- LOS ANGELES -- The party
was just getting going. It was 2am, the time they throw you out of bars
in Los Angeles, and those looking for more fun had started to arrive at
a house in the Hollywood Hills.
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- Few seemed dulled by the alcohol they had already consumed
and it was clear why. Little plastic bags were being thrown on top of table
tops, their contents dirty white crystals, the flakes far bulkier than
the powdered cocaine that had become an all too familiar sight at any LA
event with its inevitable gaggle of talkative coke addicts.
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- This was crystal meth, the latest drug to sweep through
Hollywood's entertainment industry and draw with it an ever-expanding band
of adherents loving its long-lasting high, weight-losing side-effects and
- most depressingly of all - the knowledge that they were doing the latest
cool thing, whatever the catastrophic effect it would have on their bodies.
-
- Police are warning of an epidemic, one they have traced
back to the middle of last year when Mexican drug lords in the border town
of Tijuana moved their meth factories north to start churning out cheap
supplies for America's Golden State.
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- Before then meth was still a joke. It was the "trailer
trash drug", the intoxicant of choice of America's white urban poor
- cheap and able to be brewed up from a mixture of cheap chemicals (primarily
fertilisers) in people's baths. A "meth head" was a redneck whose
teeth had fallen out.
-
- But no longer. It was suddenly available everywhere and
it is the fashionista who have embraced it - producers, agents, writers,
actors - many for the most base of reasons: that it is something new.
-
- One way to trace fashionable substance abuse in Hollywood
is what is favoured in the films: heroin in the mid-1990s with The Basketball
Diaries and Trainspotting, then ecstasy by the Millennium. Now it's crystal
meth in Mickey Rourke's Spun and Val Kilmer's The Salton Sea.
-
- Police say 70 per cent of the meth seized in the US now
comes from California. David Foerster, of the substance abuse body the
Foerster Group, says that in the past year he has placed several Hollywood
luminaries in rehab and warns: "In the past 18 months the problem
has gone from epidemic to pandemic."
-
- At first, crystal methamphetamine increases productivity
and elicits rapid euphoria, enabling the user to feel they can finish that
script even if they have been up all night. The main high may only last
six to 10 hours but it takes almost seven appetite-suppressing days for
the final effects to wear off (thinness being an added virtue in this most
image-conscious of cities).
-
- The down side is at least one in seven get addicted -
physically not just emotionally - and it quickly triggers a descent into
the psychotic. It alters the dopamine in the brain, permanently changing
a person's decision-making system. It is no accident that it got the name
"trailer trash drug" as it pulls people into the gutter.
-
- I had first seen it in Hong Kong when, just after the
handover to China, factories in Shenzhen started flooding the territory.
The expat ecstasy kids became addicts of crystal meth, or ice as it was
called there, and in six months most were being sent home.
-
- It is too new here for people to have fully realised
the dangers. Feeling like an old man, I told those at the party it was
bad news but they insisted they had it under control. "Sex on meth
is the best," one girl told me before admitting: "I do know people
addicted but no drugs have caught me before, so why should this one?"
-
- She should talk to Jenny Rowe who last month drove her
22-year-old daughter Jasmine to Arizona to put her in her brother's home
in the hope it would clean her out and stop her thieving.
-
- "It destroys lives," she said. "It destroyed
my family and now it's infected Hollywood. And Hollywood creates trends.
It determines what is cool. They will be smoking meth across the country
soon. Then watch out for London because it's going to start being seen
as cool there too. That's fashion for you and trends start here."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/28/
wmeth28.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/28/ixworld.html
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