"Journalist Owen takes readers on a trip into the world(s) of methamphetamines, from the cook houses in rural and small-town Missouri to latter-day suppliers in Mexico to users across America. In this highly personal travelog of meth making, selling, using, and abusing, Owens shows how a little-known drug first popular with bikers and truckers became a national scourge. In doing so, he debunks many myths about meth addiction and supposed meth-induced...

Jazz musician Danny Parker's wife was murdered, and Danny was powerless to prevent it. The heartbroken trumpet player is on the skids, lost in the lifestyle of Los Angeles' derelict tweakers. Or is he? In Danny's world nothing - most of all Danny - is what it seems.

Walter White, a one-time mild-mannered chemistry teacher whose transformation into a deadly criminal, kicks into overdrive.

Manufacturing just 50 grams of meth in China will earn you a death sentence. Timmy Choi just got caught making tons. Now he's in the custody of Captain Zhang, and has one chance to avoid execution - turn informant and help the cops bring down the powerful cartel he's been cooking for. Over the next 72 sleepless hours, the sting spins out of control, the line between duty and recklessness is blurred, and it becomes unclear who actually has the upper...

The author details his immersion in a world of hardcore drugs, revealing the mental and physical depths of addiction, and the violent relapse one summer in California that forever changed his life, leading him down the road to recovery.