Meth, Shattered Lives, Part 1D

DRUG CRAVING COSTS MOTHER FREEDOM, CHILDREN

TAFT - Life couldn't have been better for Shannon Lamont. Then it couldn't
have gotten worse.

The story behind this mother of three's descent into crank addiction has
been told a hundred times over. The names may change, the reasons vary, but
the regret and wreckage remain the same.

Lamont, 30, was the homeroom mother of her daughter's class, a sponsor of
the cheerleading squad and the wife of a successful Tulsa businessman. She
shopped at Neiman Marcus, owned a 3,500 square foot home, slept in the
presidential suite on a luxury cruise and bought a new car every year.

She had also been a nightclub dancer for nine years before trying
methamphetamine, which is a popular and highly abused drug in those
circles. Lamont, however, said she stayed away from drugs and booze, did
her job and went home - until home started unraveling.

Her husband was away often and started gambling, she said. Life became dull.

"I just felt like I was a single mother, married, always alone with my
kids, which now I wouldn't trade for the world," said Lamont, who is
serving a seven-year sentence for second-degree robbery, burglary, larceny
and possession of a controlled dangerous substance at Dr. Eddie Warrior
Correctional Center in Taft.

"But at that time I thought I needed something else," she said.

That something else came one night when she was out drinking with friends
and one of them offered her crank. It was love at first snort.

"You think you're Superman. You think you're untouchable, your feelings
aren't so sensitive," Lamont said of the high. "When you can take a person
like myself, who is not real outspoken - I'm not shy, but I'm not real
outspoken - but when I'm on that, I'm just everybody's friend and you just
feel different."

She had energy for everything, or so she thought. She organized her compact
discs, color-coordinated her sock drawers. There were lists all over of
things to do. Lists, lists, lists. They rarely got done.

Lamont changed her friends. Instead of roller skating in the afternoons
with other mothers, she started hanging out with gang members and other
addicts. She found a boyfriend who abused her.

Crank can be smoked, injected or snorted and Lamont said she always chose
the latter. At first it hurt to snort the chemical substance - but she
learned to crave that pain.

"It's scary how much I love that stuff. And I hate it," she said. "I call
it sometimes the 'devil' because it took everything from me and I had
everything."

Her son and daughter, then ages eight and three, took a back seat -
literally - when she'd leave them in the car while she scored a fix at her
dealer's house. The children started arriving to school late, if they made
it at all

Yet Lamont thought crank was helping her cope better with divorcing her
husband of 10 years. But on days when she couldn't score, she couldn't get
out of bed.

"I went to court everyday on crank and I still got custody of my kids,"
Lamont said.

Then came the time when Lamont had to make a choice between her children
and her addiction. She called their father to pick them up and kissed them
good-bye.

"You can still think right, but that doesn't mean you're going to do the
right thing," she said. "So it scared me, with the kind of people that
started coming to my house - I had to get my kids out of it, because I
couldn't get off of it.

"After I let my kids go, it got 100 percent worse."

Within a year of her first snort, Lamont became bone thin and, as is
typical with crank users, started picking at her hair and skin.

"I was so strung out, I thought I had bugs in my hands," she said. "I even
went to the emergency room and said I had bugs in my hands and they knew I
was on drugs."

Her addiction didn't cost her financially because she said drugs were given
to her. Men liked having a pretty girl around, and the way to keep a pretty
meth addict around is to feed her habit.

But she did pay the price of freedom. In a vague accounting, Lamont tells
how her friends robbed her boyfriend, whom she says she unwittingly helped
set up. Two weeks later she was busted. A week after that, she found out
she was pregnant.

Her daughter, now six months old, was born with a club foot and a closed
anus, requiring surgeries and a colostomy bag. But Lamont is convinced the
drugs did not impact her unborn child's health, because she was behind bars
during the pregnancy and could not use.

She gave birth while in prison and the father - the man she says was robbed
by her friends - now has custody of the baby.

"To this day I think it was God taking me out of the drug scene to save my
life and my unborn child's life," she said. "Because I can honestly say if
the robbery had not happened and I came up pregnant, as much as I didn't
want to do the drugs, I could not have stopped.

"You do whatever you have to do to do drugs and pay the consequences later."

Lamont has not talked to her two oldest children since the night of the
robbery, though she did get a letter from them for Christmas. She said she
writes them every week and keeps a daily journal to show them someday how
much she loves and misses them.

She will be eligible for parole in 2006. Then she will try to resume a
relationship with all three of her children.

Crank is perhaps the hardest drug to recover from, but Lamont is convinced
she can stay away from it once she's free.

Meanwhile, some Oklahoma prisons offer treatment programs and support
groups to help addicts stay clean before and when they leave. Officials
admit the return rate is high for drug addicts and failure on urinalysis
testing is highest for meth addicts.

Lamont thinks about some of her friends who have been meth addicts for
several years and how they can't stop moving their jaws or tongues.

"They don't have much to show for it, not even their teeth," she said. "I
can seriously say I'm not going to do it. If I wanted to, I could do it
now, but I don't."

Her three reasons: Two daughters and one son.

"It breaks my heart being away from them and missing out on their lives,
because I chose to do drugs," she said. "I have so many regrets...(but) I'm
going to be with them again."