America's Most Dangerous Drug

Meth-fueled sex is hardly the exclusive province of gay men. Dr. Alex Stalcup, medical director of New Leaf Treatment Center in Lafayette, Calif., sees plenty of straight high school and college men who use meth to have "speed sex." "They'll get a bunch of speed and go up to a cabin with some girls on Friday night and just have sex all weekend," Stalcup says. The irony is that meth can cause impotence. For many women, weight loss is an even bigger draw. Stalcup tells of one 5-foot-8 patient who weighed less than 90 pounds when she came to him. "People call it the Jenny Crank diet," says Patrick Fleming, head of the Salt Lake County Division of Substance Abuse Services, which now sees more women with addictions to meth than to alcohol.

A lot of people never saw the meth epidemic coming. Unlike crack cocaine, which erupted in the nation's urban centers in the 1980s and quickly gained the attention of media and government, meth took hold in rural areas far from America's power brokers. "It does not have the same hold on policymakers that crack did 20 years ago. I think that's one of the things that has helped the epidemic build in severity, kind of under the radar," says Jack Riley of RAND Corp., the Santa Monica, Calif., think tank. Methamphetamine isn't a new drug, though it has become more powerful as the ingredients and the cooking techniques have evolved. It was first synthesized by a Japanese chemist in 1919, and was used by both Axis and Allied troops in World War II to keep them alert and motivated; kamikaze pilots were said to have taken high doses of the stuff before their missions. In the 1950s, it was commonly prescribed as a diet aid, to fight depression and give housewives a boost. The federal government criminalized the drug in 1970 for most uses (it's still legally available in low doses for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder and narcolepsy). But by then it was illegally being manufactured and distributed by motorcycle gangs in the West. In the early '90s, Mexican trafficking organizations began taking over production, setting up "superlabs" in the California countryside that were able to crank out 50 pounds of meth or more in a weekend. To put that in perspective: an "eight ball" of meth, one eighth of an ounce, is enough to get 15 people high.

Back when bikers controlled the trade, legislators tried to restrict supplies of the core ingredient they were using to make crank, so nicknamed because they would hide meth in their motorcycles' crankcases. So the cooks simply changed the recipe to use ephedrine, a chemical then found in cold medications. Lawmakers got wise, and clamped down on ephedrine; the cooks switched to a related compound, pseudoephedrine. When the United States began restricting bulk sales of "pseudo" in the mid-1990s, meth manufacturers turned to Canada. They also began buying hundreds of thousands of boxes of Sudafed and other pseudoephedrine-based drugs ("smurfing," cooks call it, when they go from store to store buying or stealing pills). When Canada strengthened regulation of large sales of pseudoephedrine in 2003, production jumped south to Mexico, where pseudo has been arriving in ever-larger doses from Asia. Today about half the meth in the United States is made in Mexico, smuggled across the border and ferried around the country in cars with secret compartments that would make James Bond proud. "It'll be the kind where you turn on the windshield wiper, hit the brakes, hit the door lock and then the compartment will open up," says the DEA's Rodney Benson, special agent in charge of the four-state Seattle Field Division. The DEA is working with its foreign counterparts from Mexico to Hong Kong to intercept pseudoephedrine shipments from overseas and prevent cross-border trafficking into the United States. "I think, increasingly, meth will be seen from our point of view as a smuggled drug," says the agency's Mike Heald.

But meth is a two-front war, and Mexican drug dealers are only part of the problem. Because the drug is relatively easy to make, thousands of labs manned by addicts or local dealers have sprung up around the country. Legislators are now trying to make it harder for these mom-and-pop labs to get their hands on pseudo. Last year Oklahoma became the first state to put pseudoephedrine pills behind the counter; as a result, "meth labs have all but disappeared in Oklahoma," says Mark Woodward, press aide for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, which reports a 90 percent drop in lab seizures since the legislation was enacted. Seventeen other states have followed Oklahoma's example, and a total of 40 states put some sort of restriction on the sale of pseudo. Drug manufacturers, having fought hard against such laws, have started reformulating their cold medicines using a different chemical--one that cannot be used to make meth.

Still, there will be no easy victory. As law enforcement is all too aware, Anytown, U.S.A., can be turned into a meth den almost overnight. Take Bradford County in northeast Pennsylvania, a place law-enforcement officials nationwide now refer to as Meth Valley. Five years ago a cooker from Iowa named Les Molyneaux set up shop in Towanda, a town of 3,000 along the Susquehanna River. Hardly anyone in Towanda had heard of the drug, but by the time Molyneaux was arrested and pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to manufacture meth, he'd shared his recipe with at least two apprentices. From there, "it just spread like wildfire," says Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Casey. Today police have identified at least 500 people who are using or cooking the drug in Bradford County, and the actual tally is probably "significantly worse" than that, Casey says. The drug has seduced whole families and turned them into "zombies," says Randy Epler, a police officer in Towanda. "I see walking death."

The sobering fact is that, like addiction itself, this epidemic can only be arrested, not cured. "There are a lot more regular people doing it than society has a clue," says Dominic Ippolito, who for a decade dealt meth to doctors, lawyers, designers, accountants and working moms across California. He also smoked the stuff--every day for 10 years--even as he held down a job as a claims manager for a big supermarket chain. But then he lost his job and started dealing drugs full time. He finally got caught on his 42nd birthday, after a customer fingered him in a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with intent to sell. He wound up serving 9-1/2 months behind bars, where he got to see firsthand the impact of the drug he dealt. "The whole meth-mouth thing is true: I saw hundreds and hundreds of guys with no teeth. A lot of them couldn't even chew the prison food." Some inmates would grind up antidepressants and snort them, attempting to replicate the high of speed. "They were total meth heads. That's what everybody is in prison."