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Farther south, crank has decimated the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, populated by descendants of the warriors who routed Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. "Crank will do to the reservations what Custer couldn't," says Bonnie Pipe, clinical director of a tribal recovery center in the town of Lame Deer. When James Walksalong, chairman of the local school board, brought in a team of drug-sniffing dogs last year, kids climbed out of classroom windows, and by the end of the day the dogs had detected 30 instances of drug residue. On reservations throughout Montana and Wyoming, the drug has led to increased domestic abuse, a flurry of audacious daylight burglaries and overloaded medical facilities.
David Morales, a truant officer for Billings School District 2 and a recovering addict, deals with the meth problem too often in the form of 10- and 11-year-olds either on the drug or suffering abuse at the hands of spun-out relatives. "I call them the ghost children," he says. "I see them all the time."
Recently Morales called into his office a beautiful little six-year-old girl who had been missing a lot of school. "I asked her if she needed an alarm clock to help her wake up on time," he recalls, "and all of a sudden she breaks down crying." It seems that under the nose of her allegedly crank-addicted mother, the girl had been raped repeatedly by a teenage relative, a sadistic sort given to dousing his hands in fingernail-polish remover, setting them aflame and then blowing out the fire before he was burned. He warned the girl that he would ignite her if she spoke out. Morales tells of another girl, 11, whose meth-crazed mother prostituted her for a onetime windfall of $360. The girl thought this was normal life, Morales says. Mom needed the money.
The E.R. doctors at Deaconess Billings clinic have their own ugly tales to tell. The crank casualties who appear in the E.R. break down into three basic types, according to Dr. Larry McEvoy, who heads the emergency-medicine department: "First there's the 'I've hit bottom' presentation. They've used for 10 days, haven't eaten or slept and have run out of drugs. They're wiped out, feel heavy and can hardly move. Type 2 is the acute public-disturbance person. They start fighting with people or screaming in the street. Often they're impossible to interview because they're so paranoid. Third are people who use crank a lot and notice that their arms are numb or they're having trouble breathing."
McEvoy has seen a radical increase in all three types: "The amounts we see are overwhelming. As a physician, I regard it as the worst possible drug. It really burns people out." And it can do so almost instantly, in McEvoy's experience.
"One night a boy came in so out of control he thought I was the police and the police were trying to kill or kidnap him. He was incredibly violent--biting, slapping, grabbing doctors' private parts. We got hold of his folks and found out he's usually a good student. Even if he does this only once every two years, given his psychotic reaction to the drug, he could end up killing someone.