RECLAIMING A LIFE

Youth Retells a Cycle of Meth Addiction and a Dramatic Road to Recovery

Everyone has a secret calendar.

In addition to the commonly shared holidays -- Christmas, Halloween,
Thanksgiving -- there are the individual and unpublicized
anniversaries that each of us secretly harbour -- the day you fell in
love, the day you lost your virginity or the day the divorce papers
came through.

Baylie McKnight remembers the day she quit crystal meth -- Feb. 11,
2004.

"I completely did a 360 and changed my life dramatically. I came to a
realization that (crystal meth) is in control of my life and I need to
get back into control."

She described her descent into meth addiction as fast and
hard.

"The first time I tried it, I stayed up for five days. I hallucinated.
I guess you could say I was hooked the first time, because after that
it just became a cycle of doing meth, staying up for a few days and
then sleeping for a few days."

She was only 14 years old.

The next year and a half was a living hell that left physical wounds.
Small, but visible scars mark her body from picking herself with tweezers.

She also recalls peeling off her eye lens, convinced there was
something stuck in the socket.

While the eye healed and the cuts closed, she's still dealing with
emotional trauma. One night, exhausted from a five-day meth binge, she
passed out. An acquaintance raped her near-unconscious body. To this
day, she's haunted by the memory -- being intimate with her boyfriend,
standing naked in the bathroom, even being alone in her car -- the
nightmare lingers.

Throughout the experience, she remained in contact with her family.
When she learned that her mother was pregnant, McKnight decided to
turn her life around.

"I was told that I was going to be a big sister and I really want her
to look up to me and be proud of what she sees," she recalled.

Amazingly, McKnight quit cold turkey. Throughout her meth addiction,
she had remained in school through the South Island Distance Education
School. She transferred to SJ Willis and eventually finished her Grade
12 year at Spectrum high school.

The now-confident 18-year-old is in her second year of the community,
family and child studies program at Camosun College and planning to
take her third and fourth year at the University of Victoria to earn a
degree in the child and youth care program.

While her story of substance abuse is common, her recovery is not.
Counsellors say crystal meth addiction is one of the hardest to treat
- -- with a 92 per cent relapse rate, it's worse than cocaine.

The physical agony and depression that accompanies withdrawal is
reported to be worse than for heroin or cocaine.

Despite her own success kicking meth, McKnight has told her story in
support of the Salvation Army's Beacon of Hope House, a new treatment
facility for male youths ages 13 to 18 who are dealing with substance
abuse.

The facility will open mid-January.