Theroux in the city of the damned

BY JANE BOWRON

OPINION: A cheery "Hi, I'm Louis", as he extends his paw for a handshake to a low lifer, seems to get Louis Theroux a long way in his forays into underworlds.

And so it was on TV One's Monday night Real Crime: Louis Theroux: The City Addicted to Crystal Meth (9.30pm) when the social commentator/journalist and all-round nosey-parker voyeur, visited Fresno, the city one drug user interviewed proudly crowned "the crystal meth capital of the world".

There was much to learn here for Kiwi viewers who witness the carnage from P on the news every other night. For example, on Wednesday's 6pm bulletins the first story up on both channels was the seizure of one of the biggest hauls of P to hit Wellington, allegedly found in the suitcase of a 54-year-old grandmother at the airport.

When a reporter showed us a small plastic fast food takeaway-sized box, three-quarters filled with a soggy yellowish substance, it boggled the mind that this relatively small amount was worth so much - taking into account the discrepancies in the valuation of illegal substances from the boasting constabulary and the dubious demi- monde.

Part of Theroux's success is his ability to insert himself into all walks of life as he hovers on the threshold of dens of inequity, politely conveying that both he and the BBC mean no harm to The Other's planet.

To say that Fresno looked like the city of the dammed, peopled by creatures who behaved as figures in a contemporary interpretation of a Bosch painting, was an understatement.

To imagine that after screening the first-hand, drug-inspired, spontaneous confessions of users, that the police would airily grant them immunity from prosecution on the grounds that they had provided human research in drug education would be naive.

So it was a lose-lose situation in talking to Theroux, however many did, till an increasingly grim-faced Theroux admitted he was at risk of becoming desensitised to the moving tide of human misery where the stories were a horrid template to be fitted over each twisted face.

Most interesting of those singled out for perusal were Carl and Dianne, a couple who had been using for more than 30 years.

Theroux found Carl at a needle swap hook-up point where the veteran drug user told the film maker that he used up to four times a day. But he looks so well, those watching and Theroux would have immediately thought.

To add to the confusion that the face of crystal meth didn't necessarily have to be down and out, Carl took Theroux home to meet wife Dianne.

The house was humble but as neat as two pins and somehow, even though Dianne had been sexually feasted upon by drug dealers at the age of 12, she still had a softness to her, and a profound insight about her addiction that she hated not being clean but didn't like being clean either.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Dianne, like every female P user interviewed, appeared to stoically accept her life limitations as she was held hostage to the pull of the pernicious drug.

Only when Theroux inquired about the whereabouts and wellbeing of their children did the fragile masks of these barely coping women crack, as images of their progeny flashed upon their inward eye and tore them apart with bullets of guilt and shame.

One of the effects of the drug, which induces "unbridled sexual activity", has been to produce a crop, a piteous harvest, of children born to be abandoned to social welfare or grandparents.

Appalled, we watched as a completely disconnected young man was arrested at his grandmother Barbara's house as she came out from the paint-peeled walls and told Theroux that her daughter - the young man's mother - had also walked the crystal line. Barbara had sacrificed 19 years of her life to raising grandchildren she pretty much knew could never make it in the killing fields of Fresno.

Hopelessness and a lack of focus were catching, with Theroux admitting that: "While I wanted to experience the lifestyle, I hadn't thought much about what I'd do with it when I got there."

Only Carl and Dianne, who held hard to their story that they were soulmates, had some sort of direction - to keep breathing for each other, bearing in mind that Carl had once stood by the door to keep watch as Dianne turned a trick to raise the readies to score.

"He swims in a sea of denial," Dianne, the brighter of the two explained, without any trace of bitterness.

In summing up, as Theroux was duty- bound to do, he believed that crystal meth offered primitive pain relief to generations suffering from insurmountable past traumas.

That pain relief in turn brought a fresher, nastier pain that had the city by the throat, devouring the potential of its populace. The war was being carried out in every home, it had become the real terrorist.

- © Fairfax NZ News