day crank. We done everything."

People walking into Father Time's Christmas parties weren't served eggnog; they were directed to a table with two dishes full of red and green crank rocks. They wished each other Merry Christmas, and then some tried to stay awake until the new year.

Before long, Father Time had become one of the pioneers of the meth trade. When ephedrine became a restricted substance in the states, he made trips to Ensenada, Mexico, where it still was legal and easily obtainable, and smuggled loads of it back across the border. When that grew too risky, he paid Mexican "border brothers" who were desperate to make it north. They would carry 100 pounds of ephedrine on their backs in late-night border crossings, and he would pick them up in spots near San Diego and drop them off in the agricultural center of their choice.

When smuggling ephedrine from Mexico got too tough, Father Time turned to pseudoephedrine, a substance found in over-the-counter asthma and allergy pills. When California's laws governing the sales of pseudoephedrine stiffened, he made runs to the East Coast. But he was always careful: "Buy a car. Make sure the tags are legal. You stay the speed limit. And don't try to stay up four straight days. Eat regular. Get a motel. Just a tourist, that's what you are."

When he was back East, he would rent a motor home for two days, using it as a mobile office that had enough room to extract the pseudoephedrine from the cold pills. He would drive the motor home to a park or camping area. When he was done, he'd pack the drug in homemade baggies and coffee cans and head home in his car. "If you get stopped, always have a dog. The [police dog] is going to smell the dog, not the crank. Or if you really want to screw with them, buy cayenne pepper and put it along the inside of the door. The dog smells that, he's through."

Amazingly, Father Time's first arrest for manufacturing crank wasn't until 1997, and he is awaiting trial on that and two additional charges of meth production. Nowadays, he proudly talks about his history, and he boasts that his crank always was the best.

"I liked saying, 'I cooked that, what do you think?' " he says. "There used to be pride in making crank, but not anymore. The stuff that passes for crank today is complete bulls***."

CHAPTER TWO

UNCLE FESTER
A PROLIFIC AMATEUR

In Green Bay, Wis., there lives a 42-year-old man named Steve Preisler. He is the father of two young children and the holder of degrees in chemistry and biology from Marquette University. He works as an electroplating chemist. He also teaches people how to make methamphetamine.

Methamphetamine stimulates the central nervous system. It comes in powder or small "rocks" or "crystals," and can range in color from white to brown, depending on how it's cooked. It tastes bitter but easily dissolves in liquids. Depending on its method of production, it can be odorless or stink like the bottom of a football team's laundry hamper.

It has many names: "speed," "crank," "chalk," "shabu," "shi-shi," "spoosh," "zip," "boo," "chicken-feed," "geep," "scootie," "crystal," "ice," "glass" or "load of laundry."

It's snorted, swallowed, smoked or injected. Eaten, it can take 20 minutes to hit the brain. Inhaled through the nose, it can take three minutes. Smoked or injected, it can take eight seconds. Its effects last far longer than an equivalent amount of cocaine, maybe eight or 10 hours, compared to 30 minutes.

It makes you feel smarter, faster, stronger, sexier, happier and generally quite capable of kicking the world in the butt. The bad news is that it actually makes you dumber, slower, weaker and unable to have an orgasm.

It can cause memory loss, psychoses, heart damage, brain damage, high blood pressure, insomnia, tooth loss and intense paranoia. And then there are the side effects from the chemicals used to make meth, such as lead poisoning from batches made with lead acetate.

Like adrenaline, which it mimics, meth triggers the brain's fight-or-flight mechanism, making users belligerent and aggressive. They often complain about itchy skin or scalp, and they pick at themselves incessantly.

Meth also can be quickly and highly addictive.

All of this notwithstanding, Steve Preisler is not ashamed of teaching people to make it, even though he chooses to write under the nom de plume "Uncle Fester" (a nickname he says he got in college because of his penchant for making explosives and blowing things up, a la the character in the "Addams Family").

"Drugs are merely chemicals," he shrugs, "and knowledge of how they are produced can never be removed from the body of civilized knowledge." Preisler makes no secret of his own history of "recreational" drug use, although he's vague on his current habits. Nor is he shy about passing along little tips to meth users and cooks to avoid detection.

