PUTNAM WOMAN FIGHTING METH HABIT

She is thin and pale, her eyes lifeless in a sad face. She is trapped by an
addiction so strong that deep within herself, she does not really want to
see it as her enemy, and in fact, would find it much easier to remain its
servant than to mount a fight she has little hope of winning. The enemy is
methamphetamine.

That illegal drug has all but ruined her life. She's lost her home, custody
of her four children, and may lose her right arm due to an injury she
suffered while high on meth.

Like most other problems in her life after she first inhaled crystal meth a
couple of years ago, the broken arm went untreated. Now, months later,
there are signs of gangrene, doctors have told her.

The only glimmer of hope in her life -- and she is not yet strong enough to
see it as hope -- is that she was recently forced to give up her drug habit
because she was in jail. She is now on probation, facing going back to that
cell if she falters again.

Hoping to breathe some will power into the 33-year-old Putnam County woman
and maybe to save others from her fate, probation officers Tim Cook and
Scott Muncy at Progressive Sentencing, Inc., suggested that she publicly
talk about the dangers of meth.

It is a powerful, highly addictive synthetic drug which is "cooked" out of
harsh chemicals and various other substances.

She volunteered for an interview with this newspaper and voluntarily showed
up at the probation office for that purpose.

She had been off meth for 47 days at the time of the interview and admitted
she was still craving it and would use it again if it were not illegal and
if she had some.

What was it about this drug that hooked her so completely?

"It was an immediate high," she said. "It's like over-the-counter speed,
but more potent. I felt really hyper, and I liked the energy it gave me.
The high lasted a long time."

She recalls going for 10 to 12 days without sleep and with only small
amounts of food which she ate only because she knew she should, not because
she was hungry.

"I would clean the house and clean it again. I had all this energy. I
worked in the yard, I did art work (drawing and painting), I cleaned house
some more, I took my kids to the park."

Besides the tremendous energy, she also liked a certain feeling the drug
gave her:

"I felt like nothing could touch me, nothing could bother me. Everything
seemed good. I felt like what I thought 'normal' should feel like -- like I
was able to just get up and do things."

Those were the highs.

When it wore off, the extreme fatigue would set in, sometimes causing her
to go to sleep while standing up. She would also be filled with a
"hatefulness" that caused her to say things or treat people in ways she had
never done before.

"I had never disrespected my parents before -- but (after becoming addicted
to meth), I would call my mother and I would say terrible things to her."

And while she says she did not become paranoid, as some meth users do, she
admits that when a meth high wore off and the fatigue hit her, she often
feared going to sleep.

"I thought if I slept I might never get back up."

She also admits that she sometimes thinks of taking her own life and hears
voices that encourage her to do so.

"It's a male voice, and he says, 'Go ahead, you're sorry anyway.'"

Her immediate addiction to meth surprised her, she said. In the beginning,
she thought she could just try it out and then lay it down.

"But it hit me and I didn't even see it coming. I tried to come off of it
myself a bunch of times, but I couldn't."

From the perspective of 47 days off the stuff, she can say now something
that is hidden during the high:

"It messes with your mind. You lose your memory or parts of it. Sometimes
now nothing seems real to me. Sometimes I can't think what to do. I have to
think hard to figure out how to do something, and then I'll start to do it
and it all won't make sense."

She hurt her arm while high on meth by accidentally letting a car's
hatchback door slam down on her wrist. She dulled the pain with the drug
and feared going to a doctor "because I had needle marks from drugs in my
arms."

Meth has "messed with" her mind to the point that her personality has changed.

"I used to be easygoing. Now I blow up, I hyperventilate and get anxiety
attacks."

Her kids, who once were "my whole life" tiptoe around "walking on
eggshells" when she is around them now.

She is a high school graduate and studied sales and marketing in a
vocational school for two years. In the past, she worked as a nursing
assistant and in plants.

Now, she does not work and has lost custody of her children, who range in
age from three to 14. Relatives are raising the children.

"The hardest part is what I've done to my kids. I would give anything if I
could just take this all back, all that's happened. I've had so much taken
away in the past year -- my home, my children. I feel like there's nothing
left to take. My whole world got blown away, and I felt like I was floating
in limbo."

Exactly how did she get started on meth?

She had been a crack cocaine user until a couple of years ago. That drug
did not have the high energy effect that meth has had on her, and once,
after a serious illness (pneumonia) landed her in the hospital, she got off
the crack.

But later, she went back to it, and that's when she met a man in a bar who
asked her if she wanted to try meth.

Not knowing she would be hooked with almost the first whiff, she smoked the
stuff in a pipe the man provided.

That was the beginning, and the man, who was selling meth, was soon able to
use the drug to control her, she said.

"He was hooked on the money. He didn't use the drug himself so much. But
with me on it, he could decide where I went, when I went, and what I did."

The man sometimes made $2,500 or more per week selling meth, she said. He
is now in jail.

What is her theory of why she turned to drugs in the first place?

She admits that she has almost never been happy in her entire life and
traces that back to being sexually abused in her childhood.

It was a crime committed against her by someone outside her family, and she
never told her parents or anyone else, but simply suffered in silence all
those years, she said. Emotional pain became a part of her.

She married at age 18, and it didn't work out. Neither did two other marriages.

But they left her with four children to raise on her own, something she was
managing fairly well until the meth addiction seized her.

The breakneck energy of meth erased pain from her mind, at least for a
while. She was too high to notice the other things it was also taking, such
as mental ability and her personality.

How did she come to be in jail recently?

She was on probation for a previous drug arrest and one day, when she
underwent a required drug test, the test came back positive. They revoked
her probation and sent her to jail.

The forced withdrawal from her meth habit has left her drained and depressed.

Not wanting to spend more time in jail, she is trying to face the long
battle ahead to somehow get free of the drug.

Can she do it?

"I used to be in church a lot, but somewhere I got to thinking that I felt
like I didn't have the right to pray," she said. "But I still have faith in
the man upstairs."

While hope is something almost foreign to her, her love for her children is
still there.

"I hope and pray they won't ever touch meth," she said.

The only time she's ever happy is when she is allowed to see her kids, she
said.

She has also received some help in a drug counseling program, where some of
the teachings have apparently penetrated her jumbled mind.

"I know that 'normal' is a button on the dishwasher dial," she said. "A
counselor told me that."

She also knows, as they teach in many programs, that no one is ever a
recovered addict. There are only recovering addicts.

The meth has taken much of this woman's life, leaving her with little hope
for the future. She is trying hard to grab onto the tiny ray of hope there
is for her biggest goal: to one day get her children back.

To do that, she will have to find a way to forgive herself, to care for
herself. It'll be a tough day-to-day fight between her and her addiction.

She knows there is no miracle cure that will whisk her back to "normal."
She hopes that telling her story will save others from her misery.