Speed Addicts at Home in ‘The Rock’

Police call it The Rock because of its relative isolation. Residents call it home because of its relaxed pace and affordable housing. And methamphetamine addicts from all over call it an easy place to score.

Reporting District 1688, a semirural neighborhood at the base of the Verdugo Hills with a mix of modest single-family houses, new and old apartment buildings and a commercial strip along Foothill Boulevard, is the speed capital of the San Fernando Valley.

That distinction is nothing new for Sunland-Tujunga, but recently the Los Angeles Police Department singled out RD 1688 in a series of violent-crime reports for its high level of narcotics activity as well as the numerous thefts addicts commit to support their habit.

Although no recent statistics were available to bolster the report’s assessment of the region, it has also been identified by narcotics officers as one of the Valley’s hot spots for drugs.

Officers who patrol the area maintain that speed freaks are only a small percentage of Sunland-Tujunga’s population, but they acknowledge that RD 1688’s tranquillity is shattered by the users and sellers of the drug.

“You don’t have to look very hard; they’re everywhere around here,” said Officer John Smith, who walks a beat there. “And when you (arrest) a user, you are probably getting a burglar, too” because hard-core methamphetamine users need money for drugs but are usually too strung out to work.

On almost any day, speed users--commonly called “tweakers” because of their trademark nervousness and paranoia--troll the narrow streets off Tujunga Canyon Boulevard, between Commerce and Marcus avenues, for a fix.

Most snort or smoke the relatively inexpensive drug, which comes in powder or rock form, but some inject it after heating it into a liquid. Shooting it is particularly self-destructive, police say, because even in its liquid form methamphetamine has gobs that can pass through a syringe and into the bloodstream, rupturing veins.

In a mini-mall parking lot on Foothill Boulevard, a thin man with a nervous twitch attested to the drug’s lure.

“It’s bad,” he said, claiming to have kicked his four-year habit the previous day. “But it’s hard to stop. It’s like, when you’re high on it, you don’t worry too much.”

“Now,” he said, “I’m worrying.”

Longtime residents say Sunland-Tujunga once was the center of a thriving methamphetamine manufacturing industry that earned it the nickname of “Speedland.” But police say the current drug problem is almost entirely based on sales and consumption.

“We’re only dealing with the small-time dealers and users out here,” said Smith. “The labs are up in Palmdale or Temecula now.”

The move, police say, was precipitated by a rash of housing and commercial developments that began to encroach on the previous seclusion of back-yard and kitchen drug-manufacturing operations. But ironically, it was some of the residents of those new apartment complexes who became the drug’s clientele.

Today, the area with the most severe narcotics problem is centered around a cluster of apartment buildings along Commerce, Samoa and Pinewood avenues, according to police.

At an abandoned house between two apartment complexes, Officer Jay Philips, the LAPD’s senior lead officer in the area, points to signs that indicate the place has recently been an addict’s hovel.

The house, its white paint cracked and peeling, is nearly empty, but dirty. On the floors of the front room and a bedroom are beer cans that have been cut at the bottom to serve as makeshift stoves for cooking speed or heroin.

Calculators left on a kitchen counter have probably been stolen in a residential robbery, Philips deduces. A stained mattress on a dirty floor is likely where the occupants slept when their highs wore off. The non-working toilet is backed up, full of excrement and stinking.

At an apartment building next door, a man sits on a wall--a drug dealer’s lookout, Philips said.

For several minutes, the man watches, shifting his eyes from the cop to a window in an upstairs apartment. Finally, when Philips is interrupted by a passerby, the man disappears inside.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Philips said later. “We can’t stop someone without suspicious cause. And just sitting there is not enough.”

Philips, a 17-year law-enforcement veteran, has patrolled the area for about two years but has been the senior lead officer for only a month.

Typical dealers are not easy to catch, he explains, because they sell only to those they know.

Officers say The Rock’s remoteness, plus the fact that a high percentage of people grow up there and never leave, has made Tujunga an insular place. For speed dealers and their customers, the isolation translates into full-blown paranoia about outsiders.

