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Next come the makings for amateur bombs: jars of gunpowder, lengths of pipe and a homemade blasting cap fashioned from fuse cord and a rifle shell. Given crank's capacity for rendering even casual users clinically psychotic (the transparent spiders weave webs inside the brain long after the meth has left one's system), the arsenal is probably unnecessary, real weapons amassed for a figmentary showdown.
Marijuana and cocaine were this city's illegal substances of choice until about four years ago, when a blizzard of crank swept in. "It's pretty much all we deal with now," says Sergeant Tim O'Connell, who heads the city's multiagency drug task force. For law enforcers, methamphetamine is a tough drug to pin down. It's sold hand to hand behind closed doors, in homes and motel rooms, in the style of a Tupperware party. Worse, its production requires little overhead. Ephedrine, an over-the-counter cold medication, can be combined with a shopping list of chemicals easily obtained from stores and industrial-supply companies (common drain cleaners figure in some formulas) and cooked in a kitchen sink from recipes downloaded from the Internet. Billings cops call these homely setups "Beavis and Butt-head labs."
Why crank? And why now? The crank epidemic is new enough, and its mostly white, often rural victims quiet enough, that those questions are just starting to be asked. "The current culture is 'Keep going, keep moving and do it all.' That would be the initial draw, I think," says Nancy Waite-O'Brien, Ph.D., director of psychological services at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Add to this the wannabe-supermodel factor. "Women," observes Waite-O'Brien, "get into meth because they think it will manage weight. Which I suppose it sometimes does--at first."
American drug warriors, welcome to your nightmare--a do-it-yourself guerrilla narcotic spread by paranoid insomniacs who think they see federal agents through every keyhole, even when it's just the Domino's Pizza man. In cities large and small across the West and Midwest crank belt, from Oregon to Iowa, where the drug is known as the poor man's cocaine in towns that barely had cocaine in the first place, the drug arrives nonstop from every direction and by every imaginable route. Wrapped by the ounce and the pound in duct-tape eggs that can be stashed in the air vent of a car, crank comes up the interstate from California and Mexico, where it's produced in massive quantities by organized criminal gangs.
Sometimes it even comes by UPS. In one of Billings' biggest recent crank seizures, O'Connell, wearing the company's brown uniform, intercepted a 5-lb. package at the UPS warehouse one morning (street value: a quarter of a million dollars) and delivered it to the address on the label. The men who answered the doorbell were arrested. Dennis Paxinos, the Yellowstone County attorney, requested that the men's bail be set at $250,000, but the judge involved reduced the sum to a mere $1,000. Paxinos publicly called the decision "asinine." Within a few hours of his release, one of the suspects was back in jail on another charge.