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Life & Times Transcript

11/23/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

They're using drugs, but most of them didn't start out that way. Why are so many kids hooked on crystal meth?

Mike Rizzo>> A lot of these youths are homeless and they're using the drug to stay awake at night for safety as well as staving off pangs of hunger. It's sort of not a recreational drug for them. It really is about survival.

Val Zavala>> And then, her sculptures seem to defy gravity, but they're rooted in her childhood in southern California. The works of artist Ruth Asawa.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It's a dangerous combination, gay teenage runaways using crystal meth, and yet their numbers are growing. So why would they want to try such a highly addictive drug? Well, as Hena Cuevas tells us, when you're homeless and on the street, meth has a practical effect.

Hena Cuevas>> Three times a week, Ismael Morales drives the streets of Hollywood, specifically Santa Monica Boulevard.

Ismael Morales>> It's lined with nightclubs, with bars and it's a street that's known for its gayness. There's safety there, so I think they leave Hollywood and Sunset to straight people and they kind of take Santa Monica as their own.

Hena Cuevas>> Morales is a health counselor for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. He's out looking for homosexual youth, those under the age of twenty-four, living on the streets.

[Film Clip]

Hena Cuevas>> Drugs are a problem among this population.

Ismael Morales>> We try to follow up on our clients that we see during the day and make sure that, one, they're being taken care of and where they hang out, and also kind of follow the trends and see where they're using, where they're hanging out.

Hena Cuevas>> The popular drug among gay youth these days is crystal meth. Meth, a white crystalline substance, can easily be made using common household ingredients such as ammonia and battery acid. It can be cooked in home labs like this one busted during a raid in the Inland Empire. Morales says that he's seen street kids as young as fifteen hooked on this highly addictive drug.

Ismael Morales>> We feel that a lot of the youths are using it to escape what it is that their situation is, either running away from home or getting kicked out from home or having to realize that the street is their life.

Hena Cuevas>> That's what happened to twenty-two year old Michael from Sacramento. His mother kicked him out of the house a year ago. His best friend invited him to move to Los Angeles. Michael didn't know it would mean living on the streets.

Michael>> And I'm like, "Well, you didn't tell me you were homeless. I thought you had a place to stay." So that's how I became homeless. I had money in my pocket and I was using it for a hotel room, but one day my money was going to run out anyway.

Hena Cuevas>> What was it like that first night that you had to sleep on the streets?

Michael>> It was terrifying. I was scared. I've never had to sleep on the streets before. I really didn't sleep that night. I actually stayed up the whole night scared not knowing what was going to happen to me out there.

Hena Cuevas>> He says that it took less than a week before crystal meth was offered to him for free. He turned it down the first time.

Michael>> The second time, I was like, you know what? I'm living on the streets. There's nothing better to do. Let me just try it. So I ended up trying it with them two and I ended up getting hooked on it and I started like going crazy like I wanted it all the time.

Hena Cuevas>> What was the sensation? How did the drug make you feel?

Michael>> Awake, ready to move. Paranoid. Scared that people were out to get me. Every time I saw a police officer, I was like you could tell I was smacked. I was moving, I was tripping.

Hena Cuevas>> So the first time, you got it for free. The next times then, you had to pay for it. How much were you paying for it?

Michael>> Actually, my friend was originally paying for it, so I was really smoking off him for free. But he was prostituting for his money to get it.

Hena Cuevas>> Michael is one of an estimated six thousand gay youths living on the streets of Los Angeles. Not only does meth destroy the person's appearance, among other things, there is an added consequence as well. Gay youths on meth are much more likely to engage in risky sex that can lead to AIDS.

Mike Rizzo>> It hits the pleasure principles of the brain and creates euphoria.

Hena Cuevas>> Mike Rizzo specializes in crystal meth. He says that most gay users see it as a party drug. Meth lowers their inhibitions while stimulating their sex drive. That combination increases their chances of catching a sexually transmitted disease. Already more than forty percent of new HIV cases at the Gay and Lesbian Center involve meth users. But Rizzo says that these street kids aren't using the drug to have a good time.

