MY COUSIN FEEDS HIS DREAM FROM A BOX HE KEEPS BESIDE HIS BED

A Reporter's Search For A Story Begins At Home With A Relative

My cousin Anthony's home is a work in progress.

It's a modified tool shed in someone else's backyard. Just one room is
protected from the dripping rain.

Anthony's sketch of what he hopes the shack will one day look like is
pinned to a rough plywood wall.

It's impressive -- a towering cedar shading a modernistic two-storey home,
complete with workshop.

But it's a dream doomed to fail. The reason for that is stashed in a small
wooden box next to Anthony's bed.

The box contains crystal methamphetamine. Tiny shards of a toxic drug made
from industrial acids, camp fuel and cold medication.

Crystal meth was found in the bodies of 33 people in B.C. last year, more
than double the number in 2003, according to coroners' statistics.

I'd come looking for my cousin because I was pursuing a story on the drug
and I knew he was addicted to it.

The last time I saw him, in the fall of 2004, he was living well, renting
an apartment. At night, he collected metal from construction sites. He
spent a lot of his time in court, fighting for the right to see his infant son.

His addiction was eight years old. It won.

Now, there is the shack and the wooden box next to the bed. One line of
meth in the morning and one line at night.

The drug gives him energy and helps him to concentrate. In his mind,
there's lots to do. He has to gather material, tools, bits and pieces, put
them together. The meth, Anthony says, helps.

But doctors and toxicologists who deal with addicts like Anthony warn that
someone with his history may eventually become intensely paranoid as the
toxins seep further into his system.

They say meth addicts can have terrible hallucinations, sense bugs
skittering under their skin, hear voices and see images of non-existent
people ghosting in and out of their heads.

Many show up at hospital with all of the symptoms of paranoid
schizo-phrenia. Some are diagnosed drug-induced psychotic. Their minds end
up as fractured and fragile as broken glass. It happens with meth.

The lines on Anthony's face, already traced too deep for a 33-year-old, are
a roadmap to an uncertain future.

Meth users' hearts pump harder to keep their sleep-starved bodies moving.
Their chances, Anthony's chances, of experiencing a blood clot will
increase. Likewise with strokes and heart-attacks.

All of that happens, I learn, because of what's in the little box by the bed.

And, according to police and drug experts, it's happening to thousands of
British Columbians as meth use and production grows and spreads.

When The Province first reported those grim coroners' statistics in March,
the newspaper was flooded with letters from families across B.C. frantic
with worry about their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and cousins --
their Anthonys.

Over the past few weeks, I have explored the extent of meth addiction in
communities across B.C. and will be reporting on the problem in a series of
articles all this week. I have listened to harrowing tales, among them the
Vancouver woman's who speaks candidly of her only child's struggle against
meth -- and how it ended one dark January night in suicide.

For some concerned legislators, the tragedy of crystal meth is the absence
of severe enough punishments to deter those who brew the deadly concoction
in homemade laboratories.

For others, it's the easy availability of the materials that go into making
the drug. They are asking whether tighter restrictions wouldn't cut the
flow off at its source.

Looming over the picture in B.C. is the experience of such U.S. cities as
Everett in Washington state, where police say they can't fight the meth
tide without the help of volunteers to counsel those at risk.

As I worked on these stories, I heard Anthony's story repeated dozens of
times. I want my cousin to read these stories because I don't know how else
to help him.

Anthony doesn't listen too much anymore. The box is winning.

He insists he's in control. That he's "self-medicating." That he's working
on the shack. He has a joke to prove it.

Q: What's the difference between a crack addict and a meth head?

A: A crack addict will steal your wallet. A meth head will steal your
wallet and help you look for it.

Anthony throws back his head and laughs smoke toward the ceiling. His smile
is quick and wide.

And then it's time to go. There's a hug, a promise to visit again.
Anthony's not going anywhere soon.

BY ANY NAME, CRYSTAL METH IS A KILLER

- - Crystal and crystal meth are common street names for methamphetamine, the
most hyper-charged member of the amphetamine drug family. Widely used in
the 1960s and early '70s for its intense effects, crystal virtually
disappeared in the mid-'70s, but has resurfaced on a large scale in recent
years. Other names: Crank, jib, go-fast, speed. Smokable forms of crystal
are called "ice" or "glass." In appearance, it is a white crystalline
powder. Although legal amphetamine is odourless, illegal forms of the drug
often have a strong ammonia smell.

The B.C. Coroners Service reports 33 people in B.C. died with meth in their
systems in 2004, compared to 15 in 2003. The long-term trend shows deaths
increasing year by year over the past five years.