Crank: Made in America

Drugs may wreck families, but they don’t always tear them apart. Just ask Terri. She gets whacked on crank with her son and his friends all the time. (Did we say time? We meant quality time). Terri and her family are just a few of the helpless Iowa natives battling methamphetamine addiction in HBO’s Crank. Apart from chronicling the devastation the drug wreaks up close, Crank offers a brief history of meth, from its early days as a seemingly harmless pep pill to its current incarnation as monster of the Midwest. (You closet chemists will enjoy the “Nazi” method for producing meth—using over-the-counter and fertilizing products—to cultivate your own special breed of crank-heads!) The exposé culminates with an accelerated look at the destruction of a young woman’s physical appearance over the course of 10 years on the drug—think Britney Spears to Phyllis Diller in under a decade. It’s not the most pleasant hour, but the wretched human decay that a documentary like Crank profiles is infinitely more powerful than those “The more you know…” spots on NBC—and without anyone from the cast of Will and Grace. That’s what sequels are for.