Mike Rizzo>> A lot of these youths are homeless and they're using the drug to stay awake at night for safety as well as staving off pangs of hunger. It's sort of not a recreational drug for them. It really is about survival.

Hena Cuevas>> Rizzo recently joined the Gay and Lesbian Center to launch their new Meth Recovery Program focused on kids.

Mike Rizzo>> The counselors there were reporting an increased use of meth and then, as they further did the research again with our sexual health department, we saw that those numbers were really increasing.

Hena Cuevas>> Of the young men people tested for HIV in 2006, the number who reported they used meth doubled compared to the year before.

Mike Rizzo>> They're young and they feel invincible, you know. They don't think they can become addicted. They don't think that it will affect their lives long-term. You know, I'm sure that they believe at some point, they're going to get back on track. But unfortunately, with this drug, they may not make it back on track.

Hena Cuevas>> But this problem of younger and younger people using crystal meth isn't just limited to the streets of Hollywood. According to figures from Los Angeles County in 2000 of the young people coming in for drug treatment, one out of ten were doing so because of crystal meth. Jump to 2005 and that figure had dramatically increased to one out of three. Why do you think it is the drug of choice? Why do you think it's so popular?

Michael>> When you smoke it, you get the intention that you're full and you know you haven't eaten. It's crazy because, when I was doing it, I wasn't eating for four days. I was drinking water and juice, but some days I wouldn't eat for like four days straight.

Ismael Morales>> If you stay awake all night, you can't say that you slept on the streets. You can say that you've been on the boulevards, you've been walking around. So I think that's why a lot of the youths use crystal meth is, one, to get away from the emotional feeling of living on the street and why they're living on the street, and also to be able to survive on the street.

Hena Cuevas>> When we met Michael, he'd been clean for two weeks and attending regular drug therapy sessions. He had a part-time job and had found a place to live.

Ismael Morales>> "How's the crystal meth doing?"

Michael>> "It's good now. I won't even touch it, but these last few days, I've been so tired that everybody's like, oh, you're back on it. No, I wasn't back on it. I've just been stressed."

Hena Cuevas>> However, a few days after our interview, Morales told us that Michael had been evicted and was using again.

Ismael Morales>> Earlier on, I was talking and we mentioned that I used to get really sentimental and hurt when that used to happen. But now it's frustrating in the sense that you just wish that they could get some sense knocked into them after so many experiences of failure, but they don't.

Hena Cuevas>> The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center is one of the few places providing services to homeless gay youths. They hope their new recovery program will help kids before it's too late.

Mike Rizzo>> Adolescents are particularly difficult to treat because the drug is still working for them. It's really hard for them to let go of it because they're still getting high. It's still helping them deal with their stressors.

Hena Cuevas>> In the meantime, you can find Morales back in his van scouting the streets at night fighting meth one kid at a time.

Ismael Morales>> "I know I saw Michael and I know I saw the girl that he was with."

Hena Cuevas>> I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think of teenagers using meth? You can post your comments on our blog. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> She has followed the flow of oil for tens of thousands of miles from the pipeline to the gas pump and now she has the answers to all of our pressing gasoline questions like "Are we being ripped off?" She's Lisa Margonelli and Saul Gonzalez talked with this intrepid author about her new book, "Oil on the Brain".

Saul Gonzalez>> Lisa, most Americans want their experience with the global oil economy to start and end with their trip to the filling station. You wanted to explore it from pump through pipeline to oil field. Why?

Lisa Margonelli>> Well, for all of my life, like every other American, I've used about three gallons of gasoline a day, which is an enormous amount. When you add it all together, we're using ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second as Americans. I wanted to see, basically, where it came from. You know, when you go to the gas station, it's a little bit of a mystery.

