METH LESSONS

From the outside, 1999 looked like a great year for then-sociology
professor Wayne Martin Mellinger. He was making $85,000 a year. He had
secured three different teaching jobs. He had just bought a house in
Ventura.

But inside, Dr. Mellinger had a secret: At night, he was getting high
on methamphetamine.

"No one knew I was getting high," he said. "I led a double
life."

That secret life lead to the loss of his jobs, his house and
eventually to his arrest in 2005 for dealing meth.

"It was a real wake-up call," he said. "I knew I needed to change my
life."

Today, Dr. Mellinger, now 48, has done just that. On Feb. 10, he
graduated from the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission's year-long
residential recovery program. Two weeks ago, he started working at New
Beginnings as a homeless outreach case worker, and last week, he was
offered a job teaching a class at Antioch University in Santa Barbara.

Turning his life around didn't come easy.

The story of Dr. Mellinger's descent into addiction and his subsequent
journey of recovery is one that he said he hopes to share with others
- -- through teaching, drug counseling, and through the sociological
memoir he is writing about his experience. He may not fit the
stereotype of a recovering drug addict but he said he hopes what he's
learned from his experience can help teach others.

Dr. Mellinger grew up in Massachusetts in a family with no drug or
alcohol problems. He graduated from University of Massachusetts at
Amherst with a bachelor's degree in business, although he said that
part of him wished that he could pursue a less practical career in the
arts. He moved to San Francisco in 1981, to become a California
resident and pursue graduate work in sociology.

"Sociology is about understanding the world and what's wrong with it,
educating people and hoping to change it," he said -- it fit him
better than business did. In 1983, he moved to Santa Barbara to pursue
his doctorate in sociology at UCSB.

Dr. Mellinger had begun to experiment with drugs such as mushrooms and
acid for the first time in San Francisco. By the time he received his
doctorate in 1990, he was smoking only marijuana, but heavily.
"Getting stoned every day seemed like a normal part of my life," he
explained.

His next two years were spent as a visiting professor at UC Santa
Cruz, but when that job was followed by a year and a half of
unemployment, his alcohol use increased. By 1995, however, things were
looking up again: back in Santa Barbara, Dr. Mellinger had landed
teaching jobs at the Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara and
Ventura College.

"Everything is looking great," he said. But things started to fall
apart in 1999, when his drug use increased.

After his long term relationship of 19 years came to a bad end, Dr.
Mellinger began to use crack cocaine heavily. He started losing his
jobs. He entered rehab programs three times that year -- but after
only a week of treatment, each time, he would go back to using.

"I wanted to get clean so badly, but I couldn't," he said. Instead, he
switched to using methamphetamine, a stimulant often synthesized from
over-the-counter medicines that has garnered attention in recent years
due to its increasing popularity.

Dr. Mellinger began dealing meth in 2003 to support his own habit. As
he describes it, he didn't fit the media image of the meth addict --
he wasn't a dope fiend like those portrayed in the government
propaganda film "Tell Your Children," (1936) commonly known as "Reefer
Madness." He wasn't shooting people or feeling bugs crawl under his
skin. A "functional user," as he calls it, he didn't notice what was
happening to him.

"You don't wake up and think, 'Oh, I'm going to become a
methamphetamine dealer, using everyday non-stop.' You slowly drift
over time, maybe each day taking one baby step, but getting deeper and
deeper into a world that you can't believe you're in."

His double life came to an end on April 23, 2005, when he was arrested
for selling methamphetamine. He recalls taking off on his bicycle
while police chased him on foot through Ventura's Mission Park. He was
caught when the squad cars were able to block him from turning down a
street.

"The feelings I felt at that moment were the most horrible feelings
I'd ever had in my life," he recalled. "I knew that I had ruined my
whole life."

In June 2005, six weeks after that arrest, Dr. Mellinger came to back
to Santa Barbara, hoping to finally rid himself of drugs and start a
new life.

"I knew that there was a good recovery community here," he said. But
there was also a problem: "I had no insurance, I was broke, had lost
my job. I needed free treatment and it's hard to find."

However, he was able to find resources to help him on his way. He
detoxed at Project Recovery at Casa Esperanza, then stayed at
Salvation Army's Hospitality House. Finally, he entered the Rescue
Mission's program in July 2005.

It was at the the Rescue Mission, a state-certified spiritual-based
recovery program, that Dr. Mellinger was able to find the treatment he
needed -- even though he couldn't pay.

" I'm really thankful for that," he said. He stayed sober, started to
work through his personal issues with therapy, and though he did not
share in the beliefs of the Christian-based organization, he found his
own path to faith and joined the Unitarian Society. "They gave me room
to find my own spirituality," he said of the mission. "Steve Farugie
was very understanding -- he was my moral support, he's been a mentor
for me through the whole process."

Mr. Farugie, then director of the men's program, watched Dr. Mellinger
as he progressed.

"He came in really, really broken ... but he was very open to change,"
Mr. Farugie said. "He's a sharp guy, but sometimes that could be
difficult -- when you're in your head too much in recovery, it can be
a hard place. So we had to move things from his head to his heart."

Dr. Mellinger wasn't able to complete the recovery program all at once
though. After putting off his court date for a year, he was sentenced
to eight months in Ventura County Jail in April 2006.

But while he was in jail, another person from the Rescue Mission
offered emotional support -- Leni Fe Bland, one of the mission's
benefactors.

"She's a person who doesn't just write a check -- she really cares,"
Dr. Mellinger said of Ms. Fe Bland, who regularly comes to the mission
to meet new people in the program and offers to take them to the
theater, the ballet or the symphony. She called him during his jail
time to let him know she cared about him.

"He's really quite a hero in my mind," Ms. Fe Bland said of Dr.
Mellinger. "He has really had to fight very hard against addiction,
and he seems to have really won though ... I'm proud to be friends
with him." Dr. Mellinger came back to the Rescue Mission after serving
six month of his sentence.

Now that he has finished the recovery program, Dr. Mellinger is
focusing his energy on two of his passions. He has come back to his
desire to do art, painting portraits of people he has met in recovery
as well as locations around town. And he is using his sociological
background to write a book, tentatively titled "Dancing with
Dinoysus," where he discusses his own experiences in the context of
the history of drug use and abuse.

"I think that you can't understand drug use in our culture unless you
compare it with other cultures and look at it through human history
. I'm trying to understand where these urges come from. I'm trying
to figure out: 'Why do people do drugs?' ''

This year, he's also taking those questions back to the classroom,
enrolling in classes in Santa Barbara City College's Alcohol and Drug
Counseling program. He expects to earn a post professional award at
the semester's end.

"I want to teach drug and alcohol studies," he explained. "I love
teaching. I had a great life before. I want my life back."

Dr. Mellinger said he hopes to get others to rethink their ideas about
what addiction and recovery can look like.

"I think people have this image that meth is so powerful that there's
no way to escape that life," he said.

"Recovery is possible. It's not easy and it doesn't happen most of the
time -- many people fall down again and again. But it is possible."