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Dark Crystals:
Alex Wukmans's third and final installment in his examination of Meth-Amphetamine use in Houston.
By Alex Wukman

Act 1: Chris: the Student Addict

"What's in this bag will keep you up for a month." says Chris as he reaches across a stack of dirty laundry to grab a bulging white paper sack that rattles with pills. Chris was diagnosed with A.D.D. which is why he does a lot of speed.
"Check this out." he says as he jumps up and over the cluttered coffee table and onto his unmade bed. "Now where is It?" he says as he runs a hand through his long blonde hair. "I know I saw it over here.". He lies down and digs along the side of the wall. "Aha!" He throws me a pill bottle.
"Read the label." he says as he picks his way past the piles of clean and dirty laundry. The label reads:

Amphetamine 20 mg. Take one pill every six hours.

He chuckles and says "The doctors tell me that this is different than what's sold on the street. Man if they don't check the box on the prescription saying do not substitute you get just basic amphetamines.".
Chris isn't your run of the mill speed freak. He's special. He just might be a genius. In high school, he'd sleep through calculus. Once when the teacher wanted to prove a point, she woke him up and asked him to solve the equation on the board. He looked at the board and said"Two."
The whole class burst out laughing. The teacher, in an attempt to humor him, silenced the class and then worked the problem. It took her fifteen minutes and the whole black board. As she got further into the equation, her writing became slower and more unsure. You could see the disbelief in her as she wrote the two on the blackboard.
Everyone in the class room-football players, cheerleaders, wannabe cowboys and the teacher-all turned and looked at this skinny, pale, longhaired, acid head in black jeans, and worn Nine Inch Nails t-shirt.
He just raised his hand and asked if he could go back to sleep. The teacher shook her head and said go ahead. That was senior year; after he graduated he was admitted to Oklahoma State University with a declared major in mathematics. He didn't make it a whole year without changing his major.
"I changed from math to economics when I kind of got stuck on one." he says as he packs a bowl. "When I moved up there, I didn't know anybody and the girl I got along with best ran the biggest meth lab in the state." He kind of chuckles as he fires up the pipe.
"We had a lot of the same experiences."he says as he draws the gray smoke into his lungs. He holds it and exhales: "So around Halloween, I was at a party and I figured that if something is designed with 'e', the transcendental decimal, it is appealing to the eye. Man likes order. Therefore there has to be a pattern in 'e'." He passes the pipe. "So I wound up staying up three weeks trying to find that pattern. I didn't have a computer, so I was doing all the computing by hand on notebook paper. Towards the end, I could just see the answers to equations people would bring me in their math homework-I mean seniors-and I'd just crank it out. I was doing a lot of speed then."

Hey, maybe speed isn't the worst thing ever devised by mankind? I mean, if it helps a person think more clearly and stay up for three weeks trying to find a repeating pattern in a transcendental decimal by hand it can't be all that bad, can it?

Act 2: Mothers and 'Collateral Damage'

"I mortgaged my house for $90,000 to put my son in rehab. He's been hospitalized 30 times in the past year alone and he's stolen everything worth anything from me-money, jewelry-and bought drugs with it," Margaret says as she finishes up her 6 p.m. Margaret is a stylist. She runs a Montrose hair salon over on Morse and her son is the street kid named John that was interviewed in the first part of this series.
"It not only destroys the user, it destroys the family." calls Jean from the kitchen. Jean walks out and sits down on the couch. "Did you tell him about the mortgage? She's losing her house because she tried to help her son. I had two sons who were addicted. One went through 22 rehabs since he was 14. He's 31 now but it finally worked."
Margaret starts layering her 6 p.m. appointment's hair. "My other son was destroyed by watching his brother get drawn into drug addiction. He used to be a real happy and active kid. Into skateboarding, bike riding, videogames. Now he doesn't want to do anything."
Jean walks into the back to get shoes. She comes back with a pair of bright pink Tiva sandals and sits on the couch. "When they get out of rehab, the parent and all the family members believe when the addict says that he wants to change," she says as she slides one of her feet out of her flats and starts working it into the sandal. "But in a month's time, they're back on the drugs."
Margaret stops cutting for a moment. "I wish you could have known John before he got on meth. He was so smart; such a wonderful musician and he made the prettiest artwork. It ate his soul."
Jean starts to slide her other foot into its pink sandal. "We don't need to put these kids in jail. We need to hospitalize them. There's a help line for AIDS, teen runaways, suicide; but what about our young drug addicts?"
Margaret turns on the blow dryer. "The only thing to stop this is state funded long term rehab."
Jean tightens the straps on her sandals. "They had the money to build Reliant stadium and the Toyota center but didn't have the money to fund rehab? It's all sports, sports, sports but let's close our eyes to these young people dying."

Act 3: Our Mayor Bill White; The Proverbial Buck-Passer

"This is a state and federal matter. Not just a city matter," says Mayor White. He's standing before a crowd of about three hundred people at the Midtown civic center-the building that looks like a YMCA on West Gray. It's a town hall meeting to discuss teen homelessness and "Stop the Enablers" as the flyer so eloquently describes Interfaith Ministries and Covenant House.
The mayor has put in his required forty minutes and now he's leaving. But before he goes he wants us to know that "I'm always available to talk to members of the community. I read every e-mail and letter sent to me. I spend about fifteen hours out of a forty hour work week just answering e-mails. You can always call my office."
He's put away his trademark sheepish grin for a look of exasperation, "We are working on the problem. You may not see results right away, but that's because the investigations are undercover. Just let me assure you we are working on it."
City Council Member Ada Edwards has some words for us as well. She wants us to know that District D, her district, "starts in Montrose and stretches all the way to Missouri City. It covers 144 square miles, roughly the same size as the city of Atlanta."

All the non-profits want to assure us that they are doing the Lord's work, and they're successful. One of them-Montrose Street Reach I think is who the speaker said she worked for-proudly tells the assembled crowd of home owners and civic association members that "we have taken 150 teenagers off the street and put them in recognized programs."
The homeowners don't think it's enough. They want action. They even have a list of demands. It's fairly straight-forward. Out of fourteen points two are on litter; two on waste receptacles; two on communication between the 'service providers' and the homeowners; four mention service providers signing 'a good neighbor agreement' and that the homeowners be able to enforce such an agreement, and if the service providers aren't in compliance with this 'good neighbor agreement' they will essentially be shut down. Then there is the one on the police enforcing the loitering law/ordinance and the last one is about enforcing the health code at the facilities that provide food and shelter.
Nowhere does it mention drugs. No one who spoke at the meeting mentioned drugs either, but we can rest easy at night now that Covenant House will be required to pick up all trash in a three block radius. I'm sure the employees of Burger King, Taco Cabana and Diamond Shamrock will appreciate this.
Not a mention of speed or meth. Mayor White avoids it. No one uses the word meth. Ada Edwards avoids it. No one says tweak, twack, crystal or glass. The homeowners and the civic associations avoid it. No one mentions the kids bangin' meth behind the record store. None of the speakers bring up the fact that anyone can go score a bag inside of two blocks. No one talks about something the D.E.A. considers to be an epidemic.