“People don’t want to move from here,” Philips said. “There is a joke about tweakers . . . that none of them have ever gone south of the (Foothill Freeway) or east of Lowell Avenue,” the border with Glendale.

The dealers, Smith added, “have got lifelong customers. Their customers live here. They went to school together. They live next door to each other. The brother is married to the guy down the street’s sister. . . . When a stranger comes around, they are automatically suspect.”

But while dealers are hard to catch, users are not.

Although speed has gone mainstream--even becoming popular with suburban teen-age girls seeking a diet aid--in Sunland-Tujunga, the drug’s users fit more closely with the drug’s old stereotype as “blue-collar cocaine.” They tend to be white men, often thin, who sport tattoos and drive motorcycles or fast cars with big engines.

Standing on a street of single-family houses one afternoon, three police officers compared notes about how to spot a speed addict.

“Just look for the guy who is jittery, sweating a lot,” Smith said.

“And whose face is covered with sores from scratching, and their teeth are bad because the drug eats the enamel off,” said Eric Jones, his partner.

“And they are very nervous, always looking around,” said Philips. “And notorious for guns and being violent.”

Said Smith: “And they have to have marijuana on them. . . . It’s like a security blanket for them. They are so paranoid, they figure, ‘If I leave it at home, someone’s going to steal it, but if I take it with me, they can’t.”’

Philips said he is certain that speed is sold out of many of the area’s businesses as well as apartment buildings and houses. He and his officers know the names and locations of these enterprises--the problem is catching the sellers in the act.

Apartment owners and managers say they, too, feel powerless.

“It’s not like we can check out a person’s character before they move in,” said Rita Damwijk, manager of the 32-unit Samoan Apartments on Samoa Avenue. The complex had long been plagued with drug problems, she said, but both the building and the neighborhood have changed for the better.

“I would have never taken the job if the apartment had been run down and with drugs,” she said. “I don’t want people to think this is some kind of a raunchy place and not want to move in. It’s just certain streets.” Said Herbert Blinn, the building’s owner: “The trouble is holding on to the good ones and getting rid of the bad ones. There’s no way you can get rid of a drug dealer if he pays his rent.”

Later, when police officers approach an apartment building on Tujunga Canyon, two men who are sitting outside begin to whistle. Immediately, three or four open doors slam shut.

Still, Philips said, most of the area is cooperative with law enforcement. There is an active neighborhood watch, and a recent community meeting with police attracted about 70 people, he said. “This community, these people up here are real pro-police.”

The community’s cooperation has dropped RD 1688 from being the Foothill Division’s leader in burglaries of motor vehicles last year--with hundreds of thefts--to the scene of fewer than a dozen since the first of the year.

The thieves “would hit all the vehicles in an apartment parking garage,” Philips said. “There’s a problem when you have a lot of people living closer together . . . and 98% of the crime, not only here, but almost everywhere, revolves around drugs.”

Philips said Linda Nelson has been one of the most active members of the community since moving there about five months ago. When he drove to her house recently, she pointed out an apartment building across the street where she said there was a drug sale the night before. Next to it, she identified two young men in a red car as gang members.

Next door to Nelson’s place, the tenants of half a dozen cottages have been evicted and the buildings are being remodeled. The location was so bad, police said, that a garage there served as a disassembly plant for stolen vehicles, whose parts were sold for drugs.

“Before I moved up here, I had no sympathy for South-Central,” Nelson said. “But now my heart bleeds for them. This is like living in South-Central L.A.”

Others disagree, saying that at least the drug dealing is not obvious. “They just do it among themselves, so no one really knows until the police show up,” said a woman at the Hillhaven Apartments who asked not to be identified.

She, like many others, said that despite the problems, most people like the area and want to stay.

“There’s a lot of good things about this place,” she said. “It’s a good place, it has its moments. You see the police walking around and it makes you feel good.”