Spun out: Methamphetamine epidemic hits Mat-Su

Imagine staying awake for weeks on end, mostly indoors, peering out curtained windows and closed blinds when the paranoia sets in. Imagine not eating, or eating very little, feeding your body a chemical soup of cleaning products and cold medicines cooked down to crystals in someone else's basement. Imagine five or six people huddled in a dark apartment for days and days, talking excitedly, cleaning, planning, taking things apart, pacing, itching, going nowhere,

wasting away.

Imagine you are addicted to methamphetamine.

For a growing number of Valley residents, meth addiction is anything but imaginary. As local police and Alaska State Troopers continue to discover more meth labs every year and arrest more Valley 20-somethings for meth production and possession than ever before, a meth epidemic in the Mat-Su is fast becoming a grim reality.

In recent years Mat-Su's problem with methamphetamine has become increasingly apparent. In 2003, nearly half the meth labs seized statewide were found in the Valley. This year, with 39 labs discovered already, the Mat-Su Drug Unit expects its share will be well over half the state's total.

"There's been an explosion in the number of labs we've found over the last five years," Sgt. Patrick Davis said. "The trend is climbing at an alarming rate."

Davis describes Mat-Su's meth underworld as a cancer -- a loose network of cells consisting of small groups scattered throughout the Valley. The groups make, use and sell methamphetamine, Davis said, but they only make and sell enough to sustain their addiction and perpetuate the process.

A "family" of tweakers

Jennifer first tried methamphetamine when she was 16. She began taking it occasionally, whenever she was hired to clean someone's house; she says it helped her work faster, it helped her make more money.

But meth gradually became a habit, and then, much more quickly, it became a way of life.

Over the last seven years Jennifer has used meth on and off, going through periods of heavy, prolonged use. She is 23 now and says she will never do meth again; she feels lucky to be alive.

Jennifer, who requested her last name not be used, is trying to regain custody of her son and set her life in order. She has been clean and sober since March 28, 2004 -- the day the state took her son away.

"When the troopers came and took him, everyone felt really bad and they wanted to do some [meth]," Jennifer said. "But that's when I realized I had to stop. I realized it had gone way too far."

Losing her 2-year-old son jolted Jennifer out of a meth underworld in which she had been deeply involved for seven months.

She describes being part of a group of "tweakers" who stayed in or near a certain meth cook's house in Anchorage. About a half-dozen people were there at any given time, sitting around with the windows and doors locked, the shades drawn tight, first cooking and then smoking or snorting meth.

The house had a curfew; if you left after 9 p.m. you were not allowed to come back until the next day. If you made a scene or left loudly, you weren't allowed to come back at all.

Jennifer says the cook took care of them. He regulated their doses of meth, told them when they'd had enough and told them when to eat and sleep. They, in turn, looked up to him and saw him as a leader or a big-brother type.

They were his "runners," their job was to go to different stores, buy ingredients, bring them back and assist in the cooking process. Sometimes they would go out and sell meth or do other errands. Cooks are generally paranoid, Jennifer says; her cook never wanted to leave the house.

The house itself was a bizarre world Jennifer describes as both mellow and paranoid. She remembers one stretch where she stayed awake on meth for three and a half weeks at the house. There are other periods of time she can't remember, days and days of blank spots in her memory.

"When you're doing it you think you're having a blast, you think you're having the time of your life. But you're not," Jennifer said. "We talked about going out and doing stuff, but when it came down to it we were too paranoid to go anywhere. I can't even remember what we did."

What they didn't do was sleep very often.

Methamphetamine is a potent combination of store-bought items. The main component is ephedrine, the active ingredient in cold and allergy pills. Pure ephedrine is extracted from the pills through a process that involves lithium batteries, starter fluid, rock salt, red phosphorus, coffee filters, acetone, muriatic acid, Red Devil Lye, Xylol, aluminum foil and assorted kitchen glassware.

Snorting a small line can keep a person up for days. Jennifer remembers doing a line a half-inch long once, the width of a needle; she was up four days.

The tweaker life became all-consuming for Jennifer. She and her friends would use any excuse to get high -- a bad day at work, a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend, or maybe just driving through heavy traffic.

Over the months Jennifer lost track of time. When you are high on meth, Jennifer says, time slows down. On one occasion she dropped her son off at a relative's house and went to visit her cook in Anchorage. She was only planning to be gone for the weekend. She was gone for two weeks.

Nowadays Jennifer has no contact with her former "meth family." She says she wants to leave behind that world forever, including the paranoid ways of thinking and behaving associated with it.

"To this day I can't just peek out the blinds, I have to open them up all the way," Jennifer said. "I don't want to do things the way I did them when I was tweaking. I know where I am in my life now and I know I'll never do [meth] again."

Paranoia is a near-constant state of mind for a chronic meth user. Jennifer said her friends would sometimes freak out and imagine there were cops in the woods with sniper rifles trained on them, or they would see a plane flying over the flats and think it was tracking them while they drove back to the Valley from Anchorage.

