Cheap, easy to make and instantly addictive, crystal meth is burning a hole through rural America. A Hellish tour of a home-cooked drug crisis

It looks less like a crime scene - and still less like a farm - than it does a tour of an unhinged mind. Out behind the barn on this half-mile-square spread at the base of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state, there is a riot of stolen cars and trucks, parts stripped and chassis mangled. A months-old Lexus, its seats splayed beside it, lies nose-down in mud. Two white Chevy sport-utes, their axles spravined, hunker on bales of hay. Lawn mowers and dirt bikes sprawl, tires up, in poses of mechanized porn. Thirty yards away, in a vast stockade, mill twenty of the skinniest cows in the county. There were eighty head out there as late as last month, then the bank came up and seized sixty of the herd to satisfy unpaid debts.

[continues 5743 words]