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A lot of Billings crank has to travel no farther than across the street, from the apartment building where it's made to the tavern or motel room where it's sold. So pervasive is this bathtub crank that a Billings teenager trying to kick drugs had to quit her job as a hotel maid because she was constantly finding traces of meth in the bathrooms she cleaned. While on assignment for this story, TIME's writer and photographer watched from the lobby of their motel as a notorious Billings crank dealer, facing state charges at the time, received a steady stream of predawn customers in a room directly across the courtyard. ("You know he's in," the night clerk said, "when the phone lines all light up at once.") Approached for an interview about his trade, the wanted man, a tattooed giant on a bed surrounded by a clutch of weary party girls, merely said, "I'm busy. I don't have time now." Last week the alleged dealer was arrested in another Billings motel in a raid that netted several ounces of what police identified as meth. Said a motel employee about her fugitive lodger: "The only problem is that when he leaves, the mirrors in his room are always broken and all the light bulbs are missing." (Lokers without a pipe at hand typically smoke crank from a broken light bulb.)
"How are you going to cut off the supply of something you can produce at home?" asks Mona Sumner, chief operations officer of the Rimrock Foundation, Billings' (and Montana's) largest drug-rehab facility. Sumner, in her 30 years at Rimrock, has seen many a drug craze come and go, but she has never felt this frightened or frustrated. Crank admissions to her facility have tripled in the past four years.
Crank is too cheap, too available and too addictive, Sumner says. "Honestly, I don't know where it's going." The crankers who show up at the clinic require, on average, four weeks of detox, often with the use of antipsychotic drugs, before the counselors can even get through to them. On a wall in the Rimrock recreation room hangs a homemade poster showing a medevac helicopter like those that land at nearby St. Vincent Hospital. The poster is intended to reassure paranoid recovering crankers, but many are so unstrung that they fear the helicopter is after them.
Delusions about sinister aircraft are among the milder symptoms of the Billings area's mounting crank plague. East on Interstate 90, in the town of Livingston, the body of a young woman, Angela Brown, was found rotting in a river, and local law-enforcement officials are investigating a Billings meth connection. A few months earlier, south of Billings, in Hardin, an admittedly cranked-out 17-year-old, Jonathan Wayne Vandersloot, whose head hadn't touched a pillow in days, allegedly shot dead his sleeping grandparents, scooped up some jewelry, guns and cash, and took off in their pickup. Vandersloot's first trial ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors plan to retry him this fall.