You swipe your card, something goes into your tank and some money comes out of your account and what has just happened? What even is gasoline? I didn't even know what it was or what the difference was between it and diesel. So part of it started out with just an enormous curiosity to kind of unravel it all.

Saul Gonzalez>> Let me go to the first chapter of your book which, to me, was the most interesting chapter in many ways. That is the life and times of the American filling station, gas station. What's our relationship with this place?

Lisa Margonelli>> Well, we go in with a funny mixture of hostility and hunger. The hostility is that we really feel that we're paying too much for the gas. The gas pumps themselves have been designed to make us feel kind of warm and non-intimidated and familiar. Gas pumps themselves have been redesigned to look more like ATMs because they've realized that people don't feel hostility towards ATMs, which is surprising to me.

Then, at the same time that we're very anxious to avoid to over-paying for gas, zealous, in fact, to avoid over-paying for gas, we will go into the gas station and buy things like Corn Nuts or drinks and the gas stations actually make their profits selling snacks.

Saul Gonzalez>> They make more money off of that stuff than they do the energy that they're selling.

Lisa Margonelli>> Right, right. They make about five cents a gallon selling the gas and they make much higher profits on just even a bottle of water. The thing about bottled water is that you don't have to worry about it exploding or leaking.

Saul Gonzalez>> You know, we're speaking at a time where Californians are paying more than three dollars a gallon for their gas. Probably they're cursing silently about foreign countries, big oil, when they fill up their tank and they see how much they're spending. Are they right to do that?

Lisa Margonelli>> I think that consumers have a new role in the oil economy because, now that supply and demand are almost in sync, the influence of consumers like us driving along the street here is very high. When prices rise now -- prices have doubled in the past five years. We have only cut our consumption by three percent. It's a very small response to doubling in price. In the 1970s when the price also doubled over five years, we cut our consumption by thirty percent. Just huge.

People stopped driving. They changed their cars. They moved. A lot of things happened. This time, we haven't done that. First thing we have to do, I think, is to get over the sense that we're somehow being screwed and that oil prices are unreasonable. Eighty percent of Californians believe that oil prices are the result of conspiracy. If we can get over that and say, no, they're the result of supply and demand and we need to reduce our demand, then maybe we've made it over the first hurdle.

But the bigger hurdle is that individually we need to make changes and then we need to make huge policy changes to stop encouraging supply and also encouraging increased demand. We need to start reducing the demand. We need to start encouraging efficiency. About forty percent of the energy that we use in this country is lost as heat. That's just sort of bubbling off these cars down here. The car is less than twenty percent efficient in terms of dragging a person along the street.

Saul Gonzalez>> Is there a sense in all of your travels through the oil chain that this is a finite resource? There's only so much stuff left in the ground, right? Is there a sense that one day it'll all be pumped out?

Lisa Margonelli>> Well, I think if you visit Texas, you see that a lot of it has been pumped out and there are little towns that are just kind of left abandoned. Or if you go to Pennsylvania, the oil has been pumped out. Around the world, the oil is being pumped out, but there's always other oil that's more expensive environmentally and economically to get to. There's things like tar sands and there's rough little pockets very deep off the coast.

Saul Gonzalez>> We found all the easy oil, though.

Lisa Margonelli>> We found the easy oil. The cheap oil is pretty much gone and, from here on out, it gets more and more expensive economically and environmentally. We need to start accounting for that, obviously. We need to kind of anticipate that this three dollar oil that we're very upset about is kind of only the beginning of the prices that we're paying, particularly in terms of climate change. I think we need to have a plan for the future.

Saul Gonzalez>> What cost should oil be? What cost in your mind should we paying for that gallon of gasoline?

Lisa Margonelli>> Well, you know, that's a difficult question. In some ways, maybe we should be paying double or triple, but we'll never pay the amount that people in Venezuela or Chad or Nigeria are paying in terms of social chaos or frustrated aspirations.

