USER'S STORY: 'I KIND OF DIDN'T KNOW WHO I WAS'

Rachelle Autry was at her high school graduation party when a friend
convinced her to try methamphetamine the first time.

"It wasn't a big thing then," the Grant County resident says. "I really
didn't even know what it was."

But Autry, now 22, liked the rush she got from the vial of dirty white powder.

"You feel like you can do anything. Your adrenaline's pumping and you're
just up, and you feel like you can just conquer the world," she says.

She started using meth on weekends. She says it allowed her to party all
night and still get to work in the mornings.

Within months, Autry was on a rollercoaster of binging on meth and staying
awake for a week at a time before she crashed from exhaustion or had to
take pills to get to sleep.

She quit using while she was pregnant. She has three children, a 3-year-old
and 2-year-old twins.

But she started up again soon after the twins were born.

"I figured, hey, I can do this, and I was back at it," Autry says.

Meth, she says, gave her the energy to have time for herself in between
caring for her children.

In hindsight, she calls her life then "chaos."

"I was always trying to figure out where I'd get meth next, when I'd get
it," she says. "I kind of didn't know who I was after a while."

Meth left her bone-thin, burning about 40 pounds off her frame by the time
she was arrested.

"I'd always been a size 7 or 9, but when I went to jail, I was a size 3,"
she says. Her teeth were badly damaged and she lost bone density because of
the drug.

The wild ride ended a year ago this month when she overdosed on a
combination of meth and Xanax that knocked her out and landed her in the
emergency room for a night. She was released the next morning, and soon
after that, the police showed up at her home.

Autry spent six months in jail after a conviction on possession charges. In
January, she entered Transitions Inc.'s WRAP House in Covington for rehab.

When Transitions Inc. opened in 1969, the slogan was "Speed kills."It still
kills, says Mac McArthur, executive director of the Bellevue-based
treatment center.

"It was amphetamines then, it's amphetamines now," he says. "With meth,
it's just a different way to make it."

Today, a month out of rehab, Autry works in housekeeping at a Covington
hotel. She and her husband are both on probation while they wait to regain
custody of their children, who are living with her mother. She declined to
be photographed for this story.

McArthur worries that focusing treatment and law-enforcement resources on
methamphetamine - what he calls "the poison of the month" - takes attention
away from the underlying causes of drug addiction.

He'd still like to see more attention paid to addiction itself and less to
whatever substance is popular at any given moment.

"We're dealing with these things as isolated piecemeal phenomena, and we're
never going to win the war on drugs this way," he says. "But we have to try."