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Wary eyes have been watching cars below wind up the dirt road and turn off to a ramshackle pig farm in the next ravine. Finally a Cadillac with four men inside bumps along the track. The presence of guards at a pig farm, waving visitors through, confirms the group's suspicion that a batch was brewing, its odor lost in the waft from the barns. "Don't ask me; it's not mine," Big John says. "That's a bunch of Mexican nationals down there, and I'm not of a mind to visit."
Danger is integral to the booming crank business, especially in the retailing end, where double crosses are as much a threat as arrest. In a far different territory from the backcountry rendezvous, Surfer Jim, a jobber of the Product, sits in a car in his sales district near glossy Newport Beach, Calif. Just back from a cruise to Jamaica with his wife, the tanned 26-year- old has been thinking things over. "I'm second generation in this, you know, and I don't want my kids to be the third." He jiggles a foot and flops one go-ahead from his toes as he talks. "I'm out. I've never been arrested, and I've never used speed; you can't do that and survive what I do. But you really get an adrenaline rush from doing this sort of thing, and I'm an adrenaline junkie. If I wanted to keep on, I could make it big; I could make a couple million dollars."
A sudden segue: "They shot my father, you know, some people that were going to rob us, and he died in my arms. My brothers got out of it then; they were scared. I was too, but it kind of made me a little crazier at the time. I used a gun more quickly; I wasn't as slow to think it out. I'd just react, which is the way you got to be in this business, you know what I mean?" The stare is direct. "That's one reason I'm getting out, because I've got my kids, and I think about things and don't react the way I used to, and that isn't good in this business. When you're doing it big, you've got to act crazy. A guy is not going to pay you if he don't think you're the kind of guy going to come and stick a gun in his head and say, 'Hey, mother, I'm going to kill you right now.' You understand? You got to act crazy so people don't get over on you, so they think you'll come and kill them and their mother and their kids."
The pale gray eyes ask for empathy. "See, I don't have that in me anymore. When my dad got killed, you know, I could stick a gun in somebody's head and not shake and think about it. I can't do that anymore, so I'm getting out. I've got money put aside. I'm out."
Larry Bruce, the extraordinary dope lawyer, believes few retire voluntarily. "Some make it out," he says, "but this crank business is getting bigger. It's no longer limited to the backwoods, bikers and interstate truckers. It seems to me that I'm seeing as many arrests for possession of meth as for cocaine, and my user clients caught with meth are frequently young professionals and students. The business may be terrible -- it is terrible -- but you're looking at capitalism in action here. I wonder if it may be building toward critical mass."