Article - 72 hour Party People - Meth: It's not just for the white-trash crowd.

[trptamene]

72-Hour Party People
Meth: It's not just for the white-trash crowd.
By David Holthouse
Published: September 4, 2003

It comes wrapped in red foil and purple tissue, this intricate figurine molded in the form of a Japanese demon, with clawed feet, a mane of fire and a thick tongue jutting from a bloodthirsty smirk. Transparent, the size of a child's fist, it looks like a tiny ice carving or a statuette of glass. It is neither. In fact, it is 25 grams (a little less than one ounce) of nearly 100 percent pure crystallized methamphetamine hydrochloride, known on the streets of Asia as "Shabu." It was almost certainly manufactured in a clandestine laboratory in China, then shipped to the Philippines and on to Hawaii, and finally to Denver. Here it was purchased on the black market for $5,500 -- nearly five times the street value of an equivalent amount of cocaine and ten times that of low-grade, powdered crystal meth.

Shabu is so expensive because it is so pure -- and therefore so powerful. Most of the home-cooked speed in Denver is only 10 to 20 percent actual crystallized methamphetamine, adulterated with toxic by-products of the makeshift ingredients used in crude manufacturing processes. While any tweaker with a hot plate can whip together a batch of bathtub speed, Shabu requires a trained chemist working in a fully equipped laboratory with uncorrupted components. The result is pharmaceutical-grade meth -- 95-plus percent pure.

As much as the word can be applied to an illegal drug, Shabu is clean.

"There's no horse deworming medicine in this shit, okay? You can't make this kind of shit out of road flares and cold pills," says Nick, delicately unwrapping the Shabu demon atop the burnished steel of his Swedish designer coffee table.

"This is the shit JFK was getting jacked in his ass during the Cuban missile crisis. I shouldn't even be calling this shit 'shit,' because it's disrespectful."

Nick peels away the last scrap of foil and positions the demon in the center of the coffee table, surrounding it with a careful arrangement of long-stemmed glass pipes, miniature butane torches and razor-sharp utility knives.

On this Thursday afternoon in late summer, Nick is preparing the second-floor recreation room of his fashionably appointed Highland home for what has become a twice-a-month ritual of extreme indulgence for a revolving group of five to ten fellow hip, young and successful citizens of Denver.

"Basically," he says, "we blast off Thursday night and don't pull the chute until Sunday."

During their 72-hour run, he and his friends will eat little solid food save fruit, so Nick's fridge and freezer are stocked with the makings for smoothies. Along with yogurt, organic apple juice and frozen blackberries, strawberries and mangoes are five bottles of Moët champagne, a dozen bottles of Italian sparkling water, four cases of microbrew, two bottles of chilled New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and a discount-warehouse carton of 400 Otter Pops.

Speed-binge supplies of a different nature have been cached in a master-bathroom medicine cabinet -- one bottle holding ninety Valiums and another with forty tablets of ProVigil, the market name for the experimental drug Modafonil, a sleep suppressant the U.S. military tested on fighter and bomber pilots in Afghanistan and Iraq. Modafonil is now prescribed for cancer patients to combat the chronic-fatigue side effects of chemotherapy. Nick has laid in a supply because he claims he's found that combining Modafonil with Shabu takes the edge off the undesirable psychological whammies of sleep deprivation, including auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions.

"One night without sleep is just staying up all night," he says. "People do that straight or just with coffee all the time. You feel a little zoned-out in the morning, but by midday, your natural rhythm kicks in. So long as you get some sleep that following night, you're cool. But when you ride the party train two nights in a row, or three nights, things can start to get a little odd, a little slippery. And if somebody spins out, it's no fun."

In other words, a sudden case of amphetamine psychosis really brings a party down.

"I consider this shit an excellent use of my tax dollars," Nick says, rattling a bottle of ProVigil. "It helps keep people from going werewolf around hour 50."

He buys his ProVigil from a psychiatrist friend of a friend who works in several Veterans Affairs hospitals counseling and treating terminal cancer patients. When the patients die, their families don't know what to do with their ProVigil pills, so they give them to the psychiatrist, who gives them to Nick's friend, who sells them to Nick.

