A Personal Experience with Neighbors Who Were Busted for Crystal Meth: How I Learned to Recognize Meth Labs and Meth Users

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Several years ago I rented a house in a mid-sized town in Missouri. The neighborhood was one that real estate agents diplomatically refer to as “mature.” In fact, the neighborhood was one of the oldest in this little town called St. Joseph, right along the banks of the Missouri River. It was the kind of place where people had owned their homes for generations. It was in a state of decline, but the entire town has long been in such a state and there is no place that is safe from crime.

I suspect that the house I rented was a former drug house of some kind. Once the police came to the door at around 5 a.m. They shined a bright light through my bedroom before banging on the door. They quickly realized that they had either the wrong house or the wrong resident, anyway, and left. On other occasions I had strange visitors at my door at night.

About that time an entire family had been slain by drug dealers from Kansas City when the lady of the house opened the door to a strange knock. They had the wrong house and they killed an innocent family. I don’t recall if the killers were ever caught.

I ran a little book store and I recall a number of strange-looking people from the neighborhood who came in. I knew when I saw some these hollow-eyed people that they were drug users of some kind. But, I didn’t think much about it. It was a fact of life in this town that had been hit hard by bad economic policies that affected agriculture and manufacturing over the years. Not just NAFTA and GATT, but the floods in the early nineties had caused a lot of businesses to flee and high taxes and the lack of a work force discouraged new interests from taking route. It was a hard place to do business. It was a hard place to even keep a job, in fact. The town has always been a place of despair in my mind.

None of this is said to excuse the widespread use of drugs in the town, however, just to explain what kind of place it is. Situated between Kansas City, MO and Omaha, NE, it has been a stop-over for drug traffickers from the bigger cities for years. The most recent statistic I recall reading was that there was that the city officials estimated that they had an average of one meth lab on every square city block.