- Rain, saliva and tears soaked the pistol in Mike Lund's
mouth. He stood alone in a field near a baseball diamond in Regina, tasting
the metal tip of the black .22-calibre Walther.
-
- In that suicidal moment, he didn't think about the power
of crystal methamphetamine.
-
- He could hardly remember his former life as a store manager
who negotiated wholesale deals across North America. He didn't understand
how meth had reduced him to an addict, a petty criminal, a small-time drug
dealer.
-
- Now, seven months later, under house arrest, the 24-year-old
stitches together the memories from his two years on meth: the gang members
who threatened to kill him; the junkie who tried to cut off his own toe;
the friend who prowled a rooftop in a dressing gown, swinging a meat cleaver
at shadows.
-
- Mr. Lund has decided to tell this dark story, first to
The Globe and Mail and then to anybody who will hear his warning. He's
worried about other people like him, he says, about the otherwise ordinary
lives shattered by meth's arrival in places that haven't seen such a powerful
new drug in decades.
-
- "Right now, at this very moment, two Grade 10 girls
are smoking meth for the very first time at a house over there," he
said, gesturing down a street lined with mature trees. "These girls
are coming out of nice, peach-coloured homes...They have these beautiful
homes and families who love them very much, they have brothers and sisters,
they drive nice cars, and they're probably going to be whoring themselves
on the corner so they can smoke meth, four months from now."
-
- That's the heart of the fear about crystal meth. The
drug is already rampant among young B.C. street people. What alarms police,
doctors, professors and others who study methamphetamines, however, is
the way crystal meth has spread across Canada in the past few years.
-
- It's a toxic wave moving from west to east, they say.
A dose of the white crystals often costs less than a pack of cigarettes,
it's more addictive than crack cocaine, and it's more likely to cause psychosis
than any other drug on the street.
-
- The awful potential of meth has already been unleashed
in the United States, where the wave started in California and crashed
into the Midwest, plaguing small towns and making the word methamphetamine
more common than the words marijuana or cocaine in U.S. courtrooms.
-
- Meth hasn't hit Canada so hard, but the emerging patterns
are similar.
-
- Jennifer Vornbrock, a manager at Vancouver Coastal Health,
chaired meetings of meth experts last month and discovered that the scourge
among her city's young street people has become a problem for middle-class
neighbourhoods across the country.
-
- "It's getting into suburbia and small rural towns
that aren't used to dealing with a substance of this magnitude," she
said. Two years ago, almost nobody in Regina had heard of crystal meth.
Mike Lund certainly had no idea what the stuff looked like.
-
- He was raised in a comfortable house with his mother
and brother, earned good grades in school, played violin with a junior
symphony, took up classical guitar, and won trophies in hockey, basketball
and baseball.
-
- His strongest talent emerged at age 17, when the long-haired
teenager took a part-time job at a store that sells bath products.
-
- The young man rose quickly from clerk to manager. He
cut his hair short and was featured in a local newspaper as a promising
entrepreneur. Introducing the store's handmade soaps and bath bombs to
the wholesale and export markets, he negotiated deals with clients in California,
Nevada, New York and across Canada.
-
- His first encounter with meth happened on a warm evening
in June, 2002. He was finishing his day at the soap store and feeling tired
because he had recently started a second job at an auto garage.
-
- A regular customer invited him to his apartment a few
blocks away. He had never visited this guy before, but he was impressed
when he climbed the stairs and opened a door into a pristine room with
cream-coloured carpets, suspended halogen lights, spare furniture and a
glass coffee table.
-
- His new friend welcomed him, pulled out a small bottle
and shook a white rock onto the table. He said it would ease Mr. Lund's
fatigue.
-
- The rock was chopped into powder, and he snorted a line
through a glass tube. "This stuff burns, unlike any other drug. It
feels like your brain is going to explode, like it just hurts very badly.
I'm sitting there, I've got tears streaming down my face, and I'm looking
at him going, 'Why did you make me do this?' Two seconds after the pain,
though...." He snapped his fingers.
-
- "Ting! Your brain goes Atten-SHUN! Like boom, all
right! You're talking a mile a minute, you can't get enough air into your
lungs to say all the words you want to say."
-
- The high lasted all night and into the next morning,
leaving him sleepless but alert. He started taking the drug almost every
day. The street phrase for turning people into meth addicts is "making
monsters," he says, and that's what happened to him.
-
- "I ceased being a human being and became a monster."
Not everybody gets hooked on meth so quickly, and some users can manage
the cravings. But law-enforcement officials say Mr. Lund's intense reaction
to his first sample was typical.
-
- "There is no recreational use of meth," said
Douglas Culver, national co-ordinator of RCMP synthetic drug operations.
"You can't just use it occasionally. It's like a disease."
-
- The N-methyl derivative of amphetamine works like other
stimulants such as cocaine, except the euphoria can last eight to 12 hours.
Some experts say its addictiveness is pure chemistry, but others point
to the lure of heightened alertness in a fast-paced society. Club-goers
can play all night, while truckers, taxi drivers, prostitutes and students
can work longer hours.
