S1:EP1: The 33: Methamphetamine: A Love Story

[MUSIC PLAYING] Methamphetamine abuse is exploding across rural America. We're talking today about a scourge. That is going across this country, which is called crystal meth. There were times that I went to bed starving at that. I mean, there were literally nights I would cry myself to sleep, because I was so hungry. I took the 9mm and stuck it in my mouth and fired. These are the stories of those who had a relationship with one of the most addictive drugs ever known to law enforcement. Methamphetamine. Known on the streets as meth crystal rock, jib, crank, ice, and many other names, it's a drug that has paved a road of devastation in the millions of dollars and in lives. Metham's cheaper. It's pure. It's widely available and is devastating people. Transcribed from 33 interviews, Professor and author Dr. Rache Shukla delved into the meth culture in Oklahoma for an exhausting and arduous four years. I really was not prepared for what I was getting into. And from the very first interview, I knew that I didn't know very much. Hi, I'm your host, Dr. David Nelson, a professor at the University of Central Oklahoma in the Department of Mass Communication. The stories in the podcast can be difficult to listen to, but have a raw essence to them that provide a look into the lives of methodics, dealers, and manufacturers. Welcome to episode one of the podcast, The 33. I like to welcome Dr. Rache Shukla, Professor criminal justice at the University of Central local home and author of the book of Discussion. Methamphetamine, I love story. She published it through the University of California Press. So over the next several weeks, this podcast will take a deep look into this dark world, she uncovered, and her interviews related to addiction, deline, and manufacturing of meth. Today, we will look closely at the background to the book's evolution, discuss the attempts by the Oklahoma legislation and law enforcement to bring awareness to the meth problems in our state, and a very close look at the 33 people who shared their stories of addiction to meth. And a lot of what I have done and continue to do are things that basically just haunt me. And I seek answers to things that I need to find out so that we can understand so we can do better. What was it that drew you to this subject matter? Well, I showed up in 2004 in Oklahoma as a brand new assistant professor here at the University of Central Oklahoma. And I was looking for something to study. And I was looking around and a couple of weird things happened that got me interested in this. I, though I had done all my research on focused on drugs and drug policy and my graduate studies, I came out of grad school not knowing anything about meth andphetamine and what it was. And what it was, as we were at the height of the meth lab problem, law enforcement was basically in crisis trying to respond to these meth labs. There were fires, explosions, child endangerment, and there was a series of events that happened that got me to kind of get interested in it. One of the first things that happened is when somebody found out that I had been a drug researcher and I came back to Oklahoma, I met this man and he handed me this folded up piece of paper and I actually still have it. And it was kind of rusted looking. And when I unfolded it, it was a recipe but it didn't have natural ingredients on it. And it was his actual recipe for how he made meth. And he was handing it to me as his way of trying to tell me about it and also to get out of the lifestyle. Around the same time, I also became introduced to some drug agents with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs so that I could start learning more about this drug that seemed to be a huge issue that no one could really understand and know how to respond to. And so over time working with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to learn about it, I kind of came to this realization that we didn't really understand what was happening and why. And so that's what led me on the search and it would take me a number of years to get to the point where I would actually start designing and trying to do a study where I said, who will have the answers that we're looking for in terms of why people are not only using meth, but why are people involved in this dangerous activity where they're engaged in behaviors where they're putting their own lives at risk. They're putting their children at risk. Sometimes people get burned, their fingers might come out. They could die in their meth labs as well. And law enforcement are also putting themselves on the front lines of this danger. So that's kind of how it started. It was just the number one issue that was kind of the elephant in the room that no one could really understand even though all response efforts were dealing with it. And so that's how I got started. And that's what led me to eventually design a study to say who has the answers we're looking for. And the answers are within the people that are involved in the behavior. At that time, that was pre-breaking bad. - This is arts, Mr. White? - Actually, it's just basic chemistry, but thank you, Jesse, and I'm glad it's acceptable. - So meth wasn't even on the national radar screen. And so I designed a study with the help of my research assistants to come up with as many questions as we could about using, dealing, and cooking meth without knowing really anything about it. And then it was a big process of trying to figure out how do we get to find people. Because I did not want to do something where I would find people in a prison or a jail, you know, a population that's a captive population. And so I wanted to