Louis Rubino Jr. felt like he was going a million miles an hour.

Then he crashed.

At 24, Rubino had everything he wanted. He lived with the woman he loved and their 3-year-old daughter in a nice Lewiston apartment. He earned a good living, working full time unloading bricks from boxcars.

And he was a methamphetamine addict.

Being high was “the best feeling in the world,” he said.

And he had money.

He started cooking the illegal drug to feed his habit when his supplier couldn’t keep up with Rubino’s demand. The more he snorted, the more he needed to get high.

His dealer showed him how to make the potent crystals so Rubino could do it well, and safely. Most of the ingredients could be found at his home or at the drugstore. But, when mixed together, they could become so volatile that they could level a building.

One time, he accidentally put lithium the size of a dime in a cup of Gatorade. The resulting explosion sounded like a shotgun blast, he said.

A friend had peered into the cup at that moment. The explosion ripped a quarter-sized burn in his neck and scarred his face.

Had it been an entire jug full of the stuff, it could have been devastating, Rubino said.

“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere closer than looking through a pair of binoculars when that thing went off. And that’s the truth.”

A celebrity

Soon he became as addicted to making meth as he was to taking it.

When he produced more than he used, he sold the rest to his buddies. They followed him to the bathroom at work each morning. They would stumble in lazily and charge out full speed. When they were high, he and his co-workers doubled the number of bricks they would stack and bundle in a day, he said.

“They could friggin’ go run 20 miles and come back and still set brick faster than anybody that didn’t do it,” he said.

He felt like a celebrity.

And he was getting rich.

In addition to his $439 paycheck each week, he raked in $1,500 in drug sales. Only $100 went back into making the drug. A $50 sale for half a gram (the size of a match head) would keep a new user high for days.

He handed out $20 bills to friends running short on cash. He bought them packs of smokes.

At home, he lavished toys on his daughter, Dayla. He spent hundreds of dollars on trips to Wal-Mart two or three times a week. He paid his girlfriend’s college tuition. Made sure mother and daughter were clothed and fed.

He was popular at work and a good provider for his family, he thought.

No sleep

The stimulant would keep him going without sleep for a week at a time. He would crash for about six hours, then repeat the cycle of insomnia.

His girlfriend got angry because he wouldn’t sleep with her. Instead, he would watch her and their daughter sleep.

“I’d just be so high, I’d want to be up,” he said.

He also spent much of those early-morning hours cooking up batches of meth on his porch, he said. He didn’t want his family breathing the toxic fumes. Sometimes the cloud of vapor produced by the concoction was enough to fill a football field. It would float up and linger in the power lines.

With energy to spare, he cleaned the house incessantly. His daughter could walk the floors in white socks, never showing dirt, he boasted.

He knew he shouldn’t have been near her when he was high, he said, but at least he couldn’t be accused of neglect.

The crash

In late January, on a tip from one of his buyers, police raided Rubino’s second-floor apartment. They evacuated the building’s tenants. Several were rushed to a nearby hospital for observation, including Rubino’s daughter. The girl later was taken into state custody.

Rubino was charged with three felony drug counts, including trafficking. He also was charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

Later, in prison, Rubino said that hospital records would show his daughter’s medical evaluation revealed no ill effects resulting from his meth cooking.

He pleaded guilty to two of the felonies. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with all but four suspended. He was taken to Maine Correctional Center in Windham in May.

At his sentencing, Rubino apologized and told the judge his girlfriend and daughter meant more to him than anything in the world.

He is not the monster everyone thinks he is, he said.

In a cramped visiting room in Windham, the deafening clang of locking bars just outside the door, a seemingly changed Rubino talked about prospects for a new life.

Wearing black-framed glasses, blue jeans and a jean jacket, he jabbed at the air to punctuate his story. A guard sat in the corner in case Rubino had to be restrained, as had been necessary on several occasions during court appearances.

Off meth for nearly a year and on medication for bipolar disorder, Rubino was philosophical. He said his drug abuse started early. Prescribed Ritalin for hyperactivity as a child, he soon began self-medicating, first with alcohol, then with cocaine. Eventually, he stumbled on meth. A friend said it would help him work faster. It did. And he liked the feeling it gave him.

