Big Sky Film: “Montana Meth”

By Tad Sooter, 2-13-07

Since taking his first hit of methamphetamine more than a decade ago, 22-year-old “Weasel” has been hopelessly addicted to the drug and easy money he makes dealing it.

“I know it’s all going to come to an end, and it’s all going to come crashing down,” he says. “If I remembered who gave it to me the first time I did it, I’d probably want to shoot them.”

Weasel is one of the addicts whose voices make the film Montana Meth a disturbing yet compassionate look into Montana’s methamphetamine underworld. The film, set to premiere with a free public screening Thursday at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, was made through a collaboration between the Montana Meth Project and HBO Documentary Films.

While the Meth Project uses grotesque images of toothless meth addicts and dark alleys on its billboards and television ads to scare teens away from trying the drug, filmmaker Eames Yates succeeds in humanizing the meth problem. The young addicts he follows in Montana Meth describe their devastated lives with astonishing honesty.  They talk about stealing from family and friends and selling their bodies to get high. A young mother remembers smoking meth during her pregnancy, knowing that even one hit could kill her baby. But even as they see their lives melt away, the addiction is too powerful for them to stop using.

“I feel so good right now, better than any sober person has ever felt their whole entire life,” says an addict in Kalispell after injecting a shot of meth into a vein in her neck. “That’s what they don’t know.”

Montana Meth surveys the impact of the drug in towns across Montana.  Judges and policemen in the Flathead Valley tell how meth-related convictions are overflowing state prisons and doctors in Billings show how a meth addict’s body wastes away. On the Crow Reservation a recovering addict compares the wave of meth use among the tribal youth to the small pox epidemic.

Still, the strongest voice is that of the users themselves.  The film is most successful in allowing viewers to empathize with the victims of meth and understand that the addiction is too strong for anyone to fight alone.

Montana Meth premieres Thursday, Feb. 15, at 6:15 p.m. at the Wilma Theatre, followed by Q&A with Eames Yates at 7:30 p.m.