reporter steve suo tried to find an answer by comparing oregon's program with those of other states. but what the numbers revealed was something quite different, and so unexpected that suo thought he'd made a mistake. in every state, the number of people entering rehab rose and fell in unison, even though the states had radically different programs. then suo compared the number of arrests and emergency room admissions in those states, and he found the same pattern-- over the years, there had been huge, simultaneous spikes in meth use and then huge fall-offs. suo became obsessed with figuring out why. >> it's a lot like richard dreyfus in "close encounters of the third kind" where he has this image in his head of this mountain, and he doesn't know what it means, but he just feels compelled to tear up his yard and build this giant mound in his living room. and ultimately that leads him to the answer. i didn't get any aliens out of it, but i got some pretty interesting answers. >> narrator: the answers lay in the very chemistry of the brain of a meth addict. suo learned about the neurosc