find people where they were in the community across the state of Oklahoma. And so we designed the study to basically find people and look for people across the state. And that's kind of what we did. And it took me four years to find the 33 people that I eventually interviewed. But there was a story that I would show in my class that had aired on one of the national prime time shows. And it was a story of these two teenagers who were driving their car in the snow storm. And they were hallucinating. And they were just very normal suburban IT teenagers. But they had 911 calls and some clips from what they were saying as they were calling the police for help. And these young kids were like seeing cows in the field and thinking they were people. I mean, all my life, like a man-away apartment complex, who's the one Mexican and African-Americans who are all dressed up in these walls? Please, help us. My girlfriend is really free, didn't I? Oh, we can't get out of here. They don't speak English or anything. They don't talk to us. Oh, these 50 people here. I cannot guarantee you we'll make it before we freeze. And the young couple actually ended up freezing to death in the storm. And so for years leading up to this project, I would show that clip in my class as I was trying to say, you know, what is this? And those two young people that died were really a big factor is something that haunted me. And a lot of what I have done and continue to do are things that basically just haunt me and I seek answers to things that, you know, I need to find out so that we can understand so we can do better. Because so much suffering, danger, and death is at the foundation of all this. And we need to understand it before we can try to figure out what we need to do to try to help it. Let's move in the direction then. Now when you got into the book and you actually scheduled these interviews with the 33, you know, I'm on the premise from reading your book that most of the more former addicts, manufacturers, and dealers, how did you feel when you got somehow involved in this culture and delved into it? I really got sucked into this project and I was not prepared. You know, having come from a background where I hadn't ever heard about meth again, despite studying on drugs and looking at drug policy, I really was not prepared for what I was getting into. And my questions were geared at this image that we have of what a cook was that was really just based on what we were hearing anecdotally. But from the very first interview all the way to the very last interview, I was learning things that were shining light on things that nobody was really talking about, writing about, or really, it wasn't part of the national conversation, even really the conversation at a state level. This was really a hidden drug, a hidden drug problem. It was something that was all around us and to many, you know, in many regards, it's still all around us. But for some reason, unlike opioids and some other substances that we focus on, meth has never really received the attention that it deserves, given the extent of the damage and destruction that it causes not only to individuals, families, communities, but to society as a whole. So it's always been this kind of, you know, question or paradox for me is how can something be so prevalent and so destructive and yet not be on a general radar screen? And that's kind of what has, you know, pulled me into it. But I was not at all prepared for what I would learn, for who I would meet, for the stories that I would be told. And I had no idea. I, you know, I was not prepared about it. One of the big things about meth and methamphetamine that I've seen is it just rips the soul out of a person. When you look in their eyes, it's not there. I was the program director of Clay Crossing J. Schmidt from the Crystal Darkness Meth campaign that Oklahoma had back in 2009. Well, meth and methamphetamine, you know, is used in Oklahoma, approximately. And I stated this early in the podcast, 42% higher than the national average. So meth is on the rise and continues to cause major issues. Now, you may remember several years ago, I believe it was in 2009, the Crystal Meth campaign in which the state of Oklahoma invested millions of dollars in billboard advertisement and promos and even some television broadcast and radio broadcast to address this issue. However, it's now, like as you stated, it's off the radar. It's gone. You don't see much of it anymore. What happened there? Well, it's interesting that you bring that up. And Crystal Darkness was the name of the campaign that we did in Oklahoma. And that was a few years into my project. And so we actually did a Crystal Darkness showing here at the university where we had a big auditorium. And it was like a 20 to 30 minute television show. And it was broadcast simultaneously across all of the major networks at the same time. And the idea was that if you put out this public information campaign and it was connected to a phone number that people could call. So they would tell stories of meth. They would tell stories of addiction. And I haven't watched it in a number of years, but they would try to encourage people if you need help then reach out. Well, within two weeks after Crystal Darkness aired, they received over-- that means the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse-- received over 900 calls for help. We simply did not have an infrastructure or the treatment beds available. So you can imagine when people are deeply immersed in an addiction such as methamphetamine, the window of opportunity for them to get help and get out is a very small one. Because escaping this kind of lifestyle is very difficult