Methamphetamine

I've never done it.  This is the only drug i've heard of that I can consciously say i have never ingested.  That statement carries some sort of arrogant pride in my ears.  It's terribly embarassing nature makes 98 percent of people i know, stand up human beings - wish they had never met me....While for some sick twisted reason, i carry the weight of that statement proudly.  There's a glare in my eye as i mention it to you, and i can see your face reacting to it over, and over again.  As if i was saying "top that, fucker".
The reason Methamphetamine became a part of my heroin soaked puzzle isn't because it's the only thing i've never touched.  And to say i've never set a finger on it would be a lie.

About a year and a half into my heroin addiction, me and my running buddy came to a quick realization.  I say quick only because it seemed to occur to both of us simultaneously one fall afternoon.  If we had jobs, we wouldn't need to steal all this shit to buy more dope.  A genius thought, i know....
This thought was then followed promptly, and abruptly by several realizations.
1) We can't get any job that would drug test us
2) We can't get any job that would cut into the time we spend getting high
3) We can't get any job that wouldn't pay us at LEAST 400$ a week. (Our current running MINIMUM for how much tar we'd smoke in 7 days)

This narrowed down the job market considerably, and obviously - wasn't the best way to find work.  But we found one job we knew wholeheartedly we could succeed at, and would flex to our "busy" schedule.
We'd decided practically overnight we were going to cook, and sell Meth to pay for our heroin habit.
A seemingly very logical leap for a couple of junkies in need of dope money, yet unable to land a respectable job.  So this is where our "logic" lead us...

Believe it or not, we did know our chemistry.  In fact, my running buddy [who will obviously remain unnamed] is currently finishing up his degrees in Nuclear, Chemical, and Civil Engineering while maintaining an astounding 4.0 GPA. 
So we printed off every legitimate copy of directions for manufacturing Methamphetamine we could find, cross referenced all of them, and then multiplied the amount of ingredients by 10, so our batch size would be large enough to cover our dope habit, and leave enough room for purchasing supplies.
Turns out we weren't done stealing shit quite yet...Why would we spend the little bit of money we had on supplies when we could just steal them, and then make nothing but profit?  So off we went, scavenging for everything on our shopping list like a soccer mom making a pasta dinner.
We were horribly paranoid of someone catching on, so we convinced our friend Charlie to let us borrow his mom's van when we made our trips to the store.  That way, if there was any security footage of us stealing all these ingredients to cook meth and they ran the plates on the van, nothing would come back to us...["sucks for Charlie's mom" was our credo at this point]
So, hooded sweatshirts and backpacks we went, in and out of every grocery store and ace hardware within 20 miles of Charlie's house.

*and yes, it's that easy.  EVERYTHING you could ever need to manufacture Methamphetamine in mass quantities can be stolen or purchased from your neighborhood grocery + hardware store.


After a few long, freezing cold nights in the garage off the alley of my running buddy's house, with a space heater, lots of stolen chemistry equipment from the lab at school, and a few packs of Camel Lights - we had a rythym, and a schedule. 
After leaving school [early most of the time] one of us would jump the train downtown to drop off a batch of meth at a dealer's apartment, and take the money we made to OUR dealer's apartment and buy more dope.  The other one of us would get the rig going, completing the first half of the cooking process by the time the other returned.  Then we'd get high while the glass was slowly being chemically seperated from the toxins that DIDN'T make up the disgusting product. [I say disgusting because once you see what goes in to making something like meth, you wouldn't find it as attractive as tweakers do, trust me]
This cycle went on for about 4 months. 

We didn't go to the movies, hang out with friends...hell, we didn't even watch tv.  We just worked to get high. that was it.  The only form of entertainment that had any point in existing to us was the shitty radio we kept on in the garage all day and all night.
It'd be 3 AM on a Wednesday night, and instead of doing our homework and going to sleep like most kids our age, we'd be listening to the "Love Advice" segment of some awful/across the state line/late night radio program, laughing our asses off chain smoking Camel Lights cooking up hundreds of dollars worth of Meth.

Eventually we got too paranoid that the stores we were stealing from had caught on, and that there was a SWAT team of Safeway employees waiting outside the garage door with semi-automatic weapons ready to shoot us apart piece by piece, bullet by bullet, until all that was left were a few eye lids and a whole lot of stolen school property.  The mental storm of stealing things out of people's cars in the middle of the night was easier to weather than walking out of a flourescent warehouse with a backpack full of cold medicine they ID you to purchase.  So we went back to what we knew best. 

Being a junkie is easier than being a chemist.