ID: meth scene, meth son

From the Times-News, a compassionate yet unsentimental portrait of how methamphetamine is corroding life for one Twin Falls family:

Meth mom fights to take back her street - Son, accused of BLM burglary, sobers to reality of meth use

(Laurray Larsen) faces multiple problems, and each is getting worse...

But at least James Larsen, her 22-year-old son whom she had arrested to break his meth addiction, is not dead. The arrest was, after all, the last thing she thought she could do to save his life. On Friday morning, she visited him in jail...

"There ain't nothing to do but tell him it's going to be OK," she said. "But I don't think it's going to be OK."

James has been removed from the Twin Falls meth scene, but it skips along without him, particularly around the intersection of Eden and Third Avenue West. Larsen was once told if she can't handle the heat in a neighborhood increasingly plagued with drug-related crime, she should just get out. On Friday, she made it clear she is not ready to do that...

In jail, James' sobriety is bittersweet. As meth flushed from his veins, James drowned into an overwhelming fatigue, sleeping for the better part of his first week in jail. Then the numbness broke, his senses returned as he awakened into a cursed awareness of his reality.

"I'm stuck in the dark trying to find the light switch," James said, calling the Times-News from the jail. "I don't even know what's going on... I am more violent," he says weakly. "I just do whatever -- selling a little. After a while it was the only thing left to do, go and get high. I just didn't care anymore. If I had a gun in my hand that day (of the arrest) I would have shot a cop..."

Read it to decide: just more of that "completely overblown" meth myth media hype, or an honest view from a reporter talking with real people about their real problems?