METH'S PRICE

One Youth Paid With His Liberty - And Sight

The morning of Dec. 12, 2000, was a crisp, snow-covered day in rural
Missouri. Matthew Yeater, 20, crouched in the snow, teaching his future
father-in-law how to make methamphetamine.

Beside them were two insulated drinking containers. One contained anhydrous
ammonia, a meth ingredient, and the other was empty.

"Which one?" the man asked.

Yeater picked up the containers and shook them gently.

"This one," he said.

Yeater scraped the snow from the container and noticed that its valve was
shut. Too late.

Anhydrous ammonia is a cold gas. As it warms, it expands. The valve has to
stay open to enable the expanding gas to escape. If the valve is shut,
pressure builds up until the container explodes.

The corrosive ammonia exploded 18 inches from Yeater's face. He sucked it
into his lungs. It burned into his skin and eyes. His drug-making partner
ran for his car and sped away. Through his quickly disintegrating eyes,
Yeater saw him run.

Fluids from Yeater's nose, mouth, and lungs leaked onto his face, shirt and
pants. He walked into a house where, a few minutes before, his girlfriend
and her parents had been getting high with him. He got a glimpse of himself
in a mirror. His face looked as if it were melting.

About 20 minutes later, his girlfriend's mother loaded him into her car and
took him to a hospital. He was able to walk into the emergency room under
his own power. Just before he went in, he spun the woman around and shoved
her back toward her car to keep her out of what was going to be a messy
situation.

Lying on an emergency room table, he gave the doctors his father's phone
number and passed out.

Cocaine ravaged the rock star and the Hollywood world. Crack took the
ghetto. Methamphetamine has come for the farm kid.

Meth is easily made from ingredients found in most small towns. But some of
those ingredients are toxic and corrosive. They can include charcoal
lighter fluid, gasoline, kerosene, paint thinner, rubbing alcohol, mineral
spirit, muriatic acid, and sulfuric acid or sodium hydroxide extracted from
lye-based cleaners.

Meth is affordable for any kid with a part-time job at the local
convenience store. Bored kids facing uncertain futures turn to meth for
kicks and as a way to make money.

Yeater was like that: his past typical; his path familiar.

His parents divorced when he was a baby. His mother was an abusive
alcoholic; his stepdad was a trucker who was away all week. Yeater was born
in Idaho but spent his childhood in many places, including Pleasant Hill
near Pittsfield in Pike County. Pleasant Hill, as it turns out, was the end
of the line.

Yeater tested positive for marijuana at age 14. By then he was living in a
foster home.

"I was drinking and drugging," he says. "I was 16 and caught 96 counts of
burglary, theft and (possession of drug) paraphernalia."

He was sent to a Department of Corrections juvenile center. As he says, "I
got my GED in juvy DOC." He got in a fight at his foster home and went back
to his mother, then on to Arkansas with an older woman.

In Arkansas, he started using meth for fun. But he couldn't stay up all
weekend using and still go to work on Monday. He was fired. That is when
meth became an addiction. He turned 18 on a needle.

Meth suppliers kept ripping him off, so he learned to make it himself. He
did it well.

"The dope I made was really, really good. I could get $120 a gram when
other guys got $80."

Yeater called his birth father in Indiana and told him he was shooting meth
and needed help. His father agreed to take him in, and Matt got a job as
welder and laborer. But he was already too far gone.

"I got some acid at work from one of the guys. That night I went home,
packed my stuff and hitchhiked back to Missouri."

There, he met the girl he would eventually marry. He got high with her and
her parents and agreed to teach her father how to make meth. The explosion
took place during the first lesson. A rookie mistake, leaving that valve shut.

In the hospital, doctors told Yeater the anhydrous ammonia had fried his
eyes. In the days after the accident, doctors routinely lifted his eyelids
with a glass rod and scraped his eyeballs to keep them from healing to his
lids.

His reaction? Do more drugs. Someone smuggled pre-rolled joints and some
Xanax into the hospital, and he got high in the parking lot. A month later,
against medical advice, he checked himself out.

He was a blind junkie, but the bottom was still out there.

"My mom came to see me in the hospital," he says. "I hadn't seen her in
four years. Then she gets this call that her son's in a hospital, blind and
almost dead. I go home with her. But I wouldn't sign power of attorney over
to her. With that, and some other stuff, she kicks me out."

By then, his girlfriend's father had learned how to make meth. Yeater used
his stuff, but the quality wasn't up to his standards. Though blind, he
attempted to make his own. It worked.

