Life and Meth
Since the arrival of cheap, homemade speed in East Texas five years ago, the drug has torn apart countless families and turned kids into addicts—and there’s no end in sight.
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Because meth is made in the home, the addiction sometimes takes hold of entire families. The three teenage addicts I met were introduced to speed not by friends but by a parent, an aunt, or an uncle. One of them was a sixteen-year-old, Christina (her name has been changed), who was under house arrest for meth possession. She had recently failed both of her mandated drug tests. She was a pale, moody girl with a blue tattoo on her arm. Her family—and she, by extension—had a long history of substance abuse. “I’ve never been a straight-up, happy person,” she said by way of explanation. “Meth helped me feel more normal.” She had first tried it when she was twelve years old. “A bunch of us were smoking weed and playing cards at my aunt’s house. That was the hangout place. My aunt wanted me to try it, but my stepdad’s sister was the one who gave it to me. I snorted a line, and I thought I was going to pass out. My heart was racing so fast I thought it was going to pop out of my chest. My ears were buzzing and my vision was blacking out. I had to wrap my legs around my chair to keep myself from falling down. I got sick, and then I had this huge wave of energy. I felt like I could do anything, like I was totally invincible.” At first, she used meth on the weekends, at her aunt’s house. “When I was fourteen, I started using it almost every day with my friends.”
Christina lived with her grandmother, but her immediate family was never far away. “My mom and dad both used,” she said. “I’d stop by to see one of them, and we’d do it together. That was our way of connecting.” She remembered one night she spent with her father when he became so paranoid that he ordered her to patrol the land behind his house. “My dad gave me a pellet gun and a flashlight,” Christina said. “He had me crawl around in this field, Army-style, in the dark. He was yelling, ‘Shoot those MFers in the trees!’ And I was right there with him, crawling on the ground, seeing people in the trees, scared out of my mind.” One of Christina’s uncles cooked meth, and sometimes he asked her to run to the store to buy something he needed for it, like boxes of cold medicine. Her boyfriend dealt it before he went to jail last year. “I started hating the taste, the smell of it, but I still did it,” Christina said. “It was just something to do. My boyfriend and I couldn’t even stay awake on it after a while. I guess that’s pretty amazing, you know, two fifteen-year-olds with such a high tolerance that we’d fall asleep after doing a line.”
Christina was pessimistic about her ability to shake the addiction. Her best friend, who was pregnant, was still using meth, and she felt guilty for having introduced her to it. “There’s no future for me,” she said. “I’m tangled up in it. My family’s tangled up in it.” When I asked her how many people she was close to who were addicted to meth, she thought for a second, then reeled off a list, counting on her fingers until she had used both hands. “My mom, my dad, my stepdad, my best friend, my boyfriend, my aunt, and four or five uncles,” she said. She smiled, as if marveling at her own bad luck. “Misery loves company.”
KENT GRAHAM AND HIS PARTNER left the Tyler County sheriff’s department and drove to Spurger. Graham knew the town—he had hunted deer in the surrounding woods as a boy—but he had no local informants; Tyler County had recently signed on with the task force, and he had not had time yet to make contacts. Spurger is a town of 472 people, a wide place in the road with one blinking yellow light. The community was small enough that any investigation of the local meth operation would be hard to keep secret for long.
Graham turned down its quiet, tree-lined streets until he arrived at the address of the man who had first contacted the sheriff’s department about the old farmhouse. A woman answered the door. Her husband was not home, she said, but she could tell them what she had seen and heard around town. She, like many others, had taken note of the house that lay just off the main drag. On beautiful days, she said, the blinds remained closed. Even when it was hot outside, smoke came out of the vents, as if its residents were cooking something. The lights were often on all night. Nobody who lived there seemed to have a job, she said. There were always lots of cars parked there for short amounts of time and then gone. She had even heard talk at the beauty parlor that there was a strange odor in the house that smelled like meth was being cooked. Before Graham left, the woman handed him a list of license plate numbers that she had stopped to jot down whenever she drove by the house.
Graham needed to find a local resident who would agree to wear a wire into the house; if the informant could make a buy, Graham would have probable cause for a search warrant. He contacted the Tyler County district attorney’s office, and in a few days, he had located a man who was awaiting sentencing in a meth possession case who would work undercover in hopes of getting a shorter prison term. (Some details have been changed to protect his identity.) For his trouble, he would be paid $100. “If you could get Ward Cleaver to buy dope, that would be great,” Graham explained. “Unfortunately, you have to use a crook to catch a crook.” The risk to the informant was high; word travels fast in a small town. He and Graham met in the parking lot of the Woodville Wal-Mart, a half hour’s drive away, and talked over the ground rules inside Graham’s truck: He was not allowed to do any meth during the buy and was to make up a plausible excuse if he was offered any. The informant was a pale, rangy speed addict in his early twenties, and he nodded morosely as he listened to Graham explain exactly how he would help catch his friends. “This is going to cost you,” the informant said.
Later that afternoon, at a clearing in the woods outside Spurger, they met again. The informant paced back and forth nervously under the pine trees, dragging on a cigarette. Graham put a wire on him and fastened an antenna to his truck that would pick up the sound of the hidden microphone. Then Graham followed him, at a safe distance, to the house. From his truck, he monitored the brief transaction inside, sometimes straining to hear the conversation through the static feed of the informant’s body wire.
“You want a bump?” the dealer could be heard asking, slapping his own arm as he searched for a vein.
“Nah, I’m fixing to do it with my girl,” the informant said.
He emerged from the house a few minutes later, and Graham followed him as he drove back to the clearing in the woods. The informant dug a gram of meth out of his pocket and handed it over. At Graham’s request, he made a map of the interior of the house, sketching out the layout of each room. “If my momma knew what I was doing now . . .” he said, shaking his head.
“You’re doing good,” Graham assured him.
The informant frowned, as if the cop knew nothing. “Well, if they find out it’s me, they will burn my house down,” he said.
“NO ONE ELSE AROUND HERE was working meth five years ago; I was it,” Graham said afterward as we drove back to Nacogdoches. “I didn’t have a clue how to even start. None of us knew much about meth. We had to make it up as we went along.” In the late nineties, a string of house fires—accidentally sparked by amateur meth cooks—heralded meth’s arrival. “There were houses going up right and left,” he said. “We’d always find a jug of muriatic acid inside or some iodine crystals and acetone.” Graham had already worked narcotics for five years in Nacogdoches County, first as a patrol officer intercepting drugs as they were ferried north on U.S. 59 out of Houston and later as an investigator for the Deep East Texas Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force. After the rash of house fires, he was told to devote himself to tracking down meth labs full-time. His beat, which covered Nacogdoches County, where the task force was overseen by the sheriff’s department and the four counties that helped pay for the task force’s assistance—Angelina, Houston, Shelby, and San Augustine—spanned five thousand square miles. He had little to go on at first other than a handful of leads: a few names of suspected meth cooks that neighbors had called in to a police hotline.
Wearing street clothes, Graham paid each one a visit. He knocked on doors, explaining who he was and who he worked for. “We’ve heard that you might be cooking dope around here,” he would say offhandedly, as if he were talking about the latest change in the weather. “Would you mind if I took a look around?” Graham speaks unhurriedly, usually with a wad of snuff tucked under his lip, and his manner put people at ease; strangers, even those who shouldn’t have, usually let him in. Soon Graham had informants who were calling him with tips. “If we didn’t find three labs a week, it was unusual,” he said. “Once we did three in a day. The only thing that kept us from busting more was that we’d get tired. I’d drive home at night and think, ‘Good Lord, this place is just eaten up with this stuff.’”
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