An Interview with a Meth Dealer | Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller

Foreign [Music] [Music] Hi, I'm Mariana. How are you doing? Fantastic! How many people are you expecting to come tonight? You have a phone full of messages. Yes, tons of them—50 messages. [Music] And everyone there, they're trying to buy drugs from you. I double in a lot of different communities. The freaks come out tonight.

This is Mike, a meth dealer from Austin. He tells me he's been dealing meth for more than five years. He doesn't like his clients knowing where he lives. "Hey girl," so he posts up at a hotel for what he refers to as a cattle call. So who's coming up now? "Mr. Pink." After some convincing, Mike allows us to watch as he conducts deals on a very busy Friday night.

"So can I get with, uh, two, a tree, where the front? You want some Crystal meth?" "Yes, okay, thank you." So there comes... It seems like every deal is interrupted by another call from another customer. The last time meth was this popular, Mike was in elementary school. It's called Crank, Crystal, or Speed. Federal officials say more than 12 million Americans have tried it once. "Once you get that high, you just want more and more and more."

In the late 90s and early 2000s, a new type of drug epidemic began playing out on local news stations across the country. "This is the results of a meth lab exploding." When they weren't killing themselves, amateur chemists were cooking meth from a toxic mix of household chemicals and over-the-counter cold medicine. It was a DIY phenomena that produced one of the most addictive drugs ever seen and one of the best TV series ever made. "This is Art. Mr. White." "Actually, it's just basic chemistry, but thank you." "Jesse, I'm glad it's acceptable."

It was an epidemic that was devastating rural White America. Perhaps the most lasting images from those days were put together by a sheriff's deputy in Oregon—a series of before and after mugshots of users that became known simply as the Faces of Meth.

Foreign. But as I talked to some of Mike's clients in Austin, they surprise me. "I try to keep a semi-like together appearance. I don't look like somebody from pieces of math." "And your mom?" "I am not, in a million years, would I think that you use meth." "Well, I appreciate that. I think because I think there is a certain stigma that we're all like Toothless and eating people when we don't sleep for 10 days."

"I have an education, and I have a job." "You're a lawyer?" "Yes, ISO cars." "Actually, you're able to function and hold a job?" "Yes, I was an interior designer in a very affluent part of town." "And you're able to work?" "Yeah." "How often do you use meth, and why do you use it?" "That's all I'd want to do. This is what I do."

[Music] The demographics of meth users may have changed, but the control the drug asserts over those users has not. It comes from the power of dopamine. Meth unleashes a concentrated high to the pleasure sensors of the brain and explains why it's so easy for users of any background to become addicted.

"How do you do it?" "I inject it." "Is that a more dangerous way of doing it or more powerful?" "It's more addictive, I would say. It's not even a decision. It's like a loop you just can't get off of. You just reach for it. I've basically learned how to be a high functioning addict."

Mike is an addict too. When he's not dealing, he's often using. His relationship with meth has been a roller coaster. "I had three houses, two cars, and lost it all—homeless on the streets for four years." "Have you done time in prison?" "I have three felonies for drug possession. If I catch another one, I'm gone. It's a license. I made a promise to my mother that I would be here to take care of her, and I'm going to keep that."

Mike and his clients are some of the new faces of meth. I want to understand why meth is making such a comeback and where it's all coming from. [Music] Thank you.