"Mom, was it fun growing up in the eighties?” My 13-year-old son asked me this morning. “Of course, it was fun,” I replied. “I had a blast.” Those of us who experienced the end of the sex, drugs, and rock & roll era had a blast. However, when the eighties ended, so did our ignorance in terms of the consequences that drugs would have on us and those who loved us.
If you were like me, you partied hard as a teen - drinking, smoking pot, and in the small town in Nevada that I grew up in, snorting bathtub crank – a highly addictive methamphetamine. Shortly after my first Ozzy Osborne concert in January of 1989, my parents drove me out of the fine state of Nevada and dropped me off at my first of many drug treatment centers. At eighteen, the fun had stopped, and I had to face the destruction that I had created while using crank.
Crank was cheap, cooked in bathtubs, and cut with ephedrine. Back then, it was known as the poor man’s cocaine. Today, crank is almost never found on the streets. Ephedrine is illegal, and the bathtub labs designed to cook up a batch are a scientific experiment of the past.
Addiction to methamphetamine, however, is not. Drug treatment centers have seen methamphetamine addiction skyrocket as Crystal Meth, crank’s evil stepchild, has taken hold of many people across the nation, including many in my hometown in Nevada.
Recently a report released by the office of Nevada’s governor, Jim Gibbons revealed alarming statistics. Of those who used drugs, 45% of adults, 41% of adolescents and 82% of pregnant or parenting women report that crystal meth is their drug of choice. Per capita, Nevada has the highest meth use statistics in the nation according to several sources.
