Virgil Weir sat nervously across from the judge, knowing the case was out of his hands.

He'd already pleaded guilty to having the bag of nearly $11,000 worth of methamphetamine, which he said he discovered hidden inside a truck stop bathroom about nine months earlier.

At the time, he knew exactly what he'd do with the off-white powdery substance -- smoke it like he had for more than two years. Already, meth had cost him a steady job. It had cost him friends.

But now, the drug was about to cost him a lot more.

"It's been my experience," said Vigo County Judge Dexter L. Bolin Jr., quickly reaching a decision on the sentencing, "that putting a drug addict in home detention just congests the court calendar."

Weir's fate: A six-year sentence in the Indiana Department of Correction, of which he'll serve about half.

Months later, dressed in a drab-colored, long-sleeve shirt and matching khaki pants, Weir sits in a tiny prison break room, fidgeting with his hands.

He begins his story as a teenager in Whitcomb Heights, near West Terre Haute, where he dabbled with marijuana. In his early 20s, he regularly smoked pot. Within a few years, he was introduced to methamphetamine. He wasn't impressed with the first snort.

But in his mid-20s, Weir tried the drug again on the suggestion that it would improve his productivity at work.

"It seemed to, at first," Weir said of "commercial" meth -- the West Coast imported kind, which he preferred over the product of local "mom-and-pop" labs. But in the long run, "it messes you up more than it helps you."

Before long, he'd binge for a couple of days and sleep for a few more. "At one point, almost everybody I knew had some sort of problem with it," he said.

His hobby turned to fashioning glass tubes -- the convenience store kind containing a tiny, artificial rose -- into glass pipes for smoking the drug. "I had people tell me I should go into business," he said, but he never did. He shared the few dozen pipes he made with friends.

Soon, he'd lost his full-time job in the heating and cooling industry.

As he continued to use meth, the already slender man withered to 135 pounds. "I looked like a skeleton," says the 5-foot, 10-inch-tall Weir, who estimated his current weight at 170 pounds.

Now, he spends his days on someone else's schedule. His assigned duty: Delivering passes for visitors, counselors and the like in the confines of the Putnamville Correctional Facility.

"See where drugs can make you end up?"