America's Most Dangerous Drug

The leafy Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge is the kind of place where people come to live the American dream in million-dollar homes on one-acre lots. Eight years ago Kimberly Fields and her husband, Todd, bought a ranch house here on a wooded lot beside a small lake, and before long they were parents, with two sons, a black Labrador and a Volvo in the drive. But somewhere along the way this blond mother with a college degree and a $100,000-a-year job as a sales rep for Apria Healthcare found something that mattered more: methamphetamine. The crystalline white drug quickly seduces those who snort, smoke or inject it with a euphoric rush of confidence, hyperalertness and sexiness that lasts for hours on end. And then it starts destroying lives.

Kimberly tried drug rehab but failed, and she couldn't care for her children, according to divorce papers filed by her husband, who moved out last year. She was arrested three times for shoplifting--most recently, police say, for allegedly stealing over-the-counter cold pills containing pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient used in making meth. By the time cops came banging on her door with a search warrant on June 1, Kimberly, now 37, had turned her slice of suburbia into a meth lab, prosecutors allege, with the help of a man she'd met eight months earlier in an Indiana bar, Shawn Myers, 32. (Both Fields and Myers pleaded not guilty to possessing meth with an intent to distribute, though Kimberly told police that she is addicted to the drug.) Dressed in a pink T shirt printed with the words ALL STRESSED OUT, Kimberly looked about 45 pounds thinner than when police first booked her for shoplifting two years ago. Her leg bore a knee-to-ankle scar from a chemical burn, and police found anhydrous ammonia, also used in cooking meth, buried in a converted propane tank in her backyard. As officers led Kimberly away in handcuffs, her 6-year-old son Nicholas was "only concerned that his brother had his toys and diapers," recalls Detective Mike Barnes. Meanwhile, police evacuated 96 nearby homes, fearing the alleged meth lab might explode.

Once derided as "poor man's cocaine," popular mainly in rural areas and on the West Coast, meth has seeped into the mainstream in its steady march across the United States. Relatively cheap compared with other hard drugs, the highly addictive stimulant is hooking more and more people across the socioeconomic spectrum: soccer moms in Illinois, computer geeks in Silicon Valley, factory workers in Georgia, gay professionals in New York. The drug is making its way into suburbs from San Francisco to Chicago to Philadelphia. In upscale Bucks County, Pa., the Drug Enforcement Administration last month busted four men for allegedly running a meth ring, smuggling the drug from California inside stereo equipment and flat-screen TVs. Even Mormon Utah has a meth problem, with nearly half the women in Salt Lake City's jail testing positive for the drug in one study.

More than 12 million Americans have tried methamphetamine, and 1.5 million are regular users, according to federal estimates. Meth-making operations have been uncovered in all 50 states; Missouri tops the list, with more than 8,000 labs, equipment caches and toxic dumps seized between 2002 and 2004. Cops nationwide rank methamphetamine the No. 1 drug they battle today: in a survey of 500 law-enforcement agencies in 45 states released last month by the National Association of Counties, 58 percent said meth is their biggest drug problem, compared with only 19 percent for cocaine, 17 percent for pot and 3 percent for heroin. Meth addicts are pouring into prisons and recovery centers at an ever-increasing rate, and a new generation of "meth babies" is choking the foster-care system in many states. One measure of the drug's reach: Target, Wal-Mart, Rite-Aid and other retailers have moved nonprescription cold pills behind the pharmacy counter, where meth cooks have a harder time getting at them.

The active ingredient in those pills is pseudoephedrine, a chemical derivative of amphetamine. The "pseudo" is extracted from the cold pills, and cooked with other chemicals like iodine and anhydrous ammonia--using recipes readily available on the Internet--over high heat. The resulting compound, when ingested, releases bursts of dopamine in the brain, producing a strong euphoric effect.

And, amid the wreckage, a pressing political debate: are we fighting the wrong drug war? The Bush administration has made marijuana the major focus of its anti-drug efforts, both because there are so many users (an estimated 15 million Americans) and because it considers pot a "gateway" to the use of harder substances. "If we can get a child to 20 without using marijuana, there is a 98 percent chance that the child will never become addicted to any drug," says White House Deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns, of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "While it may come across as an overemphasis on marijuana, you don't wake up when you're 25 and say, 'I want to slam meth!' " But --those fighting on the front lines say the White House is out of touch. "It hurts the federal government's credibility when they say marijuana is the No. 1 priority," says Deputy District Attorney Mark McDonnell, head of narcotics in Portland, Ore., which has been especially hard hit. Meth, he says, "is an epidemic and a crisis unprecedented."