"I felt normal when I first did it, like, 'Oh, there I am,' " she remembers.

Kim is 47 now, and she has been chasing normal her entire adult life. But the more she kept using, the more what was normal slipped further and further away, until eventually, Kim stared through the lens of a camera at a police officer taking her picture, telling her to turn to the left, then the right.

"It really tricks you," she says. "It's like, you're doing the drug that's causing the problem, but it's numbing you out from the problem it's causing."

While the country's attention has been focused on prescription opioids and heroin overdoses, methamphetamine has been making a comeback. The drug's history is rooted in California — biker gangs like the Hells Angels manufactured and distributed it up and down Interstate 5 in the 1980s. Then Mexican cartels took over and kept Los Angeles as their national distribution headquarters.