Speed Demons

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Asia's medical and psychiatric infrastructure is already being overwhelmed by the number of meth abusers crashing and seeking help. But in most of the region, counseling facilities are scarce, and recovery is viewed as a matter of willpower and discipline rather than a tenuous and slow spiritual and psychological rebuilding process. Drug-treatment centers are usually run like a cross between boot camp and prison. Beds are scarce as addicts seek the meager resources available. In China, for example, the nearly 750 state-run rehab centers are filled to capacity; in Thailand the few recovery centers suffer from a chronic shortage of staff and beds. While the most powerful tools for fighting addiction in the West--12-step programs derived from Alcoholics Anonymous--are available in Asia, they are not widely disseminated and used.

What started out as a diversion for me and my Tokyo crowd degenerated in a few months into the chronic drug use of Jacky and her crowd. I began to smoke alone to begin my days. In the evening I'd take Valium or halcyon or cercine or any of a number of sedatives to help me calm down. When I stopped smoking for a few days just to see if I could, a profound depression would overcome me. Nothing seemed worthwhile. Nothing seemed fun. Every book was torturously slow. Every song was criminally banal. The sparkle and shine had been sucked out of life so completely that my world became a fluorescent-lighted, decolorized, saltpetered version of the planet I had known before. And my own prospects? Absolutely dismal. I would sit in that one-bedroom Nishi Azabu apartment and consider the sorry career I had embarked upon, these losers I associated with compounding the very long odds that I would ever amount to anything.

These feelings, about the world and my life, seemed absolutely real. I could not tell for a moment that this was a neurological reaction brought on by the withdrawal of the methamphetamine. My brain had stopped producing dopamine in normal amounts because it had come to rely upon the speed kicking in and running the show. Researchers now report that as much as 50% of the dopamine-producing cells in the brain can be damaged after prolonged exposure to relatively low levels of methamphetamine. In other words, the depression is a purely chemical state. Yet it feels for all the world like the result of empirical, clinical observation. And then, very logically, you realize there is one surefire solution, the only way to feel better: more speed.

I kept at that cycle for a few years and started taking drugs other than methamphetamine until I hit my own personal bottom. I spent six weeks in a drug-treatment center working out a plan for living that didn't require copious amounts of methamphetamines or tranquilizers. I left rehab five years ago. I haven't had another hit of shabu--or taken any drugs--since then. But I am lucky. Of that crowd who used to gather in my Tokyo apartment, I am the only one who has emerged clean and sober. Trey, my fellow magazine writer, never really tried to quit and now lives back at home with his aging parents. He is nearly 40, still takes speed--or Ritalin or cocaine or whichever uppers he can get his hands on--and hasn't had a job in years. Delphine gave up modeling after a few years and soon was accepting money to escort wealthy businessmen around Tokyo. She finally ended up working as a prostitute. Hiroko did stop taking drugs. But she has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and currently believes drastic plastic surgery is the solution to her problems. Miki has been arrested in Japan and the U.S. on drug charges and is now out on parole and living in Tokyo. And Haru, the dealer, I hear he's dead.

Despite all I know about the drug, despite what I have seen, I am still tempted. The pull of the drug is tangible and real, almost like a gravitational force compelling me to want to use it again--to feel just once more the rush and excitement and the sense, even if it's illusory, that life does add up, that there is meaning and form to the passing of my days. Part of me still wants it.

At 2 a.m. on a Saturday, Big and his fellow bikers from Do It Yourself Happy Homes are preparing for a night of bike racing by smoking more yaba and, as if to get their 125-cc bikes in a parallel state of high-octane agitation, squirting STP performance goo from little plastic packets into their gas tanks. The bikes are tuned up, and the mufflers are loosened so that the engines revving at full throttle sound like a chain saw cutting bone: splintering, ear-shattering screeches that reverberate up and down the Sukhumvit streets. The bikers ride in a pack, cutting through alleys, running lights, skirting lines of stalled traffic, slipping past one another as they cut through the city smog. This is their night, the night they look forward to all week during mornings at school or dull afternoons pumping gas. And as they ride massed together, you can almost feel the surge of pride oozing out of them, intimidating other drivers to veer out of their way.