0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
IT'S BEEN A RECORD WINTER FOR SNOWFALL in Fargo, N.D. As spring settles in, the Red River is certain to swell, threatening the tidy homes and industrial shops that line its banks. But folks here will tell you that Fargo's streets are already flooded--with the drug methamphetamine--and more than a few lives have been washed away. Just last month, a meth addict who burned his house down while hallucinating, killing his own mother, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Cops say they grabbed nine meth dealers and $10,000 worth of powder at the C'mon Inn hotel, and a local pharmacist reported that someone had tried to buy 1,200 Sudafed tablets--presumably so he could melt them down to make the drug. Residents have been locking their doors since an elderly woman was shot to death by four teens on meth last year. Life on the prairie may never be the same.
Just two years ago, experts were warning that meth--known in its former life as speed--was making a comeback in California and the Southwest; today the drug has swept through much of the heartland, wreaking violence wherever it goes. In North Dakota, where meth cases have quadrupled since 1994, a Northeastern University study estimates that the teen murder rate jumped by 320 percent. Washington has bundled five other Midwestern states--Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas--into a ""high-intensity drug area,'' prompting Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House drug czar, to warn that meth may become ""the crack of the '90s.'' It has already replaced cocaine as the drug of choice in Atlanta and is gaining ground in Miami. ""If you think crack cocaine was a problem,'' says Jerald Kemmet, North Dakota's top drug agent, ""just wait until meth hits.''
It's an odd scenario: one of the nation's most unspoiled states, with a population smaller than the city of Baltimore's, lecturing the boys back East about the coming drug plague. But then, meth is an odd drug, appealing to a lot of rural, working-class men--and an unusually high number of women--whose hardest substance used to be a shooter at the local tavern. Known on the street as crank, meth first hit Fargo about five years ago. It is said to have come primarily from Mexican migrant workers with loose ties to drugrunners in California and Texas. In their cramped office above Strouper's Bar, the handful of state drug agents assigned to Fargo began to see meth cases double and then triple, along with mounting reports of stolen guns. Sensing an opening, gangs from Chicago and Minneapolis pushed in. Now many older residents in this city of 82,000 are afraid to walk after dark downtown, where the old theater still charges $5 for movies (including the Oscar-nominated ""Fargo''), and the Burlington Northern coal train runs along Main Avenue. Across the frozen Red River, in Clay County, Minn., crime is up 500 percent over five years. Larry Costello, the Clay County sheriff, says he was skeptical when federal agents first warned local officials that meth would change their lives. ""Right now,'' he says, ""I'm a true believer.''
Read More on News
As if the surface effects of crank weren't painful enough, the onslaught in Fargo opened an underlying ethnic chasm, too. Resentment toward the growing Mexican population burst into the open last year when four Mexican teens on meth were charged with shooting the elderly white nurse in her car. Says a female bartender at the local VFW: ""We had a nice little town until all these drugs and Hispanic people started coming in.'' The truth is that Fargo's crank market doesn't need any help from farm workers; nearly all of the people indicted by the state for meth trafficking, like their customers, are white. And while most of the raw materials still come from Mexican drug syndicates, an alarming amount of meth is now being made in local ""labs''--bathtubs and closets where anyone with a high-school knowledge of chemistry, and access to hundreds of recipes on the Internet, can cook up a batch himself. Meth labs are especially hard to shut down in states like North Dakota, where so many unassuming farmhouses lay scattered across the vast prairie that it would take Lewis and Clark to stake them all out. Labs that do get busted leave behind mini-toxic waste dumps; cleaning just one can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
'The ugliest drug': The social cost of the epidemic is likely to be even greater. Longer-acting and more addictive than coke, it was speed--with its tendency to unhinge--that helped bring the 1968 Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury to a crashing close. ""It's about the ugliest drug there is,'' says Mark A.R. Kleiman, a drug-policy expert at UCLA. It has nastier side effects than coke, plunging users into delusionary fits of extreme paranoia. (In 1995 a New Mexico meth user said he beheaded his 14-year-old son on a highway at the suggestion of imaginary voices.) And while crack dealers tend not to indulge in their product, crank dealers do, which makes them especially unpredictable. Not surprising- ly, the number of emergency-room visits related to the drug has already tripled nationwide and is expected to keep rising. Alarmed, General McCaffrey is now planning a second national conference on meth this May in Omaha, Neb. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has issued a law-enforcement strategy that includes tougher sentences for traffickers, and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America is at work on more meth ads along the lines of the old ""Speed Kills'' campaign.
It may already be too late, however, to contain the spread of crank. The latest surveys show that it's turning up as far east as Delaware and the Carolinas. Most experts predict that meth won't be able to grab hold in key cities like New York and Washington, but they may be missing the point. As people in Fargo found out, it's the small towns that are most vulnerable to meth--and there's no shortage of those back East. ""I don't think it's going to invade New York City,'' Kleiman says. ""But I can easily imagine the Adirondacks getting devastated by meth.'' If that happens, folks in the suburbs will know a lot more about life in Fargo than they ever could have learned from a movie.
Narcotics officers have found that methamphetamine, or crank, is getting a lot more common. The numbers:
North Dakots Meth undercovers purchases 1993 0 94 28 95 105 96 108
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines