Contact High Tracing: Part III
Contact High Tracing -
Part III: Have You Heard About the Drugs Shoved Into the Incinerators?
A stained glass dome cut a perfect ring at the peak of the massive steel structure I’d just entered at the behest of Steve, the volunteer at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, and his terrier-mix Toby. The doors to the towering building are usually locked, but Steve, as promised, had let me inside. “We’re lucky the sun’s peaking out today,” Steve said. The past few late-fall days had seen a ceiling of clouds filling the valley, but today the inversion had broken early and the plastic and metal cover that shields the inside of the teepee burner from the elements was illuminated. Sunlight penetrated the gaps between the sheet metal walls. The burner is used for storage now, 50 years after it was retired and eventually moved down the Bitterroot Valley to the museum grounds. Dust covered boxes circled the walls. A horse-drawn carriage and riding lawnmower squared off across the gravel floor. Toby jerked toward the opened door. “Something’s spooking him,” Steve said.
I’d come to the museum to try to better understand an industry that had once dominated the west and was a crucial component, too, of the story I was chasing. Gary’s father, like many Missoula fathers of a certain age, had worked at one of the region’s many lumber mills. It was at the mill, Gary said, his father had seens police burn drugs in the teepee burner.
After leaving me with next steps for fixing our twenty-year-old hot tub and an intoxicating story, I’d been unable to get in touch with Gary, leaving me with a $500 piece of circuitry baffling me as much as his parting anecdote. My neighbor Larry, who lives just up Jumbo’s eastern slope from us, came to Missoula from Butte around the time teepee burners were phased out. When I asked him about the story from across my back fence, Larry just shook his head, let out a small chuckle, and said, “I’ve never heard that one before, but I could see it happening.” He then wanted to tell me about the hundreds of miles of mines below Butte where opium was prepared to be sent to cities across the Midwest and beyond. It seems everyone knows a drug legend in Montana.
Unable to verify Gary’s claims, I started to explore the teepee burners that were once a ubiquitous presence in the west. Missoula’s main valley alone housed eleven sawmills and their contingent waste incinerators. Additional burners could be found up the Bitterroot and Blackfoot Valleys to the respective south and east of Missoula. One of the Bitterroot teepee burners, upon decommissioning, made its way to a fairground where it was used for storage and as a symbol of a bygone era. After becoming a safety hazard (in the immediate sense, anyway), the burner was deconstructed and moved to the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula where it once again towers 45 feet above the Bitterroot River, only now sharing the grounds and air above it with a reconstructed wildfire lookout tower.
After exiting the teepee burner that November morning with Steve, I circled the rust-red metal structure slowly, craning my neck to see the top. I thought about how at one point, these teepee burners might have been the tallest structures in the area, their smoke serving as a waypoint for travelers. I noticed the abandoned forestry equipment—ancient tractors and bulldozers, and a medieval-looking apparatus called a drag-chain scarifier—lined around the burner, likely to make use of the space but seeming to signify a posture of worship. It’s not hard to imagine the teepee burner as a sort of wrathful deity, one demanding a sacrifice. Since the passage of the Clean Air Act spelled the end of the burners, sawmills began manufacturing composite lumber products— plywood, for example—with the byproducts of their operations. Some mills, like the massive operation in Bonner, had already transitioned to producing wood chips for the Hoerner-Waldorf papermill west of Missoula in Frenchtown. Before that, though, the wood chips and sawdust left over went into the burner and then into the air in the valleys around it. It was that, or be buried in the byproducts of the milling process.
Not unlike the open-air burn pits in overseas military bases that have left veterans’ lungs scarred, teepee burners caused far more problems than they solved. The combined output of the Missoula-area burners, plus the plume emitting from the papermill, left Missoula with some of the worst air quality in the nation. Street lamps and car headlights burned all day long to pierce the hazy darkness.
Eventually I stood in a large covered pavilion to admire a recreated steam-powered sawmill and avoid the drizzle from the clouds that had returned since my laps around the teepee burner. As I attempted to imagine how the various contraptions coordinated to manufacture lumber, I found myself thinking about how sausage is made—not the process as much as the metaphor—the idea that there are truths better left unknown. The clothes we wear, the politicians we vote for, the fact that same-day delivery is even an option—our modern era is full of systems and processes that may be best left unexplored. The alternative, the metaphor implies, is we would no longer be able to stomach wearing some clothes, supporting certain candidates, or shopping at Walmart or Amazon.
