Word: cranked
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Paula, 19, who has been clean for six months following a stay at Rimrock, remembers crank parties as surreal blendings of light and darkness, reality and dreams. "The sun goes up and down and you lose track, and pretty soon you're hearing laughs and whispers and seeing things dart around on the floor. Then the other people turn into monsters...
...such solitary crank use isn't the norm in Billings. Crank is a party drug here, a social thing, smoked, injected and snorted by tight-knit groups holed up in houses behind blacked-out windows, talking nonstop about their hopes and dreams and smoking a joint now and then or drinking a beer to mellow out the high...
Boyish, sardonic and stunningly intelligent, Paula, who has never been anywhere else, calls Billings the crank capital of the universe: "The people in my neighborhood all learned crank from their parents. I mostly hung out with 13- and 14-year-olds. It's getting younger and younger every year...
...Part of crank's appeal to Paula, and apparently to most users, is that it helped her get things done. It made her feel capable, on top of things. She could party into the wee hours (often having sex with virtual strangers because, as she puts it, once you've stayed up all night with someone, you feel pretty close to them), go to work the next day, then come home and clean her room. "I even started depending on it to go to school," she says...
Then came what Paula claims was a three-month-long, nearly sleepless crank run that left her homeless, expelled from school and seeing ghouls behind every tree. Crankers tend to exaggerate, but her memories of the streak have that patented methamphetamine exactitude. "I knew I had to get nutrition, so every day I had a pudding snack, an applesauce and a little carton of milk," she says...