"After the accident," he says, "I wouldn't let anybody else touch anything.
Someone even led me to the anhydrous tank, and I crawled up there and stole
it myself. But it can be very dangerous to make it blind. I don't know
whether I was trying to kill myself or get high."

He was also back on the needle.

"When you're blind and you inject meth and you miss and it goes into muscle
or tissue, it burns severely and you get a big knot. But I was so
determined to get high, I learned to shoot it blind."

Missouri doctors, unaware of his drug addiction, said Yeater would be a
good candidate for a corneal transplant. A donor cornea was available. He
underwent the transplant on April 12, 2001.

"After that I could see a little bit, a little color, and I'm, like, 'Let's
go!'"

He was released from the hospital April 13. He cooked meth again on April
15. He says he stayed up for seven days straight, making and using meth all
the while. Soon afterward, he was infected by a dirty needle. The infection
reached his eyes, and he lost what little sight he had regained from the
transplant.

"That was hard to deal with," Yeater says. "I kept getting high. I couldn't
stop. I'd stay up at night and cry. I'd do a shot and bawl. I wanted to
stop so bad, but I couldn't."

After his mother kicked him out, he returned to Pleasant Hill. His mother,
still angry, called the West Central Illinois Drug Task Force and turned in
her son. He was picked up on a Pike County warrant on June 6, 2001. He
subsequently failed a court-ordered drug test and simply skipped the next few.

"At first, he was looking at probation here," says Pike County State's
Attorney Frank McCartney. "He had talked to a task force agent about
preaching the anti-drug message to schools. But that fell through when we
found out he was cooking again."

One year after Yeater's arrest, Circuit Judge Michael Roseberry gave him
six years in state prison. He turned 22 and 23 inside the walls.

A couple of weeks ago, Yeater stood before a room full of young people in
Peoria. "Any girls here?" he asked. "I need a blind date."

Always start with a joke, his Department of Corrections counselor, Jim
Fagan, told him. Get serious after that. Yeater eagerly removes his dark
glasses so people can see what is left of his eyes. It is not a pretty
sight, but it does have an impact. This, he says, is what methamphetamines
did for him.

"Everybody thinks they're going to make money off meth," says Yeater. "They
don't make squat. All the meth cooks I've known, they didn't have nothin'.
And they've been cooking for so many years or whatever. They ain't got
nothin'. They end up using most of what they cook."

When he went to prison, Yeater was angry at the world. When he was
transferred to Taylorville, his anger morphed into a suicidal depression.

But, somehow, it became knowledge.

"At first it was driving me crazy," he says. "I'm blind. I can't even count
the bricks. What am I going to do in here? They have a class in Taylorville
that they don't have anywhere else. It's a three-month class. I got in
there and learned so much about myself. I was also in the Gateway program
in Taylorville."

Yeater made progress in a 12-step recovery program in the Taylorville
prison, eventually writing a 25-page letter about all of his life's mistakes.

He applied for an Illinois Department of Corrections work-release program.
The Adult Transitional Center in Peoria accepted him. He shares a room
there with seven other prisoners. He is the first blind person they have
ever had in prison work-release in Peoria.

"It took an exceptional amount of coordination for us to get ready," says
Fagan. "I worked at Taylorville, so I know the counselors there. We talked
back and forth a good three weeks before Matt ever got here. I had to find
services for him. It's a beautiful thing we're in Peoria, because there are
a lot of services for the blind here. I don't know if any other town has
the things they have for him here."

Peoria, says Fagan, also has an extensive array of programs for the addicted.

"The recovery community has been very good to the men here," he says, "not
just Matt. They've really embraced all the guys."

Yeater is learning Braille. He attends recovery meetings. When his ride
arrives to take him to a meeting, he takes off running down a hall.

"That took some practice," Fagan says as he watches Yeater run.

Yeater is speaking to audiences about his meth experience in an effort to
warn young people away from drugs, particularly meth.

He will be eligible for parole in two years. By then, Fagan says, he should
have learned the skills he will need in order to take care of himself and
hold down a job on the outside.

"The kid's got a shot," Fagan says. "It comes down to this for Matt: He's
got to remember every day what he's done to himself.

"You know, the most amazing part of his story to me is that they gave him
an eye. They gave him an eye with that corneal transplant, and because of
his addiction, he got it infected from shooting up and he just blew it.
That, to me, is amazing."

"That's the power of addiction," Yeater says.

He receives letters now and then from his stepfather, from his wife and
from his grandmother. He does not hear from his mother or from his father.

Yeater gets excited about telling his story to other young people. For
them, it is an education. For him, it is therapy.

"If I don't look back," he says. "I'll never be able to see forward."