The vanished mills of Missoula once powered the region’s economy, but now, the final two in the county have closed in just the past few months. In their closure announcement, Pyramid Lumber in Seeley Lake cited a dissipating workforce squeezed by an unaffordable housing market. Far more folks sling legal weed these days, and far more dispensaries dot the valleys than lumber mills ever did.
The next day, I drove the trash can down our narrow dirt road to where the pavement begins. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit’s “Something to Love” played on the stereo, and he’d just sung the line, “Old men with old guitars smoking Winston Lights,” when my neighbor pulled up, his window down, a pack of Winstons in his cup holder. Mike is a minor celebrity in this valley east of town. Well into his 70s and rarely without a lit cigarette teetering from a grimace, Mike has lived in two houses in his life: the one across the street from my family, and another in the Bonner a couple miles northeast at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Big Blackfoot. It’s rare Mike stops to talk, so I took the chance to ask him about Gary’s legend. “You ever hear about cops burning drugs in the teepee burners?” I asked. Like many old-timers in the area, he’d heard the tale but didn’t know if it was true. He asserted that few in the area knew about marijuana before the Vietnam War, a claim backed up by some of the millworkers I met. As one of them put it, “The only people with drugs back then were doctors’ kids.”
I mention this run-in for two reasons: one, I felt like a real Montanan for a moment as our two vehicles blocked the road, idling while we chatted; and two, it reminds me that threads of this story I’m investigating are all over. I need only to pay attention, watch for slight shifts, and try to find some approximation of the truth.
It’s not inconceivable cops in Missoula used teepee burners to dispose of contraband. I’ve heard stories of seized drugs being burned in steel mills in Ohio and in remote fields in California. The website for a crematorium in Lincoln, Nebraska, includes an FAQ page dedicated solely to the subject of burning narcotics—Yes, Evidence bags and brick packaging can be destroyed with the narcotics [sic]. Our crematory will be able to burn straight through the wrapping, boxes and/or bags. For a while, Missoula County’s contraband was sent to Butte where it was destroyed in a specialized incinerator that “burns at a minimum temperature of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit,” according to an Associated Press story. Proof some headlines do write themselves, the article is titled “Building housing drug incinerator catches fire in Butte.”
Despite the temporary setbacks, it makes sense the state of Montana would want to destroy their seized drugs in-house. Hiring private contractors for the practice is costly and, as the US Drug Enforcement Agency learned in Houston, requires a public bidding process. This resulted in the DEA releasing a public statement that read, in part, that they “appreciate local citizens’ willingness to offer their help,” but that they require contractors capable of destroying up to 1,000 pounds of marijuana an hour.
Like many of the contacts I’ve spoken with, I’m inclined to believe the first part of Gary’s story holds water. I can imagine Missoula County Sheriff's Office officials—who like the city and county officials I spoke with found the story amusing yet unverifiable—staring at crowded evidence lockers and then looking out their downtown office windows and seeing the plume from the burner at Polley’s Lumber Mill—which was located in what’s now called the Old Sawmill District across the river. Some problems solve themselves, they’d think. Out with the old and in with the new.
The assertion anyone got high from drugs burned in Missoula teepee burners is laughable. The notion of contact highs can be traced back decades. Sometimes referred to as “hotboxing,” the idea is that it’s possible to feel the effects of a drug by passively breathing in its smoke. In 2015 professors at John Hopkins University proved—scientifically—that “[u]nder extreme, unventilated conditions, secondhand cannabis smoke exposure can produce detectable levels of THC in blood and urine,” ergo a contact high. Not that most people needed this study to convince them of this fact, any more than twelve college students needed to score weed from their professors. Noting national trends, Baltimore recently decriminalized possession of any amount of marijuana. Perhaps they were also looking to save money on contracts to burn confiscated drugs.
Even with the inversion at its worst, Missoula cannot recreate the conditions of a room purposely bereft of ventilation as was done in the John Hopkins experiment. Still, Gary told me, the police cordoned off the area, kept people away just in case. In Gary’s understanding, the quantity of drugs burned was massive, the air around the Old Sawmill District and the valley around it sticky with the residue of wood ash and weed. The haze lingered for hours, days, and people’s moods brightened with each passive breath.
Even if Gary ever called me back, I wouldn’t have been able to get the answers I wanted about his father’s story. As is the case with many who worked the mills, Gary’s father is gone, like the last lumber mills in the region. What’s left behind are the stories we tell.
