Kathleena may have been pretty once. But today her face is a blotchy rictus grin. Her eyes are hollowed out. Her long hair blows in the stiff afternoon wind like black eels anchored unevenly to her head.

Kathleena was walking briskly down the street scratching her head and talking to herself. When she stops to talk, she doesn’t really stop. She’s fidgeting. A big flaking gold Lincoln rolls by slowly and two dudes honk the horn and yell something at her in Spanish. She turns her back to them, grits her teeth and closes her eyes.

Kathleena says she spends a lot of her time hanging around a motel on North Fremont or taking long brisk walks through the neighborhood around the Monterey County Fairgrounds looking for meth or for funds to procure meth.

A 30-something tweaker who says she used to be a nurse, Kathleena may have been pretty once. But today she’s completely bent by the drug. Her face is a blotchy rictus grin. Her eyes are hollowed out. Her long hair blows in the stiff afternoon wind like black eels anchored unevenly to her head.

But perhaps more concerning than her appearance is the look in her eyes and the things that come out of her mouth.

You get the impression that there is a stiff cold wind blowing inside her anguished head and it’s pushing images out—things that would make William Burroughs blush. A conversation with Kathleena is like watching a television being switched back and forth from a confessional documentary to some kind of ungodly death porn.

According to Kathleena, whose Tourettic conversational style doesn’t exactly instill a great deal of confidence, she grew up on the Peninsula and graduated from a local high school in 1989. She says she drank and smoked weed and did the occasional line of coke through her teens and most of her 20s. But at some point in her late 20s, she was given a line of crank at a party and it was “the best and greatest fucking fucking greatest ever.”

She moved in with a guy who dealt the stuff in Marina and evidently it’s been downhill from there. Yet despite the grim portrait of meth abuse that Kathleena has become, she does have moments of lucidity. Just before she continues down the street, she looks real sad and says, “It’s not as bad as all that, it’s not as bad as all that.”

But it is as bad as all that. To get an idea of how bad, read the endless pages of chilling confessionals on the Internet. The Web is full of methamphetamine catharsis from every imaginable segment of society.

Yet, while they demonize the drug, many meth users can’t help but continue to rave about how wonderful it feels; how unbelievably great prolonged sex can be on the stuff; how overwhelming that sense of superpower is.

“James” is a professional headhunter making six figures a year in the Bay Area. He also uses speed almost every day of his life and says there are millions like him.

“I couldn’t do what I do without it,” he says. “In this day and age we’re expected to work 80 to 100 hours a week. Man, this is just a postmodern tool for a postmodern world. If it gets to be too much, back off it. I recognize that some people can’t do that and that’s why they end up losing everything. But for most of us, speed is just a really wicked cup of coffee.”

James likes to point to artists and writers like Jack Kerouac or Ken Kesey who allegedly cranked out masterpieces over the course of days on speed.

“The stuff was engineered for WWII fighter pilots. Governments created it to create super-efficient soldiers,” James says. “Well, here I am, baby. The direct descendent.”