I aliased google-chrome and whitelisted myself in sudoers so now when I type sudo chrome it runs sudo -u chromeuser -i google-chrome &. (For reasons outlined below) Since all other users besides myself have a home directory on ext3 this works very well. The only downside is that chrome, when started as chromeuser, will not play sound.
edit: Moved question to top for clarity
Background for anyone who's interested:
I set the home directoy for one of my users to be on an NTFS partiton so that it is accessible from Windows. I'm the only one who uses the computer so I set fuse to allow 777 permissions to that partition. I deleted /home/me and created a symlink in it's place that points to the NTFS partition (which is mounted at /Shared/home).
Chrome doesn't play well with that configuration because it creates various caches under your home directory and NTFS performance couldn't keep up with it. I fiddled with a few options to chrome (--user-data-dir --disk-cache-dir) but I couldn't get 100% of chrome's open files under my control. So my solution was just run chrome as it's own user.
tldr; I started a program as another user, doesn't seem to want to play sound. Is this related to alsa?
Answered in question by OP
The solution was just run chrome as it's own user.