All he'll say about this Shabu is that it comes from Hawaii and that he has a source -- another friend of a friend -- who flies to Honolulu once every other month, buying two or three statuettes at a time for resale in Denver and Colorado Springs. It's no big syndicate, just small-time narcotics smuggling where the payoff is a free trip to Hawaii, a little extra spending money and the rush of getting away with it.

The rush of Shabu itself is freakishly powerful. A single minuscule hit -- about one-tenth of a gram, vaporized and inhaled -- is enough to keep a weekend warrior like Nick riding the lightning for twelve hours.

The statuette on Nick's coffee table, cut into tiny pieces and smoked, holds about 250 hits.

Like opium, Shabu is relatively exotic in the United States (except for Hawaii, where it rivals cocaine in popularity), but in Asia, it's cheap and prevalent. The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency claimed earlier this year that 11 percent of the Philippine population uses Shabu. The drug is popular in Japan and Thailand and is so pervasive among the professional classes in Indonesia that the government of that country last year instituted mandatory Shabu-specific drug testing of all public officials.

Nick discovered Shabu during a 1999 vacation in Bali at a full-moon beach rave. He took one hit, danced all night, frolicked in the sand and surf the next day, and didn't do the drug again for more than three years -- until early this year, when he learned of his amigo's Hawaiian connection.

Since then, he's become a Shabu vector in his social set.

Shabu is radically addictive. Yet Nick seems unfazed by his own estimate that in less than half a year, he has personally introduced the drug to more than a dozen people who now smoke it with him all weekend long at least once a month, if not twice. He and his party posse burn through a 25-gram chunk of Shabu every three or four weekends, which means they've each cultivated about a $300-per-month habit.

Nick doesn't see himself as a drug dealer so much as the self-appointed ringleader of his own private Cirque de Shabu.

He's thrown nine Shabu parties since March.

The tenth begins tonight.

HOUR 5
The one-legged Afghan child was quickly forgotten.
Bonnie did, however, locate a laptop with a wireless Internet connection and has now been reclining in a black leather Eames chair, bug-eyed before the glowing sixteen-inch screen, chain-munching Otter Pops and Net-surfing, for more than four uninterrupted hours.

She accosts anyone who walks by the door to the room with the same request: "Hey, could you bring me another Otter Pop?"

In the next room are Marcus, a custom interior house painter, and his wife, Heather, who works in marketing for a popular brand of whiskey. The happy couple is viewing a bootlegged DVD of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on a big-screen TV while frantically flipping through a leather-bound edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy classic of the same name, trying to match the text to the movie. Whenever a line of dialogue is altered, a scene cut or a plot point relocated in the film, Marcus and Heather call it out to Sasha, a dreadlocked artist who's drawing a huge, elaborate pen-and-ink diagram on a sheet of butcher paper. The diagram's title is "Two Towers: Film vs. Book, a Deconstruction."

Aha, Heather exclaims, her voice charged with the thrill of discovery. "The Wold Riders never dragged Aragorn over the cliff on their way to Helm's Deep. That is total fucking Hollywood bullshit! Sasha, you got it?"

A grandfather clock strikes midnight.

In the living room, Nick is seated across a marble chess set from Jason, a landscape architect wearing orange-tinted sunglasses. Surrounded by computer printouts, the pair have been playing for hours, re-creating 1997's epic seven-game rematch between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue move for move, playing each game all the way through, precisely as it was played by man against machine.

"This is so intense," declares Jason. "It's like I know what the computer was thinking."


HOUR 17
Emile has barricaded himself in the television room.

Two hours ago, he muttered something about needing to run an errand, then left the house in a rush. He returned about 45 minutes later carrying a bulging, black plastic bag.

"Don't go out there," he said.

Then he disappeared into the television room, shutting the double doors and shoving furniture up against them from the inside. The doors will budge just enough to display a flickering bluish light indicating the big-screen TV is active.