-
- "Unlike other drugs, crystal meth has spanned across
all kinds of demographics," said Caitlin Padgett, co-ordinator of
an outreach group for meth users in Vancouver. "There's just a seductiveness
to not sleeping."
-
- Although national statistics are scare, the number of
Canadians succumbing to the seduction seems to be growing. Data from Health
Canada's Drug Analysis Service, which tests the drugs seized by police
across the country, show the number of meth samples from British Columbia
increased 50 per cent between 2001 and 2003; Alberta rose 20 per cent;
Ontario 108 per cent; Manitoba 141 per cent; Quebec 457 per cent; and Saskatchewan
857 per cent.
-
- "It's being seized on a regular basis now,"
said Corporal Kevin Lamontagne of the Manitoba RCMP drug section.
-
- The RCMP responded to the growing threat this year by
assigning 26 officers to search for clandestine meth laboratories, full
time. Police on the Prairies say they're particularly worried because of
meth's low price, the easy availability of farm fertilizer used as an ingredient
and meth's nickname among their colleagues in the United States: prairie
wildfire.
-
- Warnings are showing up in Prairie towns such as Prince
Albert, Sask., which has a population of 40,000 and about 140 meth addicts
in counselling.
-
- Those numbers are still comparatively low, however. Police
didn't uncover any meth labs in Saskatchewan last year. During the same
period south of the border, police in Missouri raided 2,858 laboratories.
-
- Similar statistics flashed on-screen at the Western Summit
on Methamphetamine in Vancouver last month, and the figures puzzled the
international group of experts. The numbers have increased sharply, but
the drug still isn't common in Canada. Why has this substance gained a
reputation as a serious threat?
-
- "The drug debate is always plagued by one moral
panic or another," notes Cameron Duff, director of the Australian
Drug Foundation's Centre for Youth Drug Studies and a keynote speaker at
the conference. "Perhaps at the moment crystal meth is the drug generating
that anxiety, and it might be somewhat out of proportion to the actual
reality of the problem."
-
- Mr. Duff paused for thought.
-
- "But with crystal meth, it does seem to be associated
with more problems, more frequently, than any other drug," he continued.
"If you look at all the problems associated with this drug, you think,
well, maybe your priority should be on the drug that causes the most harm,
irrespective of the number of users." The nasty side of meth emerged
several months after Mr. Lund's first taste.
-
- His dealer became his best friend, and they travelled
to Calgary together to buy drugs. During his first long stretch of sleepless
days, he found himself hallucinating while driving along the Trans-Canada
Highway. He saw dragons, old women and children, and kept screeching to
a stop from 130 kilometres an hour because he thought he had hit them.
Later he blacked out and woke up, still driving, on an unmarked dirt road
with the gas gauge inching lower. The motor sputtered to a stop just as
he was coasting into a town with a gas station.
-
- The meth dealer moved into Mr. Lund's house that fall,
and started losing his mind. Mr. Lund noticed him standing in front of
a bathroom mirror with blood dripping off his face as he gouged imaginary
blemishes with a metal pick. Then Mr. Lund found videotapes of the dealer
using drugs to rape women in Mr. Lund's bed. He smashed the tapes, kicked
him out of the house - and became a dealer himself.
-
- "I'd met with all his connections, and I said, 'You're
done.'" Economics is the backbone of meth's popularity. Mr. Lund sold
the drug in Regina for about $140 a gram, or $14 a dose. Desperation sometimes
raised the price - somebody gave him a rusted 1982 Nissan for two grams,
and another addict traded his 1980 Chevy van for 1.5 grams - but it was
usually cheap. Studies have found street values as low as $4 or $5 a dose
elsewhere in Canada.
-
- Supply drives prices down. Amateurs make the drug with
recipes from the Internet, ingredients from the local pharmacy and hardware
store, and a healthy dose of courage for mixing volatile chemicals.
-
- RCMP figures show the number of meth-cooking operations
discovered by police has grown in Canada, from fewer than 10 in 1998 to
39 last year. U.S. busts during the same years were far more dramatic,
rising from 1,627 labs to 9,763 last year The sheer number of meth cooks
south of the border has forced many states to pass cleanup laws requiring
decontamination of homes before they're suitable for living.
-
- Technicians such as Dan Hannan, of Assured Decontamination
in Minnesota, climb into protective suits with breathing masks and mop
up the puddles of solvents. The usual meth factory is a roach-infested
home with an overflowing cat-litter box, he says, but his crews have also
been called to motels, mobile homes, outhouses, tree-houses and even an
ice-fishing hut. Understandably, Mr. Lund doesn't talk about the criminal
organization that supplied his drugs. But he laughs when asked about his
T-shirt emblazoned with the Big Red Machine logo, a trademark of the Hells
Angels. He wants to get something printed on the back, he says, such as,
"I screwed up my life for a criminal organization and all I got was
a lousy T-shirt."
-
- In fact, "screwed up" hardly begins to describe
Mr. Lund's short career as a drug dealer. He once saw an addict offer to
settle a debt by cutting off his own baby toe with a serrated kitchen knife.