Saul Gonzalez>> If you live in country X and oil has been discovered under it, an ocean of oil, is that going to improve your future or is it going to make it worse?

Lisa Margonelli>> Statistically, countries that have oil and countries that don't have oil, two under-developed countries, within five or ten years, the country that doesn't have oil as the economy will be much further ahead. What they said in Chad when I was there, in Parliament, when the oil was discovered and the papers were signed, the Parliament had a meeting and one of the Parliamentarians stood up.

He said, "In my village, there's a bird and, when you see that bird in the forest, you know that your mother will die or your father will die and you don't know which one." Something bad will happen. He said, "Oil, I think, is like this bird." To me, that was a very moving kind of story because there was a real sense that Chad was going to lose something in this and, in fact, Chad has lost its fragile peace.

Saul Gonzalez>> And Chad stands in for a smorgasbord of countries in their experience with oil, right?

Lisa Margonelli>> Absolutely, yeah.

Saul Gonzalez>> Where peoples' lives haven't improved and maybe even gotten worse.

Lisa Margonelli>> Yeah, yeah. In fact, when I was in Venezuela, I met someone who -- you know, people become very dependent upon the government in oil-producing countries. They're waiting for the money to come. This one woman had been sitting on the edge of a cliff in a cardboard house literally for twenty-seven years waiting for the government --

Saul Gonzalez>> -- waiting for her life to get better.

Lisa Margonelli>> Yeah, waiting for the government to finally cough up the house that it had claimed it was going to give her. It just broke my heart. I mean, she was a smart woman. She'd been a kindergarten teacher. To her, the most reasonable choice seemed to be to wait for that money to finally come in. It's kind of heartbreaking.

Saul Gonzalez>> Lisa Margonelli, I want to thank you for joining us on Life and Times and for sharing your thoughts and your experiences in the international oil economy.

Lisa Margonelli>> Thank you.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> Her sculptures are unforgettable creations floating in the air. She is Ruth Asawa, a Japanese American artist from Norwalk and she's finally getting the attention she deserves. Vicki Curry talked with curator, Karin Higa, from the Japanese American National Museum.

[Film Clip]

Karin Higa>> Ruth Asawa thinks of her sculptures as drawing in space because they're made up of wire and what is wire but essentially a line. But through manipulation, she creates volumetric drawings.

Vicki Curry>> Ruth Asawa's art defies convention, not to mention gravity. She created these drawings suspended in space by experimenting with shapes and materials.

Karin Higa>> Here was this artist who was working in very humble forms, you know, wire, but making very, very innovative and beautiful forms that still resonate and seem very, very fresh today.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> You can't talk about Ruth Asawa's art without talking about her background. Although Asawa herself wants to be known only as an artist, most of the pivotal moments in her life hinged on her identity as a Japanese American.

Karin Higa>> You know, it was a time of tremendous struggle, but adversity based on her ethnicity actually opened up other doors.

Vicki Curry>> Ruth Asawa was born in 1926. This is a drawing she made as an adult remembering her family's truck farm in Norwalk.

Karin Higa>> When you work on a farm, it's all about communal labor. Everyone has to participate. Not only is it communal labor, but everything has to be reused. So that sense of ingenuity and creativity was a really important part of family farm life in early twentieth century California and Ruth Asawa brings that same sensibility to her work.

Vicki Curry>> Asawa took art classes in her public school and at the Japanese school she attended on Saturdays. But in 1942, she and her family were rounded up with thousands of other Japanese Americans and sent to interment camps.

Karin Higa>> But strangely, the camps also provided an opportunity because, for the first time ever, Ruth Asawa met Japanese American artists who taught her drawing and animation.

Vicki Curry>> Her family was first sent to a camp at Santa Anita Racetrack, but ended up at an interment camp in Arkansas. The camp art teacher took notice of Asawa's talents and, when she graduated, she got a scholarship from a Quaker's group to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College.

