PUTTING A HUMAN FACE TO CRYSTAL METH

Users Need The Support Of Family, Friends To Get Themselves Off The
Drug

This series is a joint report by Saskatchewan's four daily newspapers,
as well as Global TV in Regina and Saskatoon.

Seth has smoked crystal meth, snorted it, crushed it into drinks and
injected it during the past two years. He recently limited himself to
injections after his nose and throat began bleeding.

"Your whole life changes. You see the dirtiest people using because
you lose the desire to care. You get rid of all your belongings,
selling it to buy your drugs," the 19-year-old says. "You lose that
sense of materialism, which is quite freeing. But you're also wearing
a ball and chain at the same time."

He was feeding an $800-a-month habit and stealing to support it. But
he's trying to cut back. His girlfriend, a reformed user, is pregnant.

"I have a baby on the way, so I'm trying. Addicts do have a
conscience," he says. "We're still human."

Seth's relationship with his mother fell apart once he started using
meth. She kicked him out of the house because "I used to do whacks
(hits) in the bathroom," he says.

He uses his stepfather as an intermediary to talk to his mom and
little sister, 14. Things are still rocky with mom, but "I had my
first decent conversation with my sister in a long time when I told
her she was going to be an auntie," he says.

When he smiles, his eyes grin, too, unmasking a gentle face amid
dangling dreadlocks and a serpentine beard.

Seth's elegant features -- wide, tawny eyes accented in thick lashes
- -- defy the begrimed addict image. His easy demeanour and articulate
speech further confound the stereotype. His complexion is flawless,
save for the bleeding vein where a needle pierces his forearm skin as
we speak. The rush is so fast it hits the tastebuds instantly.

"It tastes like lime, like a tequila shot," he says as a Cheshire grin
creeps across his face.

Although he maintains an air of composure, Seth's speech becomes rapid
and disjointed. His eyes get wider.

You have to be careful about who is supplying the meth, since there
are so many cooks and varying ingredients, he warns. It can be
produced in small, clandestine labs -- a kitchen or bathroom -- by
mixing a cocktail of about 15 substances, mostly pseudoephedrine (a
cold remedy), red phosphorous and iodine, but also including ammonia,
paint thinner, ether, Drano, Ajax and the lithium from batteries.

"Our city is awash in drugs," Seth says, no pun intended on the
cleaning products. "You have to find someone you trust. I know my
pipes are clean because I use Drano." He extends his arms and looks
them over.

His best friend died a week earlier because of a bad batch of meth.
Someone mixed in silica salts (used in packing and electronics
insulation), which hardens into a plastic and clogs the arteries. Seth
and his girlfriend had contemplated terminating her pregnancy until
their friend's death.

"We decided to dedicate it to his spirit. We're bringing someone into
the world, for someone who left," he says.

Lori Green is tired of trying to hide the "pure hell" her family
experienced as daughter Amy fell into the clutches of crystal meth.
She wants people to know how she planned for her 17-year-old
daughter's funeral.

"We were watching our child dying. At the same time, she wasn't
anything like my daughter," Green says. "She was tweaking all the time
and twitching. It was horrible. Even her voice no longer sounded like
my daughter.

"I don't know if I've ever cried as many tears as I have over meth.
It's like having everything you love stripped from you."

Green has to pause. The tears are still there.

"We thought we had a pretty nice life," she says. "All parents
probably say this, but I had a really pretty daughter. She dropped to
82 pounds and went from a beautiful impish-looking cheerleader-type
blonde to an emaciated girl. Her teeth yellowed and her hair lost its
shine. We basically watched her body die."

One time, Green thought Amy -- which is not her real name -- was in a
coma. She couldn't wake her up. It was just one of many deep sleeps
the teen would slip into as she came down from a binge.

"I did think about planning my daughter's funeral -- a lot of times. I
did go into her room and put my head right down on her chest to check
if she was breathing," says Green. "I can't tell you how many times I
just couldn't open her bedroom door, so I would wake up my husband to
do it. I was just so certain that would be the day we find her dead."

Fortunately, Amy is not dead. But part of her is. She is now 20 but
has the mentality of a 15-year-old.

"When you start to use, your emotional maturity stops," explains
Green, who has become well-versed through the experience and her
connection with Families Against Meth (FAM), a local support group.

Another parent in FAM has a 27-year-old son whose mind is also stalled
at 15.

"Biologically these are adults who should be able to function on their
own and do adult things. But it's like having a teenager with temper
tantrums," says Green. "That's when it really hits you -- when you
watch them struggle to think and function -- that this drug is brain
damaging."

Green went through the court system to have Amy committed for
treatment. When Amy was released 28 days later, her child-like state
was astonishing.

"The way I communicated with her for the first four or five days
(after she was released) was by singing nursery rhymes -- to my
17-year-old," says Green. "My other daughter, who was 15 then, says it
was like having a baby sister."

FAM started in Saskatoon in December with five members and now has
about 90 from the city and surrounding area. One parent has three
addicted children, including a daughter who just had a baby with
another user.

"And those are just the parents willing to stand out there with their
stories," says Green. "People have to understand this is not the drug
of the week and next week it'll be over and done with. It's killing
our kids."

If you suspect your kids are trying meth address it at once, urges
Cathy, a FAM member whose 21-year-old son is trying to kick his
addiction at the Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford.

"Don't turn a blind eye and say it won't happen to you. I can't tell
you how much I want to stop other parents from going through this,"
she says, collapsing into sobs. "It's too easy to say it won't happen
to you and that you raised your children right. We're all good
families who have done our best.