The man started sawing but only got halfway through the tough sinews, so
somebody else had to finish the job.
-
- Mr. Lund says he was never so cruel. He remains proud
of the fact that he never introduced anybody to the drug, even though he
jokes about his own depiction of himself as the "Mother Teresa of
the meth world."
-
- He once visited an addict's house and found him in a
psychotic state, smashing telephones. The crazed man rushed outside and
ripped wires out of Mr. Lund's car, explaining that listening devices were
everywhere. Mr. Lund walked to a drugstore, bought sleeping pills, slipped
them into the addict's drink and helped the man's girlfriend get him into
bed.
-
- Shortly afterward, he visited another friend and found
him on the roof wearing a dressing gown and wielding a meat cleaver, shouting
that he had cornered the "shadow people." Mr. Lund persuaded
him to climb down.
-
- It wasn't so easy dealing with the dealers, especially
when meth made them paranoid. One dealer secretly stashed $14,000 in an
air vent in the basement of Mr. Lund's rented house, forgot about it, and
stole Mr. Lund's car on the assumption that he had taken the cash.
-
- Another dealer put a gun to his head during an argument
about drugs, and that's when Mr. Lund started carrying weapons himself.
He was still selling perfumed bath products during the day, but his addiction
was spilling into the rest of his life.
-
- One day in March, two thugs parked a van outside the
soap shop and cranked their stereo so loud the display windows rattled.
One of them confronted him in the store about a drug debt, shoved him around,
threatened his life and stole some beauty products.
-
- Mr. Lund took the threat seriously. "Somewhere along
the way I'd pissed somebody off. So I left my store and I never came back."
-
- Without saying goodbye to anyone, he started camping
in the basement of a house belonging to his girlfriend's mother. His family
reported him missing and he saw his own photo on the evening news, but
he was too afraid to go home.
-
- It got worse. His girlfriend cheated on him, he started
laundering money and police finally caught him with drugs, counterfeit
cash and a sawed-off shotgun in his car.
-
- Shortly after his release from police custody he found
himself standing in a park one rainy day, after spending four days awake
on meth, fingering the trigger of a snub-nosed Walther he had traded for
$10 worth of drugs. He was utterly transformed, from a clean-cut entrepreneur
into a street tough who wore a leather skullcap, studded leather cuffs,
and a bracelet of bullets on his wrist. And he was thinking about how a
bullet would feel in the roof of his mouth.
-
- "I just snapped," he said. The list of health
effects from prolonged use of crystal meth is long and ugly, as with most
other narcotics. What makes meth unique, researchers say, is how often
the drug drives people insane. Users get violent and paranoid. They tend
to stay awake for days, binging on the drug, which can lead to psychosis.
-
- Richard Rawson, a psychologist at the University of California
who has studied drug addiction for 30 years, said researchers don't fully
understand why.
-
- "People get crazy on meth like they don't on other
drugs," he said.
-
- At the brink, Mr. Lund pulled back. He threw the gun
in a creek and went to bed for two days. It was the most dangerous moment
of his struggle with meth, even though it would be months before he escaped
its clutches. He was arrested again in June, released on bail, and arrested
again in September. This time he wasn't released and spent a month at a
remand centre.
-
- He wept for days as he lived without drugs for the first
time in two years.
-
- The withdrawal symptoms weren't as awful as the full
realization of what had happened, he said.
-
- "Going to jail, that was it, that was rock bottom.
And then sobering up and going, 'Holy fuck, I need help.'"
-
- Mr. Lund pleaded guilty to what proved to be Regina's
first case of crystal meth drug trafficking, as well as to charges of weapons
offences and using counterfeit currency. The judge sentenced him to 18
months house arrest with an electronic ankle bracelet tracking his movements.
-
- When he got home, his mother, Wendy Winter, 51, showed
him a sketchbook of watercolours she did to express her frustration about
his addiction. The sketches formed an alphabet series, with captions such
as: "W is for weeping," "and wondering."
-
- Ms. Winter still wonders about her son. "I can't
say I'm 100 per cent sure he's out of the woods," she said.
-
- When asked whether he still craves meth, Mr. Lund took
a long drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. He exhaled, and stared
through the smoke with his blue eyes. "Every day," he said, quietly.
"Every day."
-
- But he wants to rebuild his life. He spends most days
back at his old job in the soap store and several nights a week at Narcotics
Anonymous. He has started playing guitar again and he's been sober for
more than two months.
-
- How many more Canadians will be transformed this way?
Some experts say meth isn't any worse than the heroin and cocaine that
swept across the country in recent decades. Others believe meth will burn
through Canada unlike any other drug.
-
- Mr. Lund says there's no time for debate.
-
- "It has to stop," he said. "These monsters
are being created at such high velocity that you can't contain this fire.
If you try to contain it, it's going to blow up in your face. You need
to extinguish it right now."
-
- © Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
-
- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM
.20041204.wxmeth1204/BNStory/Front/
|
