Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  I don’t know where he got the money, but when Shane got to my house, he had a half gallon of SKYY vodka, my personal favorite. “A wedding gift,” he said. We drank quite a bit of it, then went to the courthouse to get married. After that was done, we went back to my house to finish off the bottle.

  Lisa was pretty wasted and started crying about not having her kids. Shane took that as a sign that it was time for him to go, and he left. I had to put up with the crying drunk lady I barely knew and had just wed, all by myself. Lisa kept saying that all she needed was me and Faye in her life and she could be happy. I remember thinking, “You have more kids than just Faye, right? What about needing the rest of them in your life?” I would find out later that the answer to those questions was both twisted and heart-breaking on several different levels

  .

  Chapter 10

  Lisa settled right into her domestic role and was an awesome wife. I came home from work and the gym in the morning to a freshly cooked breakfast and a spotless house. Lisa would stay up at night to clean house so she could sleep during the day with me, both literally and figuratively. In the evening, I would wake up to dinner cooking.

  Lisa finally went to court for the contributing charges, and they were dismissed. All of the kids had said they were having the party without her knowledge and that she had just come home and caught them moments before the police arrived.

  Lisa’s parents fought her for custody of the twins, mostly because they had raised the girls for most of their lives, and won. Lisa was able to obtain custody of Joy and Levi again, however. Levi came to live with us right away, but Joy stayed with Lisa’s sister until the school year ended.

  Joy and the twins would stay with us on the weekends. Tina didn’t technically stay with us, because she would take off with her twenty year old boyfriend Bernie, for the entire weekend.

  I got along great with the twins, and they started telling me a lot of disturbing things about Lisa. One night, Tina made the statement, “As far as I know, mom hasn’t cheated on you, yet.” Lisa and I had only been married for a month at this time.

  The twins also told me that they were really surprised Lisa had married me. According to them, anytime someone started getting close to Lisa, she would dump them. She was not into commitment. I guess this explained the funny looks they had given me when they witnessed Lisa telling me she loved me.

  The twins also said that Lisa had admitted to them once that, by the time Lisa was seventeen, she had had sex with over two hundred different men.

  The most disturbing thing the girls told me about Lisa was that she hated Tina. The story they had given me was, they were partying one night, and Lisa got mad at Tina over something. She started screaming at Tina, telling her she hated her and wished she would have died at birth.

  This tirade went on and on, until at one point, Tina crawled under a table, crying, just to try to get away from Lisa. I asked Lisa about this, and she admitted every bit of it. She literally hated Tina.

  Lisa even told me that at a party one night, Tina had passed out on the couch. There were several guys there that were friends of Lisa’s boyfriend at the time. As Lisa and her boyfriend headed to bed for the night, Lisa told the guys to, more or less, do whatever they wanted to do to Tina, but just to make sure that Tina had her clothes on when she woke up in the morning, so she wouldn’t know what happened to her. Tina was only fourteen years old at the time.

  After learning about all of this, I felt sorry for Tina, so I began to show her extra attention. Lisa had started telling people that Faye was her favorite and Tina was my favorite. For my part, that wasn’t true. I loved both of those girls equally.

  Lisa had also admitted to me, that she got pregnant with Joy simply to keep her first husband from leaving her after he caught her cheating on him. Lisa was never married to the twins’ father.

  Levi’s father was just a live in boyfriend, and Lisa had also cheated on him as well, with someone else. Thinking there was a chance that she was pregnant, Lisa started having unprotected sex with the boyfriend to cover up the affair.

  I should have seen what kind of person Lisa was, but she convinced me that she was just looking for a chance to prove she wasn’t that person anymore.

  I loved Lisa, and she did seem like a totally different person than what I was hearing about her, so I thought she really had changed. She even quit drinking after we got married. I was willing to give her a chance to be this better person.

  I called Lisa from work around 4am one morning. Faye was at the house with her, and Lisa said they had been spring cleaning all night. It was only January, so I thought it strange that it was referred to as “spring cleaning,” but I let that go.

  I mentioned to Lisa that I was pretty tired, and couldn’t wait for the night to be over. I was off for the next two days, and it looked as if I was going to sleep one of them away. Lisa said she had a little something to “help me out.” She wouldn’t say what exactly this was, but she did mention that I would like it.

  When I got home, Lisa pulled out a small baggie of meth from her pocket. This is the first meth I had seen since that one night in California. Lisa asked if I knew how to smoke it, which I didn’t. She showed me how to smoke the meth off a piece of aluminum foil, and after that, Lisa, Faye and I spent the rest of the weekend smoking meth together. It was great!

  I wasn’t surprised in the leased that Lisa would allow her fifteen year old daughter Faye to do meth with us. I knew that both of the twins had done meth, coke, pills, weed, and alcohol since they were fourteen.