Preisler is the author of "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture, Including Recipes for MDA, Ecstacy and Other Psychedelic Amphetamines." Now in its fifth edition, the 183-page, soft-cover book explains in some detail how to make what he calls "that food of the gods, meth." He says his book sells 5,000 copies a year, mostly through West Coast bookstores, where it retails for $30 a copy.

It is not illegal to write or publish such information, although Congress has considered passing a law that would make it so. (The "war on drugs," he says, "is futile . . . Endlessly adding more common chemicals to lists to be watched by America's secret police has done nothing to stem this nation's voracious appetite for illegal drugs.") In fact, Preisler's book is just one source of meth recipes that is readily available. The World Wide Web is brimming with them. But Preisler generally is acknowledged as the Pied Piper of meth making.

"I think it is fair to say," he says proudly, "that I'm the person responsible for making clandestine [meth] cooking what it is today -- a burgeoning pastime."

It is that. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, almost 7,000 meth labs were discovered in the United States last year by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, and about one-third were in California.

More remarkably, in the largest category of labs -- the so-called super labs making multi-pound batches for widespread distribution and sale -- 97 percent were in California, mainly in the Central Valley and the Southern California deserts.

"Most of the meth in the United States comes from California," says Bob Dey, the DEA agent in charge of the Sacramento office," and most of the meth in California comes from the Central Valley."

How the Valley became a "source nation" for America's meth could be said (with some poetic license) to have its roots in ancient China. For more than 5,000 years, the Chinese have used an herb called ma huang. It is derived from the stems of the ephedra plant, a 2-foot-high shrub that smells like pine and grows primarily in Asia. The plant, which contains alkaloids called ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, is most commonly used for opening clogged bronchial and sinus passages.

When Western medicine discovered its benefits, the plants were used at such a rate that there was a fear the world would run out of them. Then in 1927, a Los Angeles-based researcher named Gordon Alles experimented on himself and others and discovered that amphetamines were an effective substitute for ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Amphetamine, a drug that stimulates the central nervous system, had been synthesized from chemicals in Germany in the mid-1880s. Methamphetamine, a more potent form of amphetamine, was created in 1919 by a Japanese pharmacologist. But before Alles' experiments, there hadn't been much use for it. About the same time, scientists discovered that ephedrine and pseudoephedrine could be made synthetically, without ephedra.

Now there was plenty of both substances, and pharmaceutical companies began putting them to work. By 1946, amphetamines, including methamphetamine, had found more than three dozen pharmaceutical uses, from nose drops to treatment of obesity, narcolepsy and, in the words of one doctor, "amelioration of mood." Because the drug induces feelings of high energy and loss of appetite, nations involved in World War II routinely supplied it to soldiers to fight hunger and fatigue. (Nor was it confined to the battlefield: Adolf Hitler was said to have received up to eight meth injections a day.)

In the 1950s, many U.S. doctors prescribed the drugs with abandon, particularly for weight loss. In Japan, the postwar government actually encouraged workers to use amphetamines, including meth, to increase production. The result was an epidemic of addiction, followed by a giant program to discourage its use.

By the 1960s, "bennies," "pep pills," "dexies" and "white crosses" had become popular in the United States, and some pharmacies began selling injectable amphetamines. Even President John F. Kennedy shot meth to give him energy and help him cope with chronic back pain.

But as the '60s ended, many drug companies, under government pressure, got out of the "speed" business. Their place in the market was quickly taken over by a cottage industry that in turn, by the 1980s, would give way to a mega-business, prompted in part by the burgeoning cocaine business.

Cocaine use in California cities grew during the 1980s, but the drug often was expensive and hard to get in many rural areas. So drug users turned to a substance made by outlaw motorcycle gangs in makeshift, clandestine labs. It was called "crystal meth" because it was in the form of a little rock, or "crank," and often was carried in the crankcases of motorcycles.

The bikers made their meth using a chemical called phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P. Until 1980, P2P was freely available from chemical suppliers, but that same year it was classified by the federal government as a controlled substance. Underground chemists reacted by producing their own P2P, using more than a dozen different methods.

Sometime in the 1980s, just as authorities began cracking down on some of the chemicals used to produce P2P, meth makers discovered a different formula using ephedrine, hydriodic acid and red phosphorus.

In addition to skirting the ban on P2P, the method had other advantages. It produced a higher yield -- and a purer and more potent form of methamphetamine.