Some of her friends suffered from the delusional sensation of bugs crawling under their skin -- "crank bugs," they called them -- which causes people to scratch their skin raw. Jennifer, although she never felt crank bugs under her skin, would pick at her fingers until she had sores.

But Jennifer is in the process of turning her life around. For the past five months she has been in a recovery program. After completing her treatment, she will have a hearing about regaining custody of her son, who now lives with his grandmother.

Still, for Jennifer, there are occasional reminders of the meth life. She gets phone calls every now and then from friends who are still users. She says they don't make sense anymore; now that she is sober she can't really talk to them about anything, there is no common ground.

Four out of every 10 people Jennifer knows have "spun out," or used meth regularly in the past. Six out of 10 people she knows have tried it at least once.

Off the top of her head, Jennifer can think of at least eight meth labs in her corner of the Valley. Every one of those labs has about a dozen people connected to it, sometimes more. Jennifer thinks those numbers have been steadily growing since she first tried meth seven years ago, and first-time users are getting younger.

"I had a 13-year-old ask for it one time and I just about flipped out," Jennifer said. "But how could I tell him not to do it when I was doing it? You can't say you're not old enough, because no one's old enough."

Although it started as an occasional thrill, using meth gradually became a way of life for Jennifer and her friends. She said it was like walking into a room where everyone is smoking a cigarette, only everyone's doing meth, so it was just the thing to do.

"But it will kill you," Jennifer said. "And you can quit, you just have to leave everyone you know who's involved with it, and that's the hardest part. You think they're like family, but they're not, they're not really there for you. The people who are there for you are the ones telling you to stop."

Living hell

For those who don't stop, meth becomes increasingly dangerous and tends, over time, to produce paranoia and psychotic behavior. As a general rule, the more a person uses methamphetamine, the more dangerous they become.

Darin Jones knows firsthand the dangers of heavy, long-term meth use.

Two years ago Jones was convicted of second-degree murder for fatally shooting his best friend, Shane Rogers, on Aug. 25, 2000. At the time of the shooting, Jones and Rogers had been making and taking meth for weeks.

Police records of Jones' arrest and interrogation reveal a bizarre sequence of events that led to Rogers' death near Sutton.

When investigators questioned Jones the day after the shooting, he said they were smoking and snorting lines of meth as they drove from Anchorage to Palmer to attend the Alaska State Fair. As they drove, Jones became convinced that Rogers was poisoning him, "by some kind of gun powder," or red phosphorus in the meth. He told police he felt his "brain melting," and "fire in his back."

The men argued as they drove. There was a Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun on the console that Jones picked up at one point. Jones told authorities that Rogers grabbed the gun and it went off. The bullet passed through Rogers' T-shirt from left to right on the front -- without even scratching him -- and shattered the passenger-side front window.

The gun, according to Jones, then "went off" a second time, with that bullet perforating Rogers' aorta. Jones dumped Rogers' body off the side of the road near Sutton and drove back to Anchorage, where he ran out of gas.

Jones left the car in the middle of a road with the lights on, his driver's license on the driver's seat and Shane Rogers' wallet and identification on the passenger seat, on top of broken glass and blood.

During questioning, Jones seemed disoriented and said several times, "Shane is not dead." Jones told police the meth was making him hallucinate and he thought there was someone else in the car with them at the time.

At one point in the questioning, Jones wondered out loud why they were asking him questions, saying, "You were there, weren't you?"

In a telephone interview from Spring Creek Correctional Center, a maximum-security state prison in Seward where he is serving a 25-year sentence for second-degree murder, Jones set Rogers' death in a broader context.

Jones said he and Rogers had spent nearly two weeks cooking meth in a small room in Anchorage before they set out for Palmer that day. They were awake, on meth, the entire time.

"We were so high we should've been dead from overexposure to the chemicals," Jones said. "When you're in the same room where that stuff is being cooked, you have no idea how intense it is, it's just a cloud of gas, it attacks your body from every direction."

Jones said he was "tripping out," hallucinating and seeing things that day. He said Rogers was flicking red phosphorus at his eyes, he didn't know why, and things got out of control.

"I didn't realize I was so out of it," Jones said. "I didn't think I had that much in my system."

Although Jones says he had taken meth for 15 years, on and off, the weeks before the shooting when he and Rogers were cooking up meth in a small room together were the first time he had ever been around when meth was being cooked. Jones says they were not making a lot of meth, just enough to keep them high.

"The whole thing was crazy. My life is a living hell now," Jones said. "Meth was the only drug I ever really did, and the only reason I did it was because I worked a lot of hours driving trucks. I was an addict, and when you're an addict you find your sources and keep them close."

In Jones' case, his source was Rogers, and like the myriad "meth families" scattered and hiding throughout the Valley, he kept his source extremely close, perhaps too close.

"He was my best friend," Jones said. "My best friend is dead now. It was devastating, and it was all over a piece of sh*t called methamphetamine."

This is the first installment of a three-part series exploring the rise of methamphetamine in the Mat-Su.

Contact John Davidson at john.davidson@frontiersman.com.