  Lisa and I started getting about a half a gram of meth every weekend, and we’d smoke it with Faye. This became a regular thing, and soon enough, we were up to a gram on the weekends. At first, I didn’t want to do any meth during the week, in case I was drug tested at work, but I eventually decided that I couldn’t pass a piss test anyway if I was getting high on the weekends, so we started doing meth during the week also.

  At first, I didn’t mind how much we were spending on meth. I made pretty good money, so it wasn’t much of a problem. Once we started buying meth during the week however, and I started running short on bill money a couple of times, I decided that it might be a good idea to learn how to cook meth myself. My life would never be the same again.

  Chapter 11

  While it was my growing addiction and the cost of feeding that, as well as Lisa’s, addiction, that inspired me to learn how to cook meth, it would be my love for the whole process that would make it impossible for me to quit using, as well as cooking, meth.

  There is a ritual to everything involved in the process of making and doing meth. With smoking meth off of aluminum foil, (also known as “chasing the dragon”) you have the ritual of folding the foil to the exact specifications of the person doing the folding. Some people call the folded piece of foil a “boat”. Some people want the shiny side of the foil up, while others prefer the dull side. There are a lot of people who incorrectly believe that one side or the other has waxes on it and said waxes account for the difference in the look of the two sides. They don’t want these “waxes” in their dope while they smoke it, so the foil has to be turned a certain way. “The waxes” are just one of many meth related urban legends.

  Some people don’t want you to touch the foil with the lighter flame, because it blackens the foil as you smoke. Others simply don’t care. Most meth addicts, who smoke very large amounts, like to carry their own piece of tubing used for smoking meth from foil this is called a “tooter” and is usually a piece of disposable ink pen that has been cut to about four inches long. Occasionally, people will get fancy with their tooters, and make them out of glass or pieces of metal with engravings on them. I’ve made really nice ones out of wind chimes, myself.

  To understand why people like to use their own tooter, you have to understand how to smoke meth from foil. First, the foil, (usually Reynolds’ Heavy or Extra Heavy duty are preferred because of the quality, and there aren’t any tiny pin-h
oles for the flame to burn your dope) is folded into a boat. Then, you sprinkle the desired amount of meth onto the foil. A flame under the foil melts down the meth, and the smoke is inhaled through the tooter. That’s all there is to it.

  After using the same tooter many times, a layer of meth will build up on the inside, and once enough has built up, it can be scraped out and smoked again. Everyone knows this, so everyone that smokes meth, has absolutely no problems with letting others who have no tooter use theirs. It’s basically, free dope.

  Unfortunately, people will also steal tooters for the very same reason. Some people will let the meth build up in their tooter, then put it up and start using another one. Once they have several tooters saved up, they scrape all of them, and that amounts to hundreds of dollars worth of dope.

  In a pinch, tooters can be made out of anything. A cut piece of a drinking straw is commonly used. A rolled up dollar bill works well also. If you are good enough you can inhale the smoke right off the foil with your mouth. Just be careful not to get too close, or you could burn your lips, or set your hair on fire. I’ve done both, and it wasn’t fun.

  One evening, out of desperation, I used the barrel out of my Colt 1911 pistol as a tooter. It was heavy, and I almost chipped a tooth, but it worked well enough. Tasted like crap, though.

  When I decided to learn how to cook meth, I didn’t think it was going to be any problem. I had heard on the television and read in newspapers, that it was made out of everyday household items. The recipe shouldn’t be hard to get, or at least figure out, I thought. If I would have known how long it was going to take me to actually make meth for the first time, and how much money I would have invested in my self-education, I would have probably given up before I’d even got started.

  When learning a new skill, the first, and most obvious, step is to find someone who already knows how to do what you want to learn to do. This person must also be willing to teach you the new skill you would like to learn.

  Just like with any other skill, most meth cooks were taught their art (and it is an art form to a quality drug maker) by someone else. So, step one; find someone willing to teach me.

  Lisa had been a meth user for many years, and knew a lot of people in the meth world. Since I was new to the game, I didn’t know anyone. Even though we had been smoking meth together for a couple of months, I had never gone with Lisa when she went to buy dope. The way I saw it was, if I wasn’t out buying drugs, I didn’t have to worry about getting busted and going to jail.

  I sent Lisa out on a mission to find one of her friends who would be willing to teach me how to cook meth. I knew it was going to be a long shot but it was worth a try. Of course, nobody was going to give up the several hundred dollars every week that they were making off of me paying for dope, to teach me how to make my own.

  Meth cooks normally don’t like to teach others how to cook, because doing so would cut into their profits, and bring more competition into their area. That isn’t good for business in a specialized market.

  When a cook is willing to teach, it is usually for one of two reasons. Either the student is a very close and trusted friend or family member of the cook or the student is paying a lot of money to learn how to cook. I’ve known personally some cooks who have charged thousands of dollars to teach someone the vital information.

  I just wasn’t willing to pay someone to teach me to cook. Since I was pretty much an internet junkie at the time, I figured I would just find a recipe on my own. Having someone else actually show me how to cook would have simply been a time saving idea.

