Bloody crystal.

As research for my current novel, I interviewed a West Hollywood, Calif., sheriffs deputy who told me a story that chilled my blood. Recently he and his partner responded to a complaint from a cab driver who couldn't get rid of a particularly obnoxious passenger.

When they arrived at the scene, the out-of-control passenger bolted into the middle of traffic. The deputies grabbed the man and wrestled him back to the sidewalk, where they realized they were covered in blood. One of the man's feet was lying next to them on the sidewalk; the man had no idea that it had detached from his body.

The deputies traced the man's previous whereabouts to a gay nightclub, where a reluctant bartender finally gave them an explanation. After closing time, the taxi passenger, the bartender, and several others had decided to have sex on top of the pool table. During the proceedings, one of them decided to try twisting the taxi passenger's foot against the force of his anklebone. Apparently, he succeeded in twisting the man's foot through several revolutions before the skin tore and the bone snapped. The collective response was to put the man in a cab.

All of the men in question were high on crystal meth.

Crystal meth is old news to many of us. Since the 1990s, the wasting, wild-eyed "tweaker" has become a fixture on sidewalks of urban gay centers throughout the country. New York's gay nightlife has been vastly altered by the drug: Where bllssed-out ravers once offered hugs and light sticks, lockjawed sex addicts now offer bug-eyed glares and brazenly explicit propositions.

To view the popularity of crystal meth among gay men in a historical context is to invite some deeply disturbing comparisons. Amphetamines and their cheap and easily manufactured stepchild, crystal meth, have long been used by bloody despots and cold-blooded killers. Adolf Hitler is reported to have taken nine to 10 injections of amphetamines a day. Outlaw biker gangs introduced crystal meth to California's Central Valley in the 1980s. Timothy McVeigh was said to have been a habitual user while drawing up plans to bomb Oklahoma City's federal building.

Now the drug of outlaw bikers has taken up long-term residence at gay bathhouses. Some attendees of this coming Easter's White Party in Palm Springs, Calif., will be amped up on the same drug that coursed through the veins of Matthew Shepard's killers as they tied him to a fence post.

Crystal doesn't cause murderous violence, but it is the undisputed drug of choice for calculating killers. My West Hollywood sheriffs deputy assures me that alcohol deserves the blame for most of this country's random acts of violence. But nothing about Hitler and McVeigh was random. These were men with fatal runnel vision, an ability to divorce themselves from all forms of empathy and compassion in the pursuit of bloody strikes against a threat they had magnified 10 times over in their minds. How much crystal meth aided them in this endeavor is a question we will have to ask their ghosts.

I have had my own experiences with substance abuse, but not meth. The one time I did it, I felt like I had landed in an Edward Hopper painting: Time collapsed, the world lost all texture, everything inside me wanted out. So I cannot answer for those gay men who are trapped in the grip of this drug. But unlike so many other drugs that narcotize the user into a state of blissful detachment, crystal meth is about big plans. I want to know what the plan is.

The continuing presence of crystal meth in the gay community has introduced a never-before-seen level of calculated violence and self-destruction. I'm not saying that pursuit of sexual excess belongs in the same category as domestic terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and hate crimes--the resulting damage is primarily self-inflicted. But then I remember the taxi passenger's foot flying across Santa Monica Boulevard, and I wonder if crystal's toll on gay people will be just as bloody as the rule of any murderous tyrant.