THE TALK THESE DAYS IS OF THE DANGERS OF CRYSTAL METH

SEDLEY -- The unforgiving wind churned hard across the prairie,
lifting the dust and the debris, and it carried a cold bite to it. We
are not out of the woods yet, yesterday being a reminder that the
warmth of a balmy spring has yet to take a firm hold. On the streets
of this small Saskatchewan town, less than an hour's drive southeast
of Regina, there is little activity in the early morning. Only the
figures of children marching to the Sedley high school are visible on
the deserted streets. School buses bringing students from nearby
Francis also are pulling into place.

It is now just after nine o'clock in the morning and many of the
students are on their way into the gymnasium and they take their seats
on the metal chairs and they wait for Jim Pedersen and Kelly Merriman
to come into the gym because that is why everybody is here. Jim
Pedersen is a hockey scout for the Dallas Stars and a self-described
farmer from the Milestone area. He also is an alcoholic, hasn't had a
drink for years, but spends a lot of time talking to young people
about the evils of alcohol and drug abuse. He has raised three boys.
He is so good at what he does hockey teams everywhere and some pro
teams bring him in to talk to the players. Kelly Merriman is a
34-year-old Saskatoon woman who bounced from booze to drugs for years
before she saved her own life by getting off the stuff, which was
exactly 14 months ago yesterday. They are here, in the Sedley school
because like the majority of Saskatchewan communities, big or small,
they are concerned about young people finding themselves involved in
drugs. And the focus of their talk on this morning in late April, a
talk punctuated by tears and underlined by laughter, is the latest
"popular" drug, crystal meth. Faster than any other drug, crystal meth
slips into young people and steals away their youth, and perhaps,
their futures so swiftly it is astounding. It is a problem throughout
Canada, and no community is safe from its reach. Crystal meth is made
from ingredients found on store counters and can be bought on the
street for anywhere from $5 to $10 or so a pop. That will give the
user a high that can last for a dozen hours. It also ruins lives.

Before, Jim Pedersen used to speak mostly about the evils of alcohol.
Now, he does a significant talk about crystal meth. How did he get
interested in crystal meth? He saw what hell it could produce for its
users.

He was visiting someone "at the Wascana Rehab in Regina. I looked
across the hall and there was this boy, aged 17 years, strapped into a
wheelchair. There was a girl sitting in front of him, crying. It was
the boy's sister. I looked and the boy was wearing diapers. He was
fried. He'd only started on crystal meth about a month before he got
to Wascana. He tried to hang himself once. He can't swallow anything
so he's fed intravenously. He's strapped into the wheelchair because
he tries to bite everybody who goes near him."

For the better part of an hour, Jim Pedersen talked to the students
about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. He talked of a Yorkton
hockey player who drove himself and three of his buddies to their
deaths by driving when he shouldn't have. He talked of the boy on
drugs who thought he could fly and, so, jumped off a water tower and
died. Of the boy who stood on the train tracks and tried to take on a
rumbling freight train. "The trains don't lose," Pedersen said. He
talked about the kid on drugs who tried to swim across a lake to a
party on the other side. "Drowned. Had never swam a lick in his life."

"Drugs," he told the kids in Sedley, "can wreck your lives. It's not a
one-night thing with drugs. It lasts a lifetime." He talked about a
Kelvington hockey player who committed suicide, about a girl in
Melville who tried the drug ecstasy. "Blood came out of her ears and
she was frothing at the mouth when they got her to hospital," he said.
"She was supposed to graduate that year. She didn't."

He closed in on what crystal meth leaves behind. "There was a girl who
had scars all over her stomach from scratching sores meth left her
with. There was a girl who clawed through her skin, and her muscle --
all the way to her bone -- because she was hallucinating and thought
she saw worms crawling on her arm. There was a severely depressed meth
user who had been in a closet for six days."

I have never seen a group of high school students so focused and so
attentive as they were yesterday morning in a school gymnasium in
Sedley, Saskatchewan, one small town trying to do as much as it can to
prevent the spread of crystal meth and other drugs. But when Kelly
Merriman got up to talk about her own experiences in the world of
drugs, the atmosphere in that gym grew thick with raw emotion, tears
and, in the end, hugs.

Tomorrow, Kelly Merriman's story as she told it in Sedley.