What the hell happened to meth?

Does anyone still remember when the local press was having a love affair with anything related to the drug? That 2004 documentary: Life or Meth: Hawai‘i’s Youth? Sad images of teens rooting through dumpsters in search of food because their folks were too strung out to put it on the table? Story after story about ruined lives, the depths to which they sank. There was a sick excitement to it—a luster to raising awareness about The Silent Killer, The Homewrecker, The Breaker of Dreams.

The government got into the act, lobbing news bombs. Judge Edward Kubo, on his days as our U.S. Attorney, saying crystal methamphetamine is Hawai‘i’s gift to the nation. Hawai‘i High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Executive Director Gary Yabuta on how we were the “pioneer of methamphetamine abuse” before the mainland. Congress, too, had a hand in shining the spotlight on our fair islands—those 2004 House Subcommittee sessions, The Poisoning of Paradise: Crystal Methamphetamine in Hawai‘i.

Once that caravan moved on, we found ourselves watching with fascination as a new narrative unfolded. Now it was good, honest working-class folks who took to the drug to help them hold down three jobs to realize the American Dream, Hawai‘i-style: owning a house, multiple cars, paying private school and college tuitions in the face of a tyrannical housing market and a ridiculous cost of living.

And then came the anecdotes and exposés on white-collar meth use. Attorneys finding a way to cram more billable hours onto a limited clock by eliminating sleep. College students pulling all-nighters three nights in a row.

Meth wasn’t just for the addicts sleeping in their piss in ‘A‘ala Park anymore. Meth was for everyone.

In retrospect, it seems that Hawai‘i’s operatic obsession with meth was tied to the fact that we were a national leader. In something. All investigative efforts on the trend indicate that Hawai‘i was the birthplace of the United States meth epidemic, having received it from Asia. There were large amounts of the innovatively engineered substance coming in from places like South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Hawai‘i was the gateway. We followed the coverage on the drug with a perverse pride, in a similar way we might when a UH sports team makes an appearance in a national championship tournament. The meth epidemic wasn’t something we were proud of, but it was uniquely ours.

Then the hype went away. The coverage, while still existent, lacked the urgency of a decade before. Mexico supplanted Asia as the world’s source for crystal methamphetamine, the cartels undercutting all global competitors in price and cornering the market. Bankrolled by Big Pharm, who could teach the cartels a thing or two about marketing, opioid use—and opioid deaths—became all the rage on the mainland. Any day now we’ll be on to the new drug panic. Wait for it.

What happened to meth once Hawai‘i no longer claimed the national spotlight, becoming once again the obscure little island state we once were? To start, meth’s faded glory has given us the impression that it’s less of a problem today. That the worst is behind us. Tweaking? That’s so 2010!

Maybe it was because we were worn down and weary of it. Maybe it was because we’ve abandoned any hope that there was a viable solution. Whatever the reason, we’ve dismissed the problem from our consciousness and have started to look at other things to feed our sangfroid. Homelessness. Trump. COVID.

But meth is, unfortunately, alive and well. 

I won’t go into the facts or the statistics on meth’s enduring existence and significance here. Honolulu Civil Beat and Hawai‘i Public Radio’s thorough coverage on the matter in their joint 2016 series Hawai‘i’s New Ice Age: Crystal Meth in the Islands soundly concludes that it’s still with us. HIDTA’S Annual Report numbers also tell us that news of its diminishment is greatly exaggerated. We are, after all, a literary review, not an investigative journal (though the line will blur deliciously). I’ll instead examine a novel from the heyday of meth coverage, and make a case for its continued relevance.

Alexei Melnick’s Tweakerville (Mutual, 2010) is a dark, riveting tale and a disturbing exposition of Hawai‘i’s meth world as seen through the lens of a teenaged runner, Jesse Gomes. The novel opens with the overdose death of a young haole military brat at a Halloween party and comes full circle on that death: Jesse has a hand in burying her corpse, and the burial sets in motion events which lead him deeper into the dark world of Tweakerville. 

Melnick’s work is noir in the truest, most French sense of the term, where our protagonist gets caught in the downward swirl into the drain of oblivion, accelerated by the false hope of redemption. Every detail rings true today as it did a decade ago, including the drug house itself, a residential home in a suburban neighborhood, indistinguishable from all the other houses save for its occupants:

Robby’s house jus look like any house in the neighbor hood, bags of cans and bottles, the hose wrapped around the nozzle. The cinder block walls and high bushes make it hard to see in the yard. I keep the drive way pretty clean, sweep up the Heineken caps, cigarette butts, sun flower seeds. Sometimes there would be a Q-tip, a strip of cloth or a paper clip straightened out, nothing the mail lady would prolly notice. But if you knew what to look for you would know.

Bedroom community homes like the one Jesse describes are all over O‘ahu and continue to be the subject of law enforcement raids. The occupants of these houses are not so much residents as they are party guests who have stayed too long. The “business” people who run these houses are often none too happy about the hangers-on and tweakers from last night’s (and the prior nights’) party, but they seem to accept their presence as a part of the landscape, half cost-of-doing-business, half professional courtesy, though they stop short of offering them permanent lodging, because they know at a certain point it’s bad for business:

It prolly hurt him real bad too that he couldn’t stay at Robby’s house. But you know, when you get one tweaker living your house you gon have five more coming by every day, yelling whistling, trying to get in the house, throwing up tweaker hand signs.

Tweakers bring heat. Every night for them get action.

Reading Tweakerville should make you uncomfortable because it’s still next door. These guys haven’t moved away; maybe they just make less noise. After all, we only hear what we choose to hear. Melnick’s most perturbing message by far is that Tweakerville is a twisted, dark reflection of our own world, with its own alpha dogs, power brokers, pawns and losers. And like our own world, one could start out being one thing and instantly become another with one serendipitous—or cruel—turn of events. He makes a bleak statement about both worlds:

Being sober is like being high. Nothing looks the way it’s supposed to. Nothing ever feels right.

Most of all you have to face this stranger. This boring sorry cowardly fucka wearing your clothes.

We have a tendency here, whether through Polynesian humility, Asian decorum or haole propriety, to sweep shit under the rug and look the other way. Denial is something that afflicts us all to certain degree here, and much more than in other places in the United States. It’s denial that’s made us believe that meth isn’t the problem it used to be. It’s no coincidence that when meth began to fade as the problem du jour in Honolulu, homelessness rose to take its place. The sidewalk tent villages are only a different vantage point of the same issue. The root causes are often the same. Yesterday’s suburban meth house tweaker is today’s Kaka‘ako Waterfront Park tenant.

If Melnick’s harrowing portraits of ice houses and their denizens seem passé, almost nostalgic, better ask yourself it’s only because you’ve written them off and moved on. Rest assured they are still here, lurking under the rug where we’ve swept them—if not mainstreamed: our work-hard-play-hard users in the conference room and nightclub are just as invisible to us as the tent city dwellers.

Image by Krystal Ng.