Word: cranks
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...over Billings (pop. 91,000), the scrappy hub city of the northwestern Great Plains, home to oil refineries, regional medical centers and countless smoke-filled fistfight barrooms where cowboys from Wyoming to South Dakota come for some urban R. and R., people are losing everything to crank--their families, their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts and, perhaps irretrievably, their minds. The potent, man-made stimulant--invented 80 years ago in Japan, issued to soldiers in World War II, prescribed to chunky housewives in the '50s, known to '60s hippies as speed and now sometimes passed out to antsy third...
This isn't the carefully calibrated dose of methamphetamine dispensed by pharmacists in pill form. This is crank--smoked, snorted or injected--and it makes people live like coyotes, says a cop standing outside a south-side Billings bungalow while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration toss the place for drugs. "This town is coming unhinged," another cop says. As if to prove their point, the suspected crank house whose street-side picture windows are sheathed with tinfoil (sunlight is the cranker's natural enemy) starts belching evidence of criminal lunacy--hypodermic needles clogged with meth, automatic pistols of several...
...perched at the bar of a downtown dance club where her dealer boyfriend ditched her ages ago with just $4 for drinks, Jennifer scratches at her wrists and elbows; her eyes dart from pool table to door; and her butt compulsively scoots around inside her baggy jeans. Crank kills the appetite, just wipes it out, and while many women she knows view this as a selling point, Jennifer doesn't want to lose more weight. Hoping to supplement the child-support check that turns to drugs the day it hits her mailbox, she'd applied...
...This drug makes you lose everything," she says, gulping a shot of bourbon and root-beer schnapps to calm her freaking neurotransmitters. "I'm not afraid, though. I've cranked for seven years," Jennifer says. (Her name has been changed by TIME, as have the names and various identifying details of other crank users cited.) "I'm getting pretty used to losing everything...
Next come the makings for amateur bombs: jars of gunpowder, lengths of pipe and a homemade blasting cap fashioned from fuse cord and a rifle shell. Given crank's capacity for rendering even casual users clinically psychotic (the transparent spiders weave webs inside the brain long after the meth has left one's system), the arsenal is probably unnecessary, real weapons amassed for a figmentary showdown...