It's a full-moon Friday night, and Jennifer, 25, a hard-core loker (smoker of methamphetamine, known as crank) has been wide awake around the clock for almost four days. She isn't yet seeing plastic people, shadow men or transparent spiders--just three of the fabled hallucinations of the Billings, Mont., crank scene, a hyperstimulated subculture sickeningly rich in slang and folklore. But she is feeling pangs of remorse about her three-year-old. On Monday, when she left her parents' house, where she has been living since dropping out of college, she promised the daughter she calls "my angel" that Mommy would be right back. Sadly, though, crank squeezes time like an accordion, and since Jennifer swore her solemn maternal oath, approximately 100 hours have passed in a sleepless, virtually food-free blur of hurried parking-lot drug deals, marathon bouts at the video poker machine and frantic cigarette runs to the mini-mart.
Now, perched at the bar of a downtown dance club where her dealer boyfriend ditched her ages ago with just $4 for drinks, Jennifer scratches at her wrists and elbows; her eyes dart from pool table to door; and her butt compulsively scoots around inside her baggy jeans. Crank kills the appetite, just wipes it out, and while many women she knows view this as a selling point, Jennifer doesn't want to lose more weight. Hoping to supplement the child-support check that turns to drugs the day it hits her mailbox, she'd applied for a job as a cocktail waitress, but her meth-shrunken breasts didn't fill the skimpy costume.
"This drug makes you lose everything," she says, gulping a shot of bourbon and root-beer schnapps to calm her freaking neurotransmitters. "I'm not afraid, though. I've cranked for seven years," Jennifer says. (Her name has been changed by TIME, as have the names and various identifying details of other crank users cited.) "I'm getting pretty used to losing everything."
All over Billings (pop. 91,000), the scrappy hub city of the northwestern Great Plains, home to oil refineries, regional medical centers and countless smoke-filled fistfight barrooms where cowboys from Wyoming to South Dakota come for some urban R. and R., people are losing everything to crank--their families, their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts and, perhaps irretrievably, their minds. The potent, man-made stimulant--invented 80 years ago in Japan, issued to soldiers in World War II, prescribed to chunky housewives in the '50s, known to '60s hippies as speed and now sometimes passed out to antsy third-graders with attention-deficit disorder--is, at least in its crumbly, powdered street form, an upper that leads straight down.
This isn't the carefully calibrated dose of methamphetamine dispensed by pharmacists in pill form. This is crank--smoked, snorted or injected--and it makes people live like coyotes, says a cop standing outside a south-side Billings bungalow while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration toss the place for drugs. "This town is coming unhinged," another cop says. As if to prove their point, the suspected crank house whose street-side picture windows are sheathed with tinfoil (sunlight is the cranker's natural enemy) starts belching evidence of criminal lunacy--hypodermic needles clogged with meth, automatic pistols of several calibers and an AK-47 with a loaded 100-round clip.