Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth.

 My qualifications for telling the personal story will become all too clear in the early chapters, but the reader may wonder by what authority I recount the history of meth. After all, my background is in software. The truth is that I began this book in the first place because at the time I initially became aware of the nightmare unfolding right under my nose, there was very little accessible information on methamphetamine. America had not yet awakened to the enormity of the problem, and even the so-called experts – the doctors, the licensed chemical dependency counselors, and (especially) the law enforcement professionals – knew very little about it. These were the people I initially turned to for help, which they were more often than not unable to give.

So I set out to do my own research, and, this being the information age, it was not, as they say, rocket science. At the risk of sounding a bit elitist myself, if a sub-literate, dentally deficient bumpkin can master the delicate and dangerous chemistry of meth production, is it not conceivable that a reasonably well-educated software professional could look up some facts about the product?

I wrote this book because I strongly believe it tells a story that needs to be told. It is an open-ended tale, still unfolding on both the personal and global fronts, even as I write this. But from my perspective, it does have a clear beginning.

The story begins close to home, with someone who was once very close to me. I won’t begin with “once upon a time,” as it has been thoroughly used up. And the vote is still out on whether a “happily ever after” will ever come to pass.