  I started searching the net for my first recipe. Believe it or not, you don’t find much useful information when you type in “meth recipes” in a search engine, like Google. You do, however, get a LOT of anti-meth sites.

  Now, something I did not realize at first is just how much there was to cooking meth that I did not know. To my understanding at this point, all a meth cook needs to do is mix a few common chemicals together and, before you know it, you have meth! That is both accurate and not accurate.

  One problem is that, you have to clean, prepare, and/or alter several of these common chemicals into something else. Another problem arises when trying to figure out how to make some of the ingredients that you can’t simply walk into your local hardware store or garden supply store and purchase legally, or without suspicions.

  As I slowly began to put together the list of ingredients I would need, I was still looking for an actual recipe that would tell me how to put everything together. As I searched chat rooms, online bulletin boards, and even the anti-meth websites, I kept coming across the name of an author, “Uncle Fester.”

  I started searching for the book I was reading about that was written by this author and was eventually able to purchase two separate books directly from him. Both books had many recipes for manufacturing not only meth, but several other drugs as well. All of this was in easy to understand language.

  In my opinion, one of the best features of these books was that if there was a hard-to-get chemical, Fester would have a process to make the chemical yourself with ingredients that could be obtained legally.

  Even more valuable to me, other than the information in these books, was a website that was listed at the end of the book. While this site no longer exists today, I was able to meet a lot of people on that site who knew an awful lot about cooking meth. I was able to download over one hundred different recipes from this “underground” site as well as other sites that this one linked to.

  I learned all of the processes I would need to break down my pills and to make my iodine crystals. Breaking down pills is the process of extracting the pseudoephedrine, or pseudo as we call it for short, from cold and allergy pills. I actually learned several ways of doing this, and had a couple of problems perfecting my own method, but in the end, I learned from my mistakes.

  The only problem I had with this website is that you were not permitted to ask any direct questions. Any questions you had would have to be asked hypothetically. If you were describing something, it had to be described as if it had happened in a dream. There was also a lot of code used. If you posted on the site, you had to word everything correctly, or everyone would freak out and you would end up getting banned. With that in mind, I just used the search engine most of the time to find the answers to my questions, and I had many questions.

  One of the first things I ever learned about cooking meth was how to obtain and clean red phosphorus, or “Red P”. Contrary to popular belief, Red P does not come from match heads. I only mention this because, while in jail, I have been approached by many supposed meth cooks who wanted to “talk shop”.

  These people often mention that they use this or that kind of match head for their cooks. That instantly proves to me, that the guy is a moron, because the only place match heads are used in a meth cook, are on television specials occasionally aired on the subject of cooking meth. They do this so dumbasses like these don’t figure out how to actually make meth by watching the show.

  Would someone watch one of these TV specials and think they could figure out how to cook meth? Of course they would. I actually used to go to the anti-meth websites because they have a lot of pictures of meth labs. I figured out different designs for different components of my labs from these sites when I was first starting out.

  There was even a time when I would record the nightly news, in case there had been a meth lab bust. The news always had close ups of all the stuff the cops found during the raid.

  Some aspiring meth cooks will often claim that they can cook, just so they can get you to start talking. Once I figure out a person is full of shit, I usually just walk away from them. Most cooks will do the same, because that person could easily be a cop. If the person continues to try to get cook info out of me, I will usually tell them some crappy shit that makes no sense at all. I’m just an asshole like that sometimes.

  After a lot of study, I finally knew how the cook works, why “this” is mixed
with “that,” why different styles of labs are made the way they are, and several different ways there were to cook meth. I knew more about meth as a drug, and also the science of cooking meth, than almost any other common meth cook in my area, and I had still not done my first cook. It was time to get busy and put all of this new knowledge to work to see what would happen.

  Chapter 12

  The method I decided to use for my first cook was called the “push/pull” method. It seemed like the most commonly used method among the people I had been talking to and learning from via the internet, so I decided to go with that.

  Now that I had all of my ingredients gathered together, everything cleaned, prepped, and ready, and my cooking apparatus built, I was ready to become a meth cook. Armed with dozens of recipes from what I felt were reliable sources, I set everything up in my kitchen.

  I began mixing and stirring, heating and cooking, and following the recipe I had chosen for my first cook to the letter. Everything was going perfect. I had the right size and color bubbles. I was building pressure like I was supposed to, according to my research. I was happy and excited and nothing could go wrong.

  Then it did. Something went completely wrong, because everything in my cook pot suddenly came to a stop. I was looking at my mix and there was no action going on. I was no longer happy, or excited.

  I still had at least forty minutes of cook time left to go, but my reaction was dead. I began looking through all of my recipes, my Uncle Fester books, and the internet, and I could not find any mention of anything like this happening to anyone else.

  Finally, I was forced to conclude that I had somehow screwed the whole thing up. So, I did the only thing I could do. I dumped everything down the drain and started over.