Karin Higa>> Essentially, they told her that no school would hire her as a student teacher because she was Japanese.

Vicki Curry>> So Asawa enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an alternative school dedicated to artistic experimentation. Her teachers there included Joseph Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Karin Higa>> And one of the things that they did at Black Mountain was think about how every object or every material should be exploited in a way and thought about in really creative ways. You don't just look at what in western art we would say as foreground, but you think about its relationship to background space.

Vicki Curry>> It was in this environment that Asawa started to explore the looped wire sculpture that became her signature.

Karin Higa>> In 1947 and 1948, Ruth traveled to Mexico and she actually witnessed women making metal baskets out of wire, you know, to hold eggs and whatnot. She was just fascinated by that technique. When she returned to Black Mountain College, she experimented with making these baskets and immediately she saw the potential as a way of making art.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Asawa had another life-changing event at Black Mountain. She met her husband, architect Albert Lanier. They moved to San Francisco and raised six children. But Asawa continued making art, trying her hand at print-making, electroplating and tied wire, but she always maintained her work with looped wire.

Karin Higa>> She uses a wooden dowel where she wraps the wire around, but she actually does the crocheting loop, the e-loop, with her hands.

Vicki Curry>> Karin, when I look at these pieces up close, the intricacy is amazing. I can't imagine that she made all this by hand.

Karin Higa>> Yes, she made everything by hand. This is made by a single wire, copper wire, and she just starts making this sort of modified crocheted loop and then keeps going up and up. But you can see that it's also interlocking, so it's sort of a form within a form. In this case, it's almost as if they're kind of merging together. Technically, it's not difficult, but it is complicated.

Vicki Curry>> And time-consuming.

Karin Higa>> And time-consuming, yeah. Sometimes she would start from above and work down. Other times, she would start from below and work up. She would often work on her back. What's interesting is that she didn't actually have a lot of drawings or even recipes, so to speak, about how to make these things, so it was very instinctual. She would make up the forms as she would go along.

Vicki Curry>> Ruth Asawa's art was quickly recognized with major museum shows and magazine profiles, but critics were confused about how to classify her work.

Karin Higa>> People were perplexed because sculpture traditionally sits on the ground. It sits on the floor. It sits on a pedestal. Here she was making sculpture that hung from the ceilings. I think there was always this tension between is it decoration or craft or is it works of art?

Ruth was part of this period in the 1950s of artists who were pushing the boundaries. What I think is interesting is that she was a young woman, she was a mother and she never really saw the difference between being a mother and an artist.

Vicki Curry>> I love all these photographs of Ruth at work while she's at home with the kids.

Karin Higa>> These photographs are fantastic. This photograph is my favorite. Her daughter, Iko, seems to be helping. She has one of these wooden dowels. There is the copper wire.

Vicki Curry>> And then one of the boys is inside the piece, or it looks like it. Maybe he's behind it.

Karin Higa>> You know, I'm not exactly sure he's inside or behind. But that's actually a good point because that's the thing about Ruth's work is that what's inside and outside is hard to tell. One of the important things for Ruth Asawa was that here you take this really humble material, wire, and you transform it into something else. But it still maintains its wireness in the sense that you could unravel the whole thing and it would still be a wire.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> Despite her innovations and early success in the art world, Ruth Asawa is not very well-known especially outside San Francisco. That might be because she started focusing on arts education in the 1960s and became better known as an activist. Or it might also be because Asawa has never been much of a self-promoter.

Karin Higa>> She doesn't really seem to care about being an artist. She seems to care about constantly being creative and pushing herself. Ruth Asawa is an interesting artist because her philosophy is that there's very little distinction between life and art. So although she makes these gorgeous sculptures and prints and drawings, in her own mind she sees them as a sort of expression of everyday life.

Val Zavala>> Asawa's work will be up through May 27. For details, you can go to the website for the Japanese American National Museum at janm.org. I'm Val Zavala. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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