Word: cranked
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Huddled on the ground against a wall, Justin and Kim, 24 and 18, scoff at Tom's pipe. They're bangers--they shoot their crank--and anyone who does different is crazy, they say. "We've been off it 11 days," says Justin. "I'm trying to get my tolerance back down so it won't take me so much to get spun out," he explains. As narcotics go, crank is famously cheap--a $20 bundle keeps you buzzing for up to 12 jaw-grinding, heart-pounding hours--but frequent users still have trouble affording it. For one thing, they...
...quit smoking the same way, by sucking on a crayon." Like so many other Billings geeters--yet one more slang term--Justin is a teller of wild tales. He shows off the sunken veins in his arms and describes how he once had to gaff his shot of crank--inject it straight into his jugular vein--while watching himself in a rearview mirror. "The jugular," he says, nodding earnestly, "the only vein in the body that won't roll over...
...That's what the others call him, and he answers to it. Trembling, high and radically withdrawn, Dracula refuses to speak a word, but he does show off an arm full of tattoos. The intricate, dense, almost abstract blue-green filigree seems to say, "This is your brain on crank." The next show-and-tell item is the eyeglass case in which Dracula keeps his syringe and razor blade. The case's interior is obsessively decoupaged with tiny, interlocking pictures snipped from magazines...
Across town, at a table in the modest apartment where she supposes she'll have to go on living until she finds a job, Alicia is quitting crank. Once an upwardly mobile employee of a FORTUNE 500 company based in a large Southwestern city, Alicia is in her mid-30s but looks 50. Her face is pocked and pitted from her attempts to pick out the crystals of methamphetamine that, she swears, used to form under her skin. Alicia moved to Montana several years ago in hopes of escaping the bigger city's crank scene. She says the subcutaneous crystals...
Right now, however, she's lighting one last pipeful in a ritual as intricate as a Japanese tea ceremony. She ignites a propane torch and holds the blue flame beneath the smudge of powder in her clear glass pipe. Crank is smoked differently than crack cocaine; it takes less heat and melts instantly (burning away the impurities, Alicia says). Once the drug vaporizes in a white cloud, Alicia inhales. She then repeats the process. The residues in the pipe, called frosties, are infinitely valuable to crankers, and Alicia keeps torching them until they're gone...