Not only was it the best high, but he also could make it himself.

He was not alone. Shortly after his arrest, another meth cooker was busted in Auburn.

“There’s an epidemic comin’,” Rubino said in the prison room. “And they’re not gonna be able to do anything about it … there’s too many people that like it.”

No exaggeration

That’s no exaggeration, experts say.

Although their numbers are relatively small compared to cocaine users, the population of meth addicts is on the rise, said Kimberly Johnson, director of the state’s Office of Substance Abuse.

“The trend is definitely up,” she said. She expects to see its popularity growing in the Twin Cities, where this type of drug, similar to cocaine, is in high demand.

A White House report released this week showed methamphetamine use is increasing along the East Coast after years of largely being confined to rural areas west of the Mississippi River.

In 2000, 17 people in Maine were admitted for treatment for methamphetamine abuse. In the fiscal year ending in June, 61 people had been treated, she said.

During the past four years, the number of arrests in which meth was the primary drug also has spiked.

The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency made 40 arrests in the past 12 months, compared to only three in the fiscal year ending in June 2002.

“I think it is a drug of serious, serious concern for the state,” said MDEA Director Roy McKinney. “It has a sufficient foothold to take off.”

The highly addictive stimulant targets the central nervous system. Unlike cocaine, where abusers feel as though they can do anything, meth gives them the physical energy to actually do it, “Like drinking too much coffee, a thousandfold,” Johnson said.

But its buzz comes at a price.

Over time, meth abuse, called “tweaking,” can trigger paranoia and delusions, she said. It also can spark violent rages. Meth abusers are more likely than coke addicts to commit criminal acts while high, she said.

Over the past year, seven meth labs in Maine were busted, some of the them – like Rubino’s – were found in urban settings.

That also scares authorities.

Cookers will make the drug anywhere they can – in apartments, garages, basements, on porches, even in cars. Not only is there the risk of explosion and toxic fumes, there’s also the environmental degradation caused by improper disposal of the byproducts, McKinney said.

In an effort to check the growing number of homemade meth labs springing up in Maine, the Legislature passed a law limiting the sale of over-the-counter drugs containing pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in meth. Lawmakers forced stores to keep those drugs behind the counter. Congress also has passed measures aimed at clamping down on meth labs.

Law enforcement is fighting back with a highly skilled team of police officers (including two from the Twin Cities) and chemists throughout Maine who are trained in spotting and safely dismantling meth labs in the state.

Those actions should reduce the amount of homemade product, but likely won’t halt the spread of the drug, McKinney said. So-called superlabs are shipping meth into the state to fill the gap and feed the growing demand, he said.

The future

Rubino is working at understanding why he became a meth addict. He meets with a therapist regularly in prison and plans to enroll in parenting classes.

During the raid on their apartment, his girlfriend, Donna Pagnani, was charged with possession and trafficking along with Rubino. Those charges were later dropped.

She was an innocent bystander, he said. She always hated his habit and forbade him from cooking in their apartment.

“She’s just suffering the travesty of my actions,” he said.

Despite that, his girlfriend and daughter have been coming to visit. His daughter thinks he is “on vacation.” He’ll tell her the truth when she’s older, he said.

Meanwhile, he and his girlfriend discuss their future.

They’ll “never live this life again,” she has told him. “My girlfriend’s made that very clear to me.”

When he gets out of prison, he’ll likely leave the state. Try to start over. He wants to own a diner. He likes helping people, he said.

But his family is his reason for his getting out of bed each morning in his prison cell. Without them, he doubts he can stay clean and sober.

“I just know myself that I won’t make it very far without her in my life full time with my daughter.” he said.

“My daughter’s 3 years old, and I’ve only been in her life nine months. That’s not too good. I don’t want to be known to my daughter as a failure. I want to fix it and raise her right.”

He said he plans to work hard and finish putting his girlfriend through college. He won’t do drugs and won’t drink alcohol again, he said.

“We’ll live our lives, and this will be just one big nightmare and we’ll have woken up from it.”