to do. So if you air this kind of a program and the people are calling for help, if you don't have a bed available immediately for that person to transition into, you may never reach them. And we did this huge campaign with no real follow-up and no real infrastructure support to it. And so I don't necessarily want to say it was a failure because we did air it and we did raise awareness for it. But when the calls started coming in, there was very limited resources to help the people that were seeking help. And that's part of the reason why we are still today, almost 17, 18 years into this project, methamphetamine is cheaper. It's pure, it's widely available, and it is devastating people. I mean, it's increasingly being linked to overdose deaths. A majority of overdose deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control, are related to opioids. They say about 70% of all overdose deaths. And we're talking about over 70,000 people in 2019 that overdosed. But an increasing proportion of those overdose deaths are now increasingly becoming methamphetamine. And the other thing to kind of keep in mind is that methamphetamine is a huge problem here in Oklahoma. Partly, we're uniquely situated. We're at the crossroads of I-30 and I-45. So if you're familiar with the highway structure in the United States, those are two major highways that connect north to south and east to west. So they provide us with a very strong drug trafficking route. But what we are learning is that methamphetamine is now not limited to Oklahoma. It's not limited to California. It's not even limited to the United States. I mean, I was able to eventually talk to people that are responding to metham places far away as India and Australia and New Zealand. And methamphetamine has become a global problem in countries around the world. And so it's a little disheartening to think about the fact that we almost had this opportunity to be at the forefront of trying to figure out how to respond to this. And here we are almost two decades later. And we're not any better off in terms of the problem as a whole. Now labs themselves have gone down. Whereas meth labs were a huge problem in 2004 when I started this project. And that's part of the reason I started it. We were having about 1,200 labs seizures a year. And that's a lot. There's a lot of time, money, energy, resources, training that goes into sending law enforcement into this home where these toxic chemicals are being mixed. And you basically have to have a chemistry training in degree almost to do this. But in a way, almost failed because it's become a global problem. And of course, it's not in our shoulders in Oklahoma to fix it globally. But had we been able to figure out a way to maybe respond to it more effectively earlier, we may not be in the situation where today we're more and more people are now dying from it. Where at that time, there were not as many people dying from it. So something's even changed. Where why are more people dying from meth overdoses today than they were even 15 years ago? I don't even know the answer to that question. There's so many flammable chemicals used to cook methane fattening. There's spills that occur in large fires due in Sioux. We've responded in the helicopter to individuals that didn't quite make it out of the house. And we're found charred at the window. You're listening to episode one of the podcast, The 33 Methan Fatamine, a love story of the book written by guest, Dr. Rashi Shukla, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Oklahoma. I'm your host, Dr. David Nelson, Professor of Mass Communication here at the University of Central Oklahoma. Rashi, when we talk about the lack of attention on the meth issue here in Oklahoma, we talked about this offset. And the idea that opiate is becoming more attentive by the news media and authorities because it is an upper-middle class issue. But meth, the images we often see are often people who come from poverty, stricken homes. We have these images of faces that have been riddled from picking their skin. And we'd see these horrific pictures. And we saw that during the crystal meth darkness promotion that was conducted by the state. Is that part of the problem, too? Is that we just see it as something of a population of people that we can just throw away? I mean, I would say that is correct. And I would say that's an accurate description. But they were basically, when they started looking at the mug shots of people that were getting arrested over and over, they were seeing this what I call visual validation of the decline, which is basically as someone gets immersed into their addiction. When you're not eating, you're not sleeping. When you're feeling like bugs are crawling on your skin or you're picking it yourself, you could visually see them declining. But this was not a population of people as a whole that were necessarily all coming from these suburban communities. With opioids, we see football players. And we see people that come from well to do families. And they come from higher social strata. And so people tend to feel more empathy for someone that they could either relate to or that they might want to relate to, someone in a higher social strata. The people that were involved with methamphetamine, though not all of them came from necessarily poverty. Many of them did. And they were in smaller rural communities. So they were already living lives in many cases that were harder. And so they, plus the effects of the drug, they would look different. And so I really think that the faces of meth and impacted our view of it. And that was a population of people that were scary, that were dangerous. We actually had a politician