In meth we trust

Make no mistake: Even casual users can attest that meth quickly becomes a horror-show drug. But it's also one that dovetails neatly with our current national mood. Each era gets the drug it deserves -- or seems to, after the fact, when viewed through the smeary lens of pop history. Hence Coleridge and the other 18th century Romantics with their laudanum visions; Rimbaud and Verlaine sipping absinthe in 19th century Paris; the acid-tinged 1960s; coke-amped 1980s and the 1990s' sunken-eyed, vampiric heroin chic.

Methamphetamine, a drug that embodies a Platonic ideal of paranoia, perfectly suits our national mood, when sleep-deprived employees are afraid to get off the treadmill of work for fear they'll fall even deeper into debt, and sexual titillation seems both omnipresent and joyless. The erotic vampires who populated pop culture in the late 1990s and early naughts have given way to zombies stumbling or wanking or fucking their way through the detritus of the early 21st century in recent films like "28 Days Later" and "Shaun of the Dead."

Owen does a masterly job of detailing the Drug Enforcement Administration's efforts to limit or prevent the sale of so-called precursor chemicals such as pseudoephedrine, used in meth manufacture. In the mid-1980s, the DEA's Gene Haislip had succeeded in nearly eliminating Quaaludes from America's recreational drug cabinet. Haislip's attempt to make ephedrine and pseudoephedrine regulated substances was nearly derailed by the pharmaceutical industry's lobby.

When the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act finally went into effect in 1989, its impact was muted. Like the mythical hydra, the meth industry almost immediately sprouted new and improved means of manufacture, through the Mexican drug cartels that wrested distribution from long-established U.S. sources such as the Hell's Angels. Factories as far away as India, Pakistan, China and the Czech Republic began shipping tons of ephedrine powder to facilities south of the U.S. border. Owen writes, "'The Mexicans do it so simply, so quickly, and their network is so mobile and tight that they can make meth today and have it sold in the Midwest tomorrow,' a top official from California's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement told the Los Angeles Times in 1995." Even more troubling, Mexican ice is rumored to be 98 percent pure, rather than the 20 percent to 80 percent found in most home-manufactured meth.

In his introduction to "No Speed Limit," Owen recounts his own experiences with the drug in the late 1980s: "For a writer, meth seemed like manna from heaven ... Writer's block? No big deal ... An impossible deadline to meet? Easy as pie. The drug banished any thought of sleep. Piles of boring research to plow through? Bring it on ... Meth, I managed to convince myself, was a valuable vocational aid, a tool of the trade like a good thesaurus or a supply of freshly sharpened pencils."

Owen's meth use was fortunately short-lived. But he has a disturbing coda toward the end of his book when he describes sampling Mexican ice. Despite his prior experience of the drug and journalist's detachment, he immediately and inexorably gets sucked into its hallucinatory maelstrom.

"Right from the first line, I could tell this was as different from the old biker meth I used to do as the biker meth was from the adulterated amphetamine sulfate of my teenage years." His experiment turns into a sleepless, five-day hallucination that involves wild sex with floating holograms and the appearance of FBI agents who accuse him of aiding terrorists. When he comes to, he muses that "the fantasy elements were so seamlessly intertwined with reality, I had spent the last four days living in a David Cronenberg movie and I couldn't tell the difference."

James Salant spent a longer time immersed in this nightmare, as detailed in "Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir." Salant, now 23, gives us a searing, sordid account of his 19th year, spent shooting and smoking meth and heroin in California, where the middle-class teenager from Princeton, N.J., had been sent to a rehab facility. "Leaving Dirty Jersey" recounts how its young author scored, stole, scammed and screwed his way through an increasingly desperate addiction, then managed to overcome it and write a book with the terrifying energy and harsh, overlit violence of a Tarantino movie.

Salant's prose sometimes bears the hallmarks of a tyro writer, but more often he nails the hellish tedium and despair of the addict: "I'd ... simply gotten worse at telling lies. This was inevitable, considering that believable, preferably true details are what sell a lie: a fabric of truths and easily-could-be truths woven from everyday experiences to support and hide the one thing that didn't actually happen. Which of course made telling lies nearly impossible for me, because, living on meth, I wasn't having any everyday experiences."

Salant's recovery feels excruciatingly hard won. Given the self-inflicted horrors he endured, one hopes to god he hangs onto it.

Not for the weak of heart or stomach, his memoir is a dirty bomb lobbed from the trenches of crank addiction. Owen's work, in contrast, is a report from the home front. Neither book suggests that this particular war is near over.

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