Speed Bumps

Meth Milestones

The early ’40s saw a new market for meth, namely World War II. Sometimes when you’ve got to get your six-year-war on you need a little pick-me-up. The United States experimented with the drug on pilots. Nazi Germany just experimented. Tweakers—for the uninitiated, methamphetamine addicts—love to talk about how Hitler used the drug. While unproven, his behavior in the later stages of the war suggests some of speed’s side effects such as paranoia, irrational euphoria, even psychosis.

The ’50s saw the drug enter the medicine cabinets of middle-class America as “mother’s little helper,” and was frequently prescribed for lethargy, depression, and weight loss. The ’60s saw the rise of the first underground labs, but the drug remained on the fringe of the counterculture, perfect for a violent demonstration or a night of cranking out pamphlets railing against capitalism.

“All the Rage”

But the drug never caught on in an era at least nominally focused on peace, love and expanding the mind. The speed freak at the Love-In became the butt of jokes, and meth became a pariah drug and spent most of the ’70s in hiding, the misbegotten freak of dope culture.

It took the go-go-go ’80s and new recipes in home cooking to revive the drug. And revive it did. After all, meth nailed the “work hard and make tons of cash” ethos of the new era, although any tangible increase in energy was ephemeral for most users.

Most new users got Reagan’s “Morning in America” message because, after all, they had been up all night waiting for it. While crack caught the attention of Hollywood and law enforcement, outside the inner-city meth was all the rage, no more so than in our own Inland Empire, where officials—who by now were waking up to the problem—were eager to dub the Riverside/San Bernardino counties area the Capital of meth in the United States.

Crank Capital?

Jack Shafer is editor at large for the online magazine Slate, and has done an excellent job over the years documenting how bogus stories—many dealing with drug use—spread virally throughout the mainstream media, seemingly impervious to fact-checking or critical analysis of any sort. The title “Meth Capital of the U.S.” turns out to be no exception. Shafer mentions that cities and regions claiming the title include Philadelphia, San Diego, Polk County, Florida; and Jackson County, Missouri. At one point Japan got a mention as the world capital.

Luckily we had some local backers in our quest for the title. Shafer writes that, “The Press-Enterprise kept insisting on bragging rights for Riverside,” all the way up to 2000.

Still, if the title of capital of methamphetamine lies open to dispute there’s no denying that the inland region of Southern California soon became known as a nirvana for the drug, with lots of land with little snooping from the feds, areas where trailers dot the turf anyway, thus drawing little suspicion, and a workforce often employed in repetitive jobs perfectly suited to a drug that could make cleaning the bathroom seem as heroic to the user as Hannibal crossing the Alps.

Going Mainstream

Hollywood took notice, and the drug that no one noticed or cared about finally hit the big time when David became addicted to meth during the fourth season of 90210, the sure sign of making it as a new social issue in the early ’90s.

Comedians began to include jokes which featured the IE and tweakers, and—more ominously—addiction rates, arrests, and petty crime rates began to spike throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties as the drug spread in popularity, escaping its lower-class origins and infecting all rungs of society.

Politicians woke up and began fulminating against the drug. Drug enforcement officials and hazmat teams soon began a full score war against local cookers and just plain addicts as well.

The Aftermath

The Press-Enterprise ran an excellent series on meth’s legacy in May of 2008, with one of their key findings being that the crackdowns, through drug raids and the limitations on the sale of medications containing ephedrine (called precursors) and related chemicals, effectively quieted the local production of meth in county, although some limited small-scale production remains. The latest variant being the micro-micro batch that can be cooked up in small containers on the go, making just enough dope for one or two users to get high with. Most of the users who were cooking up during the ’80s and ’90s are now serving long prison stretches, dead or have somehow managed to leave a lifestyle that while seductive proved increasingly tenuous to hold onto.

The actual production of the drug now takes place mainly in Mexico, with occasional mini-labs operated on this side of the border by Mexican nationals. Drug cartels produce the drug in Mexico proper and then rely on the Mexican Mafia to distribute the final product in the United States. Like many capitalistic enterprises, the larger fish has devoured the smaller. A sophisticated drug cartel can afford up to a 20-percent interception rate at the border, a rate that would land a Billy Barstow or a Hemet Hank a rather long sentence in Chino.

Where Did All the Users Go?

While most of the meth labs are gone, Riverside and San Bernardino counties remain an important distribution hub and have been left with something of an environmental nightmare, as the residue from toxic labs is still present in many homes, even years after the actual meth labs are gone. As Douglas Quan and Jose Arballo Jr. point out in “Meth Legacy,” California had no policies in place for meth lab cleanup before 2006. Homes used as labs “didn’t get nearly the same level of scrutiny they get today,” the authors claim. In addition, California kept no databases on homes used as meth labs, making future cleanup efforts far more difficult.