in the state of Oklahoma at the very beginning of my project who referred to meth as a white trash drug. And I say that not to say that there's any validity to the idea that there's such a thing as white trash. But that was even the perception of high level politicians at the time that led to this idea that this is this population that is almost disposable and doesn't even matter. And so we've really done a disservice because when it comes to something like addiction, it's not because this person is addicted to this drug and looks a certain way and comes from this family versus someone who doesn't. That one is more valuable or has more worthy of a life than other than the other. I just-- it's something that I've been fighting a battle to raise awareness about this for the entirety of my career. And yet we're still fighting that battle. And we're still talking more about things like opioid and overdoses opioids. I am struggling to understand why we continue to overlook this the way we do not only locally but nationally and internationally. They find themselves entrapped very quickly in a culture that they just-- they never dreamed of when they first took that hit in methamphetamine. It's a violent, violent cultured. That was the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics from the Crystal Darkness Meth campaign that Oklahoma had back in 2009. And what we see when we look at the stories of the individuals that I met-- and I don't like to call them subjects because they were people. And they were-- they're just people that had these life stories. But methamphetamine around 2004, when I started the project, it was pretty much everywhere. I mean, when you grow up in a small town where everybody's on meth and where there's a lot of people cooking meth, and that's pretty much normal. They're not-- it's not like an environment where they're being abnormal. It was all around the chemicals to make it wear around. People were all doing it. They were sharing these experiences. So it's presence in these communities definitely made it easy for people to become involved in it because it was all around them. There were about six people in my project that started using illicit drugs before the age of 10. Now, if you look at a 10-year-old, look at a 10-year-old in your life, or look at a 10-year-old that you know, and think about that 10-year-old being around illicit drugs, sometimes as hardcore as meth. I mean, I had young people that at age 13 would have a neighbor that would shoot them up. I mean, that's not normal, but that's not also not the world that I grew up in. I grew up pretty sheltered. And so I can't imagine if I had been in an environment or a community where there were so many people involved in cooking and using meth, how that might have impacted my quote-unquote choice or my decision to do it. It was very prevalent, it was everywhere. And so it made it easier for people to fall into it. And at one point, they asked me about coming up with a theory for the use. How would you explain it? And really, all I could come up to was it was there. It was accessible. Everything you needed to make it was legal. You could basically go to the store, get everything you need, come home, make this drug that would take away the worries that you have and the poverty. And it wouldn't take it away, but it made it something that you didn't think about as much. And so it wasn't natural that it happened, but it shouldn't have been surprising. And it shouldn't have been unexpected that when people want something and it's easy to access and it's easy to make, and everything's legally available. You could literally walk into a major retail store, or a farm store, and get everything you need. Why people wouldn't become involved in it, particularly when it was as profitable as it was. At the time back then, you're talking about $100 a gram. And that's a lot of money. When you can turn around and you could make a pound of meth, or you could make multiple pounds of meth over a period of time, that translates into a lot of income and translates to a lot of power, translates to a lot of things that go with when you have something that people are desperate for and they want, and they're willing to pay money for, and they're willing to sell their bodies for, they're willing to do all kinds of things they wouldn't normally do for. It just makes it harder to wrap your head around. How did it get that bad? And we talked about Evan earlier in this broadcast. He was in the introduction, and he had an interesting quote where he says, as someone handed you $10,000. And you thought, wow, thanks for the $10,000. And then you looked, and only the top one was real. Evan was my first cook, cook. And he kept talking about it as an illusion. And I just kept trying to say, what do you mean illusion? What do you mean illusion? Because keep in mind now, I didn't know anything about meth. And it wasn't part of any conversation. And so he said, is that it gives you everything you've ever wanted. But the truth of the tragedy is that it takes everything you have. But that idea of illusion came directly from Evan, who was the third interview. Because he was the one who made me see that things weren't as they seemed. And really, as I worked on the project and wrote the book, I came to the understanding that the illusion of methamphetamine didn't just apply to the people that cooked. But it applied to us as well. We almost live in an illusion where we want to pretend things are one way when they're not. If we don't talk about it, if we don't see it, if we don't document it, if we don't report on it, then it doesn't exist. And that's kind of what I think in terms of we're kind of