Now Nick is murmuring through the slim crack in the doors, attempting to persuade Emile to let him inside. Eventually, there is a scraping sound from within the room, and the doors open wide enough for Nick to squeeze through, then shut quickly after him.

Minutes pass. The doors open, and Nick comes back out. The doors close.

"TV room's off limits indefinitely," the party host announces. "Emile needs some privacy."

In a lower voice, he confides the gritty details: "Emile's in there watching porn. He's got like twenty gang-bang DVDs stacked in alphabetical order."


HOUR 33
There is a thief in the house.

They found the thief where they knew they would: within the underground labyrinth of Enigma, the after-hours club in Larimer Square, around three in the morning. They'd been out on the town since nine Friday night, guzzling hot flacons of sake at a sushi bar (but eating nothing: Ike ordered a plate of seared ahi and barely nibbled at it). They spent one hour and $200 at a strip club downtown, then danced at the Alley Cat before finally winding up at Enigma, where the party goes until dawn.

They stayed at the after-hours joint just long enough to find and snare their prey -- an underage crystal-meth snorter known as the Sketchinician. The Sketchinician apparently turns into a kleptomaniac when he's tweaking, which is pretty much whenever he's awake.

It's all going according to Nick's carefully laid plans. Before they'd gone out Friday night, they'd combed through the first floor of his house, securing all valuables, then baiting the living room and kitchen and parlor with cheap electronic equipment -- junk cameras, battered Walkmans, laser pointers and busted light-up Star Wars toys, the "few things for the Sketchinician" that Marcus had picked up at a couple of thrift stores during his afternoon foray out into the real world.

Now it's four in the morning, and they're pretending not to notice as the Sketchinician sketches around the house, pilfering the goods and then stashing them in his car during his repeated, always loudly announced "I'm just going to go and have a smoke" brief trips outside.

The Sketchinician is skilled, to a degree. No one ever actually sees him, say, snake the cracked-case Canon point-and-shoot off the end table. They just notice it's gone, and the whispered word spreads through the party: Check it out, the Sketchinician got the camera by the couch.

Then, in the denouement of this set piece, around five in the morning, Nick pretends to suddenly notice that all of his possessions are missing. And the Sketchinician? He plays it beautifully, fervently joining the search for the missing camera and laser pointer and Walkman and Darth Vader light saber, all of which Nick is distraught to lose, because he really, really wants them for the trip to Vegas.

"You see, that's how you know when a tweaker has it hard-core," Nick murmurs in another one of his conspiratorial whispers. "They'll steal shit from you, and then they'll help you look for it."


HOUR 42
Team Shabu is smoking speed out of lightbulbs in the $249-a-night Venezia Fontana luxury suite, in which they will spend a grand total of 45 minutes before descending to the casino floor.

"I have a poem I want everyone to hear," Marcus says, fishing a fresh bulb from the cardboard box of four General Electric 60-watts purchased earlier on the Strip. "It's about a moth and a lightbulb. I've memorized it for just this sort of five-star occasion."

His voice changes to that of a bereted poet giving a dramatic reading.

"I was talking to a moth the other evening," Marcus begins, thrusting the lightbulb up and away, then pondering it like Hamlet pondering a dagger. "He was trying to break into an electric lightbulb and fry himself on the wires."

Marcus pulls the lightbulb back, walks over to a dresser, and then, with one quick hammering motion, snaps off the bulb's aluminum screw-in plug. It falls to the carpet and he stares it for a second, then at the teardrop-shaped piece of glass in his hand, which now has a jagged hole at the fat end.

"I forget the next part," he says, weaving on his feet and staring into the bulb's hole like a drunken pirate staring through a spyglass. "But the guy who's talking the poem asks the moth why the fuck he's trying to fry himself on the light, and the moth says..."

And here Marcus goes into the voice of the moth, rendered high and reedy, as if he had just inhaled helium: "‘We get bored with routine and crave beauty and excitement. Fire is beautiful, and we know that if we get too close it will kill us, but what does that matter? It is better to be happy for a moment and burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while."

"Hell, yeah!" Bonnie says emphatically.