Almost as difficult to assess is how the war on meth labs in the Inland Empire has affected usage rates. Like many jobs in America, the manufacturing side has been outsourced, but are we still chronic consumers of the drug? Is the IE still home of the tweaker? Or did the legal constraints against speed actually cut its use? Is this that rarest of examples in the largely misguided and mismanaged “War on Drugs,” an unmitigated success? 

Still a Health Issue

While repeated phone calls to local law enforcement regarding recent arrests rates for meth went unreturned, Statistics from the U.S. Department of Health show that from 2000-2004—as officials began turning the corner in the war against local production arrests for the dangerous substances drug category, of which methamphetamine is a member—arrests doubled, as did admissions to mental health programs. This suggests that speed use in the IE exists independently from its distribution, thus becoming in many way like any other drug. Heroin addicts don’t necessarily care where the stuff comes from, as long as it does the trick.  

Darwin Neidlinger, supervisor of the substance abuse office run by the Riverside County Department of Mental Health, believes meth use is still a tremendous health issue. Neidlinger says that he sees just “as many clients as before,” and that “70 percent of the admissions he sees are from methamphetamine.” Speed apparently still has the potential to make its users mentally ill, specifically from amphetamine psychosis, an acute and dangerous form of paranoia. Neidlinger believes that the biggest benefit from the lab crackdown is the fact that fewer children are exposed to meth production and large-scale amounts of the drug. Maybe that alone makes it worth it. It boggles the mind but there were actual generations of meth-producing families, cooks whose grandparents had dabbled in kitchen crank-making operations.

Green Acres

The 10 Acre Ranch Detox & Recovery Center sits above the Santa Anna River bottom in an area of Riverside that is decidedly old-school, far from the yuppies enclaves of Orangecrest and Canyon Crest. The rehabilitation facility doesn’t look like much from the outside; in fact its very isolation would have made it an alluring place to cook up some meth in the ’90s. At the door I’m greeted by Nicholas Costagliola, the administrative assistant and intake coordinator who has agreed to show me the facility. Nick looks like he might have briefly been in a band that opened for Lou Reed. His eyes are intense, almost glaring, and you get the idea that back when—to use rehab lingo—he was using, you wouldn’t have wanted to cross him. Now though, he’s a gregarious fellow who firmly believes in the twelve-step philosophy, and seems eager to help addicts stay clean.

The facility itself is an all-male, mildly Spartan affair. “Guests” share rooms, are asked to cook and clean and undergo a series of therapy sessions throughout the day. Some of the men are here in lieu of serving jail time; some have checked in of their own volition. It’s not Betty Ford, Nicholas tells me, but it is an affordable option. Many facilities charge up to $30,000 a month for treatment—the cost at 10 Acre Ranch is a fraction of that.

Besides, the backyard has a great view of Mt. Baldy, horses, a swimming pool and what could be loosely described as an exercise area. I have to remind myself that this is a rehab center and not a bed & breakfast on the way to Bishop.

Shedding the Label

I sit down with Nicholas in his office and I wait for the stories about how most of the addicts are speed freaks, how they come in out of their minds, how meth is still the number one problem they see. When I ask about meth Nicholas looks at me as if I’m some relic of times gone by, as if I’ve asked if he wants to bring his records over and listen to them.

Oxycotin is the huge problem at the 10 Acre, he tells me; maybe three of the current 11 patients have problems with speed. No, Oxycotin and heroin are the trendy drugs of the moment, with many users favoring injection as the way to get high. Meth seems almost an afterthought here. I leave the 10 Acre Ranch still confused—are we the meth capital or aren’t we?

Perhaps it no longer matters. And maybe it’s time for us to shed the meth label all together. Goodbye to rocket-fueled freaks with red-phosphorus stained hands cooking up poison in trailers in Blythe, and goodbye to all-night pool halls and meth-moms and super-militarized narcotics squads. The contamination may stay with us for awhile longer, but we no longer need to feel contaminated by it. “Tweakers Suck,” say the bumper stickers. Maybe that about nails it.

Tweaking the Numbers

This smattering of figures are meant to serve only as snapshots into the methamphetamine landscape of the region. Or something like that.

851 — The number of meth labs busted in the IE in 1998, nearly half of the 1,717 drug labs seized in California that year. (Source: The Press-Enterprise)

2,064 — Amount (in pounds) of meth seized statewide by the California Highway Patrol. About 25 percent of the seizures stem from the IE. (Source: The Press-Enterprise)

625 — The number of meth labs busted by Riverside and San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies busted in 2000. (Source: The Press-Enterprise)

500 — The number of meth labs seized across California in 2005. (Source: Drug Enforcement Administration)

24 — The number of meth labs busted by Riverside and San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies in 2007. (Source: The Press-Enterprise)

156 — The amount in pounds of meth seized in San Bernardino County as a result of a 2009 Mexican drug cartel bust. (Source: KABC)

$600,000 — Amount of federal funds to fight meth production in San Bernardino County in 2009. (Source: www.InlandEmpire.us)

$150,000 — The cost to clean up a meth lab site. (Source: www.kci.org)

(Compiled by Kathlena Hope Gagnon and John A. Waterman)