As America closes out a century of stimulant abuse, its slavishness to methamphetamine has spawned a public health epidemic equal to, if not more devastating than, the crack cocaine siege of the '80s. Ex-addict rebuilds ruined life from the bottom up Meet John Dorman, a former lawyer who wound up behind bars because of his involvement with meth. His freedom depends on staying clean and sober. Cindy Fulton couldn't imagine ever snooping in her teenaged daughter's diary, stripping her bedroom bare or calling her friends behind her back. Then again, Fulton never dreamed she'd have a methamphetamine addict living under her roof masquerading as her child.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Not only has it staked a claim to be a rival to, if not the baddest drug on the block in the Southwest and Midwest. It also has become incredibly profitable for what law enforcement calls the Mexican Organized Crime Families. Treatment programs just at the starting point Methamphetamine, as rapacious a drug as America has encountered, is fast leaving treatment providers in the dust. Karol Kumpfer witnessed methamphetamine's influence on its prey a quarter of a century ago, when meth was being pushed by bikers, when speed was its common name. But Kumpfer, now director of the U.S. Center for Substance Abuse Prevention in Washington, D.C., was unprepared for its transformation.