Marcus picks through the shards of Shabu on the dresser, chooses one the size of an almond sliver and drops it into the hole in the bulb. He asks for a lighter. Then he continues the poem, again in the voice of the moth.

"We wad all our life up into one little roll, and then we shoot the roll. It is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than it is to exist forever and never be a part of beauty. We are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves."

"No, wait, I fucked up."

He dances the flame of the lighter over the bulb. The Shabu inside bubbles, and smoke collects in the chamber of the bulb.

"I can only remember the last line, but before that, the moth flies into a lighter and dies, and the last line of the poem is the guy thinking to himself, ‘I wish there was something I wanted as badly as the moth wanted to fry himself.'"

Marcus inhales the smoke from the hole in the lightbulb. Moments pass in silence. He exhales sickly sweet.

Bonnie: "Wait, are you saying we're all moths?"


HOUR 52
Heather and Sasha have developed a compelling interest bordering on obsession with the current novelty club hit "Cameltoe," by the bubbly all-girl trio FannyPack.

So many vehicles on the Strip are blasting the song from open windows that Heather and Sasha come up with what seems to them a perfectly sane endeavor. They sprint into a strip-mall store and buy two pads of paper and two pens. Then they take up a post on the sidewalk by the fountains outside the Bellagio and declare their intention to remain there until they have heard and recorded the entire four minutes of "Cameltoe," played in snippets from passing cars.

First they catch two lines from the second stanza of lyrics, percolating from a rented Corvette:

She walked right by, the poor woman didn't know.

She had a frontal wedgie, a Cam-el-toe!

And then, twenty minutes and one fountain show later, a jackpot: the entire first stanza, coming from a red, open-topped Jeep:

Walking down the street, something caught my eye,
A growing epidemic that really ain't fly.
This middle-aged lady, I gotta be blunt,
Her spandex biker shorts were creeping up the front.

When, nearly four hours later, they finally put in place the last piece of their surreal sonic puzzle -- the line Girls don't sleep, don't let your pants creep -- they hop up and down and clap, celebrating, as if a million-dollar slot had just come up three cherries.


HOUR 64
Back at Nick's house, there are Otter Pop wrappers everywhere. Otter Pop wrappers on the hardwood floors, on the kitchen tile, on the toilet seats in all the bathrooms, in the sinks, on the turntables, on the couch cushions. They are hard, plastic, sticky, omnipresent evidence that something very strange and very wicked went down in this place.

And then there is Emile, passed out on the love seat in the parlor just inside the front door, shirtless, with what looks to be dried bright-blue goo smeared all over his bare chest. Judging by the Otter Pop wrapper dangling from his fingertips, he fell deep asleep mid-pop and then failed to wake as the blue ice melted on him, drip by drip.

The doors to the TV room are now open. The big screen displays the DVD menu for Gang Bang Angels.

Realizing that one hit isn't going to do much for them at this point, the Vegas vacationers each take three in quick succession.

Then the women spend the next three hours choreographing an elaborate and vaguely obscene dance routine to "Cameltoe" while Nick obligingly spins the single over and over and over and Marcus and Ike sit and watch and giggle.

HOUR 72
Gang Bang Angels has been replaced by the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars.

For a Few Dollars More is on deck.

Subdued by forty milligrams of Valium each, the fellowship of the pipe is splayed around the TV room on beanbags and cushions, listlessly eating soggy fruit like a bunch of drugged monkeys.

Ike, who is slowly building a three-tiered house of hooker cards, says, "Yo, that was fun while it lasted."

Heather: "Was it?"

http://www.westword.com/2003-09-04/n...ty-people/full

Reputation Comments on this post:

	great article
	fabulous article

[Police Officer]

Do people wonder how addictions are born? Anyone think about the dangers involved?

[toe]

Originally Posted by Police Officer

Do people wonder how addictions are born? Anyone think about the dangers involved?

Respectively: no, hindsight is 20/20 and yes, but knowing the truth in the first place might have made the former a moot point. Or maybe not, being that adolescents are omniscient and immortal.