Copyright: 2004 The StarPhoenix
Contact: spnews@SP.canwest.com
Website: http://www.canada.com/saskatoon/starphoenix/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/400
Author: Randy Burton, The StarPhoenix
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

THE SCARS OF CRYSTAL METH

MLA's Whole Family Hit Hard By Daughter's Drug Addiction

"I started out on burgundy but soon I hit the hardest stuff."

-- Bob Dylan, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

That's how it was for Kelly Merriman. Her path to the bottom of the dark
well of addiction began with a joint at the age of 21.

From there it was a short hop to magic mushrooms, then on to LSD and
ecstasy, cocaine and finally crystal methamphetamine for a four-year run.

There was really no serious thought of turning back at any point along a
12-year journey of drug addiction until March of this year. Drugs were the
driving force in her life and once on crystal meth, it was like she was on
rails, unable to turn aside.

She floated on the peaks of tremendous highs, euphoric and energetic. Once,
she hallucinated that a stucco ceiling was actually falling snow.

Kelly also suffered unbelievable lows that could last for two weeks,
periods when she would spend a lot of time crying, too depressed to get out
of bed, often ill. She also heard voices that weren't there and suffered
from paranoid delusions that people were out to get her.

In the grip of meth, she lost all track of time. Five minutes could seem
like five hours, or vice versa. Many times she never went to bed at all,
but simply stayed up all night and went to work with no sleep whatsoever.

At one point, Kelly lived on nothing but chocolate milk for an entire month
and lost 45 pounds in the process. Some parts of what she went through she
can't recall. Other parts she doesn't want to remember, much less talk about.

Looking back, the 33-year-old realizes that she was suffering from low
self-esteem and wanted to please everyone. Often that meant her boyfriend,
also a heavy drug user who wanted to stay high as much as possible.

As you might imagine, she met a lot of other meth users along the way, most
of them teenagers. She found herself something of a den mother in an
apartment that sometimes had as many as nine people crashing there and
smoking meth.

The atmosphere was chaotic, with the men on raging power trips and the
women cowering in fearful paranoia. She says it was not unusual for her to
come home from work to find people peering out the windows looking for the
cops. This is one of the hallmarks of the meth user -- chronic paranoia.

Kelly's social circle was limited to fellow drug users and she often found
herself at filthy apartments without a stick of furniture, full of people
who just wanted a place to smoke and crash.

"I was one of very, very few that actually had an apartment, that still had
things. Most of the people I knew were either squatting at other people's
houses or stealing out of department stores."

Driven by guilt and the fear that her parents were going to find out about
her secret life, Kelly tried to maintain some semblance of normality. She
managed to hang on to her restaurant job, mainly because her boss was
friends with her father, local Saskatchewan Party MLA Ted Merriman.

In spite of the fact that Kelly kept coming back to her parents for
financial help, it took years for them to figure out what was going on.
Even when he was paying off her astronomic Visa bills and getting her phone
reconnected, Ted says he just assumed the weight loss and the hyperactivity
were things any daughter might go through.

"We always seemed to be able to attribute everything to stress without
looking at drugs as an issue, because the generation that Marie and I come
from, drugs was never part of the culture. If she had had a drinking
problem, I probably would have picked that up real quick," Ted said in a
recent interview.

Like any parent, Ted has his own burden of guilt to deal with.

"Fathers want to protect their little girls and I didn't. I don't know if I
could have protected her, but I would have liked to try," he said.

Even now, he has trouble dealing with the emotions Kelly's addiction has
provoked.

"It comes over me. It comes like a wave. It might last for two hours and
then it goes away. Some days I can talk about it, some days I pull over to
the side of the road and cry."

'I Hit My Bottom'

A little more than a year ago, Kelly began to realize she was in trouble.
She went to her parents and confessed about her decade of drug use. She
went into a detox program for a week, but the enormity of her addiction
still didn't register. Still blaming her parents for her problems, she was
back smoking meth with her boyfriend again within a few months, this time
harder than ever.

"Finally I ended up in the hospital a couple of times for dehydration. I
was having major pains in my sides because it affects your liver. Last
February, I finally had enough. I hit my bottom. I had pushed my family
completely away. They didn't trust me anymore. I was missing out on
important things. I mean, I missed my nephew's first birthday," she says,
choking back tears.

Once again, she went home and asked her parents for help. They helped her
get into a three-month program in a nine-bed centre called Hopeview
Recovery Residence in North Battleford. They took away her cellphone and
helped her to understand the triggers for her drug use. The treatment she
received at Hopeview has helped Merriman stay clean, at least so far.

Counsellors say that no more than six per cent of crystal meth addicts get
over it, but Merriman is intent on success.

What Kelly has learned is that drug use is a "feelings disease," that
people use drugs because they're trying to drown something out, whether
it's guilt or something else.

"I was numb for 10 years. I had no idea what this felt like or that felt
like. I had a fake sense of happiness for 10 years. Anybody that's dealing
with some kind of pain, that's what they're doing, whether they're drinking
it away or eating it away or drugging it away, anything so they do not
feel, because feelings are the worst thing any addict or alcoholic can have."

