THE METH DIET . . . APPETIZER, ENTREE, DESSERT, DISASTER . . .

Mom Recounts Her Downward Spiral And Upward Struggle

The PTO mom with the pretty red hair was higher than a kite.

She hadn't slept in three days. She'd cleaned her kitchen cabinets at least
a dozen times. She'd baked the cupcakes for her daughter's classroom. She
had cleaned her cabinets again before she drove off in her BMW to her
daughter's school.

Her daughter's teachers adored her. So did her daughter's friends. Most
important, so did her daughter.

No one ever suspected the secret in her bra: the packet of methamphetamine,
the devil's dust, the stimulant she snorted to keep her motor running.

She was a meth mom to her daughter, and later a son, fathered by a meth cook.

Lyn Noland, 36, will tell her four-year struggle with the drug tomorrow at
RecoveryFest, a salute to sobriety. The bands will play and the artists
will sing and the audience will dance. Noland will tell how a single,
first-snort was all it took to bind her to a demanding demon, a drug she
needed so much she even learned to cook it.

She learned to kick it, too.

That's the triumph behind the tragedy, the happy ending, the reason her
12-year-old daughter will smile a lot and probably cry a little during her
mother's speech.

Noland has been clean for 730 days today, two complete years. She's still
counting her clean days. She always will. She knows that relapse is a
reality. She also knows she doesn't want to walk that uphill road again.

Noland will use her own name at Recovery Fest, putting a seemingly unlikely
face on the disease of addiction. "Nobody knows what an addict looks like,"
she says. "She could be the woman working beside you. There's no
one-look-fits-all. Not all meth moms lose their teeth. I lived in small
towns in Tennessee and people just didn't think I was a druggie. . . . I
wonder just what they think an addict looks like?"

Noland grew up in Alamo, a small West Tennessee town near Jackson. She was
popular in high school, voted the most unique, made all A's. But she was
restless.

The spring she graduated from high school, she left for summer school at
the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She became a campus party girl.

"People would call me and ask me what was going on. I would tell them which
frat house was having a kegger. I was an addict then," she says. "My drug
then was booze."

Later, after a failed marriage, she moved to Cookeville, Tenn., where, she
says, she was running from her disease. One night, at a party, a friend of
a friend offered her meth. From that night on, she says, "I never needed
alcohol. I never needed cocaine. I had found my poison."

Three years later Noland moved to McMinnville, Tenn. Her friends there were
doing meth. They were cooking it, too. Initially, Noland would go out and
buy them the ingredients they needed.

She would put on overalls and pull on a baseball cap, dressed as a farmer,
and stop by a co-op for iodine, one of the ingredients in her friends'
recipe for meth. Early on, she would trade off the products she bought for
the drug itself. Later, she was so addicted to meth, she quit her job. The
one-time well-paid marketing executive sold meth-making products for living
expenses.

In time, she started cooking the drug, in caves and in sheds, but never in
her house.

She didn't want her children exposed to it or her home to smell like a meth
lab, though meth was the appetizer, the entree, the dessert of her life.

"I couldn't live without meth," she says. "I couldn't lift my head off the
pillow to brush my teeth without it. As soon as I sat up in the morning, I
snorted a line. That is, if I'd been to bed at all."

Noland's arrest was by accident. Officials came to her home looking for a
man she knew who allegedly was involved in drug manufacturing. She invited
the officers in. When they came to her roommate's bedroom they found a
duffel bag filled with meth ingredients.

She says she was as shocked as the police were.

"My roommate had broken a covenant," she says. "We had promised each other
there would never be any drugs around my children or around the house. I
was high all of the time, but I tried to never put my children in jeopardy."

She was charged with manufacturing over 100 grams of methamphetamine, a
charge that could have brought her up to 30 years in prison. Instead, she
served three months in jail before she was to go to trial.

Because it was her first drug offense, she was given a stint in Buffalo
Valley, a rehabilitation facility in Hohenwald, Tenn. She lost custody of
her children. Her daughter went to live with her ex-husband, her son to
foster care.

"I didn't ask for rehab because I wanted it," Noland says. "I asked for
rehab because I thought it would be far easier than a long time in an
over-crowded jail."

During the 25 days she was in rehab, she dried out and began to study all
the literature she was required to read. Somewhere, she found herself on
the pages of the study sheets.

"The more I read and talked, the more I realized I was Lyn, the addict,"
she says. "Buffalo Valley rescued me from me."

From the treatment center, Noland moved to a Nashville halfway house to
get away from her old friends. She began earnestly trying to get her
children back. Within a year, she had, though her daughter continued to
live with her ex-husband.

Noland, her firstborn son and another baby, who was born a year ago after a
brief affair with a man in the halfway house, all live in an east Nashville
apartment complex that houses only recovering addicts.

"We feel safe together," Noland says. "It's a wonderful community."

She is the monitor, the one who calls the police if anyone disrupts the
residents. As monitor, she also administers monthly drug tests to all the
adults who live there.

She's far different from the woman who kept her meth stashed in her bra,
only a restroom away from a high.

She drives a limping '93 Chevrolet Blazer. She laughs a lot in her small
apartment jam-packed with Little Golden Books on the shelves and Baby Magic
on the end table and two little blond boys who won't go to sleep unless
they get second kisses.

She herself thrives on the sweet sleep of the recovering addict.

Yet, there are nights when she has horrid dreams she is using again. And
there are moments when she wants to. But those moments are fleeting.

"I have my 12-step programs," she says. "I have my 12-step sponsor. I have
my clean friends. I have my tokens for my sobriety passages."

Except for one.

Noland had been six months clean when her mother died. That
six-months-clean token was buried tucked into her mother's hand.

"My mom always believed in me," Noland says. "Now I believe in myself."