"If you wait for your child to make a decision (to stop), you'll be
writing an obituary."

Her son began taking meth in early 2004 but fell hard in August. Since
September he has been in and out of the Hantelman mental health unit
at Royal University Hospital seven times. He lost weight, went pallid
and was verbally abusive to Cathy. He was "seeing and hearing things
we can't even imagine" and at times, would hit walls and doors in the
house, forcing Cathy to call police.

"Meth has taken him down so quickly, it's unbelievable," she
says.

He was transferred to North Battleford for more exhaustive treatment a
few months ago. He was clean for close to two months when he visited
home the first weekend in June.

"We had our fun back. His personality and ambition had returned,"
Cathy says.

By Sunday, he was back on the junk.

"He had that blank look again. His emotions were gone," Cathy says.
"This is a setback, there's no other way to put it. But he wanted to
go back to the hospital. He wants help and that's encouraging."

Lori Green says the procedure to secure a commitment order for one's
child is enough to derail some good-intentioned people.

"You're laying the most private aspects of your life out there for a
stranger," she says. "Then you have to do it all over again for a judge."

The worst experience, however, was when police arrested Amy at the
apartment of a meth dealer.

"They phoned to say they had picked her up and I could hear my
daughter screaming in the background, why have I done this to her,"
Green says. "You're trying to save somebody but they hate you for it."

She described her family as close-knit, with annual traditions on
holidays such as Christmas.

"When my daughter decided to go out, missing Christmas dinner, it was
so out of character for her. It may sound trivial to people but it's
what you have to pay attention to," she says. "What this drug does to
a family is break down the most basic family traditions until you're
living with a stranger. You know you're child is in there somewhere
but they're lost."

Most drug users call the time they're on a high a "trip." Meth users
call it a "vacation" because of the extended stay of several days.

Time is non-existent to a user, Seth says. Five minutes can feel like
five hours and vice-versa, he explains, squatting in the bushes at an
off-leash dog park, shooting his gak (a dose). A friend, Sonny, smokes
it a few feet away.

"We work on a strange clock. I'd prefer if we had a 72-hour clock with
three hands. That would make more sense to us -- that's the kind of
time we keep," Seth says.

He has gone full days without eating or drinking and has a friend who
went a month without consuming anything but salad dressing and
chocolate milk.

The process to smoke meth begins with a solid shard heated inside a
broken light bulb, like a makeshift Bunsen burner. It puddles, is
cooled to crystallize, then heated again as the user inhales the smoke
through a straw or pen casing.

Smoked meth can develop as crystals at the back of the throat, Seth
explains. He calls the formation "diamonds" and "talks them forward"
over the period of a week to where he can bite them for another buzz.

Smokers experience more side-effects than those injecting. It vents
through their pores with a urine-like odour. They look mangy, with a
poor complexion scored with pimples, scabs and scars.

They become infatuated with picking their skin to get the meth trapped
in their pores. Their skin bleeds and scabs over. Hard-core addicts
will pick the pimples and scabs and smoke them to get every ounce of
meth, Sonny says, his lips upturned in disgust.

"Snorting it makes you crazy. Smoking it makes you stupid. Injecting
it is a pure head high," says Seth.

Lori Green's daughter, Amy, left home earlier this year to escape the
meth trap in Saskatchewan. She is working on three months of being
clean, living in small-town Alberta with her biological father.

"When she left she looked like crap but she was relatively clean,"
Green says. "It was her choice to go there because she desperately
needed to get away from here. Dealers can almost smell someone clean
coming out of rehab and they're knocking at the doors again. The draw
is just too much."

Another reason Amy relapsed was because she began putting on weight
and thought she was getting fat.

"They're so used to having themselves thin," says Green. "We did the
gym together but that doesn't work nearly as quickly as the drugs."

On top of that, Green's family was burdened with shame as friends,
neighbours and relatives became aware that Amy was a drug addict
locked in a psych ward.

"I think there's probably a million broken marriages. I'm lucky that
my husband and I stayed strong through all of this," Green says. "It
took me a long time to tell people the things that -- as good
middle-class people -- we've been told all of our lives to hide and
not talk about."

Amy was never violent and didn't steal from her family, but in some
ways, that might have been easier to deal with, says Green.

"Instead, she just wasn't there, inside herself. There was nothing
important to her anymore. She dropped school, sports and her friends,
then got new friends you'd never see. I used to call them
nightstalkers."

The family adapted to the new life by barring the windows to keep the
faceless friends from going in and out at 2 a.m., and recorded phone
numbers of people who called. They also installed an alarm system, but
Amy gave the code to friends.

"It's a surreal world," says Green. "People tell you to get control of
your child or lock them out of the house until they choose not to do
it. But it's not that easy. It may have been a choice to begin with,
but after the second or third use, the choice is gone. It's now an
addiction, a debilitating addiction.

"And if we throw them out of the house, we're throwing them into the
meth community."

Green and Cathy stress the need for meth-specific treatment centres in
Saskatchewan. A meth addict needs rest, but present addictions
programs require active participation or you get tossed out.

"One of the other mothers in our group was told by her son, 'I'm not
even a good enough addict to get help,' " said Green.

Until then, Cathy says she will count success by the minutes and days
that her son is clean.

"I don't know how this picture's going to end. I can just hope we'll
get through this and my son can live a decent life -- a life where
he's happy."