Nobody knows exactly how many crystal meth addicts there are in Saskatoon,
but there's no doubt the problem is growing rapidly.

Sgt. Jerome Engele of the Saskatoon integrated drug unit monitors the
number of police seizures of crystal meth in the city. In 2000, there were
none. In 2004, there have been 86. The same trends are evident across the
province and Western Canada. For every seizure the police make, Engele
believes there are at least 10 or more that they never see.

Kelly Merriman believes there could be anywhere from four to 25 meth labs
in the city, but if so, they have eluded the police so far. Crystal meth
manufacturing is a dangerous business, given that it involves cooking up a
chemical stew from a variety of sources. Depending on the recipe, Engele
says it can include ephedrine, Coleman camp fuel, lithium batteries,
starting ether, pool cleaners, anhydrous ammonia and red phosphorous.

A lot of it comes in from Edmonton, but local theft of ingredients is
common, especially the anhydrous. Engele says addicts like to take barbecue
tanks to agriculture dealers or farmers' yards and bleed the chemical
fertilizer out of farm tanks. This can be very dangerous, given that the
propane tanks are not designed to hold ammonia and sometimes explode when
used for the wrong purpose.

Dangerous Stuff

Whatever its origin, crystal meth is beginning to dominate the local drug
scene. It's turning up at raves more often and dealers are now spiking both
marijuana and cocaine with it, Engele says. In short, drug users don't
necessarily know what they're buying.

"Old-time druggies that I've dealt with for years say they would never use
the stuff. It's too dangerous. And these are people who will put any kind
of needle in their arm. They know when they're getting morphine, what's in
it. If it's Ritalin, they know what it is. With crystal meth, they say who
would want to put Drano up their arm?"

For families who have experienced the horrors of crystal meth, none of this
will come as a surprise. Ted Merriman is now very careful about keeping the
smell of household cleaners out of his house anytime Kelly visits, for fear
the odours could trigger a chemical craving.

The same kinds of stories come up again and again among parents, says local
artist Linda Duvall, whose son Jesse Loewy became addicted to crystal meth.
In the midst of a drug-induced depression earlier this year, Loewy
threatened police with a gun and was shot. He recovered from his wounds and
is now serving a 17-month sentence in the Saskatoon Correctional Centre,
while his mother is organizing a local community group called Moms Against
Meth.

It was at a recent conference Duvall organized that Ted Merriman first
spoke publicly about his daughter.

Aside from addicted children, Duvall says what affected families have in
common is difficulty finding adequate treatment facilities. At the moment
there are a total of 164 beds in the province for drug addiction treatment
of all kinds, sprinkled throughout several locations.

However, Duvall and others say most government-funded drug treatment
programs are not long enough to deal with the crystal meth problem. What
she and others including Merriman are calling for is not just adjustments
to existing treatment programs, but a separate facility devoted to youth
drug addictions.

The only one in the province, called Whitespruce, was closed by the
provincial government in 1993 as a cost-cutting move. For the moment at
least, there's nothing new on the horizon.

In an interview, provincial Learning Minister Andrew Thomson said the
government still believes in an integrated approach to dealing with all
addictions, rather than tackling a specific crystal meth initiative.

"I don't think there should be a separate strategy," Thomson said. "This is
a designer drug growing in interest today. A couple of years ago we saw a
rise in the use of ecstasy. These seem to move from one to another. What is
better we believe is to deal with root problems of the addiction and also
make sure there are specific treatment options to deal with the specific
addiction."

Merriman Determined

This is a line of argument that as an MLA Ted Merriman has heard in the
legislature many times, and one that the Saskatchewan Party rejects.

"Do we have to wait as politicians until it's an epidemic to act? If we
were on this from Day 1 and we stopped 50 kids from getting involved, it
would pay for a program," Merriman said.

"If we've got millions of dollars for business ventures that are
unsuccessful like Spudco and Navigata, which are a total of $95 million
between the two, and we haven't got money for addiction centres and
educational programs, then I say as government, on either side of the
house, we've got our priorities backwards."

Merriman says he's determined to make progress on this issue, even if he
has to do it himself. He and other businesspeople established a feeding
program for hungry kids called Care and Share without government
assistance, and he's prepared to do the same thing on education and
treatment for crystal meth addiction.

"If they won't do it, then I'll do it. I'll find the money and we'll get
the business community. I already have a sponsor that's prepared to look at
it."

Daughter Kelly isn't thinking about that, she's simply focusing on getting
better. Out of treatment for the past four months, she's working again and
trying to piece her life back together.

It may never be the same. Her short-term memory is not as good as it used
to be and she has a reduced ability to concentrate. There are still
occasions when she doesn't know what day it is and she finds herself having
to read things over several times or saying them out loud in order to
understand.

Kelly is also trying to make the emotional adjustments that any addict in
recovery has to go through. Firstly, she says, "I have to realize that what
I have to say is important and it matters and not just go with the flow.

"If you want to be in recovery, you can be. If you don't want to be in
recovery, you're not going to be. For me there are no slips, there are only
conscious decisions."