living in an illusion ourselves when it comes to drugs and drug policy and what to do about it. Well, the 33, as we describe your interviewees in your book, have a very powerful but yet very tragic stories of their experiences with meth. What else can you add about the 33, which of course includes Evan? We're going to talk about Katie in the next episode. Both Evan and Katie will be highlighted in episode two. But what can you tell us about kind of a big overall picture of the 33 of those that you interviewed? You know, they meeting them changed my life. And I wish that everybody could sit face-to-face with them or in an audio format like this and listen to them. Because they were people that were desperate to tell their story. And you just keep in mind what it would take for a stranger to answer some a card or a flyer and go tell people something that they've never talked about. You know, these are criminal behaviors. And so I would struggle with my father who was alive at the time. And he was a big supporter of this project. And I kept saying, you know, I only have 33. I only have 33. That's not a whole lot of people. And he would just tell me, no, Rossi, you don't just have 33 people. You have all of their life experiences. And so when I calculated it together, we had 1,238 years of life experiences encapsulated in these 33. Just by chance, they ended up being almost equally male and female. And you know, at that time, we didn't know a lot about females because we viewed this as very much a male problem. But these were people that I expected to show up looking like faces of meth. You know, and even getting the permission to do the study, they were very scared that these people would come after me. And what if they chased me and should I tell them my real name? But, you know, I was never afraid at that point because they were just people that were involved in a drug. And I thought, you know, that they'll just come meet me. They were mothers, they were fathers, they were daughters, they were sons, they were parents. They were just like you and me, and they had lived through this dark, dark world of methamphetamine and at the time of their interviews, they had all escaped. You know, the longest escape was someone who had been clean for 14 years. But the shortest was someone that had only been clean for about a month. And so, and if you know anything about addiction or, you know, people can relapse at any time. So, we won't really ever know whether any of these people went back or not. But at the time of their interviews based on their own self report, they all had used meth. And how they used it varied, how often they used it. You know, some people skipped it and their coffee, others shot it and they're, you know, intravenously. And some smoked it, you know, there was all the different ways that you could think about them using it. They all were involved in dealing in one capacity or another. Again, at the lowest level, it might be someone who's just selling small amounts to their friends and their peers. All the way to my, I call them my truckers. I had three truckers that were all connected to each other and they would drive cross-country, you know, over and being involved in methamphetamine for decades. And they would, you know, some of them admitted to hauling, you know, methamphetamine across country as they would drive their trucks and their legitimate product across country. So they, they all used, they all dealt and a majority of them were involved in manufacturing. There's a term that I, that kind of encapsulates my whole project and really a lot of what I do now, which is heterogeneity. And even if you like zone into something is very specific and narrow as involvement with methamphetamine and immersion in the methamphetamine lifestyle, what you see is a very diverse group. You see diverse patterns of behavior and that's something that I just find intriguing. And I mean, these people changed my life, they taught me so much. I actually, I don't even know if I should say this or not, but I've always felt a little bit like a fraud because my name is on the cover of the book. And what makes the, the book and the research and the knowledge that we gain from it, the power of it comes from them. You know, and I wish I had had the wherewith all back in the day, you know, to even tell the publishers, hey, put, you know, Rashe Shukla and, you know, 33 individuals. It would have been nice to give them the credit because this is actually their book. And we're going to learn more about these 33. You've just listened to episode one of the podcast, the 33 based on the book, methamphetamine, a love story written by guest Dr. Rashe Shukla, Professor Criminal Justice at the University of Central Oklahoma. I'm your host and producer Dr. David Nelson, Professor of Mass Communication at the University of Central Oklahoma. So in the next episode, we will talk specifically about Evan. We'll talk about Katie. We have Lucy, several people we're going to talk about over the next several episodes here on the podcast, the 33. And they discuss some very difficult subject matter related to sex, money, the attempted suicide, and even some even mentioned, they felt more powerful like Evan. So make sure you join us for a future podcast as we look into the darkness of those who battled with their addiction to meth. The show was produced in the podcast studios at the University of Central Oklahoma and special thanks to all those who provided the voices of the 33. And also thank you to the Oklahoma Crystal Darkness campaign for their permission to use sound from their promo and also thank you to bensound.com for allowing us to use the music beds. [BLANK_AUDIO]