'I Couldn't Get Away'

METH OUTRANKED EVERYTHING - EVEN HER KIDS

She remembers her nose burning and a bitter taste in the back of her
throat. Red polka-dots clouded her vision. At first, she could scarcely
feel the high - the one her husband told her would make everything - life,
sex, their marriage - better.

Candy Heimbaugh walked out of the Motel 6 bathroom, worried the powder had
not worked its magic.

"Is this what's supposed to be happening?" the Des Moines woman remembers
asking.

It was 1993. Mexican drug organizations had slowly overtaken distribution
of a cheap but potent stimulant that had been sold by outlaw bikers since
the 1950s. Substance-abuse workers around Iowa noticed a rash of new,
hard-core drug users that some called "tweakers."

After rounding up a series of small, crude drug-making laboratories, drug
agents cringed at an ominous discovery in Ames: 40 pounds of one of the
world's most addictive substances, all made using a common allergy medicine.

What happened to Heimbaugh next that night helped spark what has arguably
become Iowa's worst drug epidemic. Within minutes, the 22-year-old felt a
powerful, long-lasting rush that dwarfed all other highs she'd known.

She would chase that rush for the next decade. Almost overnight,
methamphetamine's grip stripped her of judgment, stole her ability to
parent, and coaxed her into an underworld of addicts.

Heimbaugh is clean now, and she knows she has more to be thankful about
this Thanksgiving than she could put into words. After all, there was a
time not too long ago when she believed her only hope of ending the pain of
addiction would be to end her life.

"I was sick of it, and I couldn't get away," she says. "Meth was everywhere."

It's been 10 years since Heimbaugh became hooked on methamphetamine, and
today, the drug is almost everywhere.

Addiction outbreaks have been reported in most parts of the world,
including Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, New Zealand, Australia and
Southeast Asia. Authorities on the U.S. East Coast are only beginning to
understand the dangerous qualities that make meth so hard to fight.

But for all its newfound popularity, some believe methamphetamine's deepest
roots remain in the Heartland, and Iowa in particular.

Like Heimbaugh, many casual drug users in the Midwest became hooked on meth
in the early 1990s, following a deliberate attempt by underground drug
organizations to market a new, more potent form of amphetamine. The new
drug's active ingredient was ephedrine, a widely distributed
over-the-counter drug.

Smoked, snorted, injected or eaten in capsules or pills, methamphetamine is
considered more addictive than cocaine, heroin or opium. Yet users
consistently underestimate the drug's addictive qualities when they first
decide to try it.

Especially in the early stages of usage, meth fuels huge energy spurts,
eliminates hunger and intensifies thoughts and sensations, like sexual
satisfaction.

"I've tried all sorts of drugs, and I can't think of anything like it,"
Heimbaugh said. "You never forget that first high."

One Try and "You're Doomed"

In the past decade, thousands of Iowans have been imprisoned for dealing
and manufacturing meth, and thousands more addicts have lost children and
jobs. Yet new generations of users are easily lured.

"I think the decision to use has a lot to do with the state of mind you're
in when you're exposed to it," Heimbaugh said. "All it takes is for you to
see somebody using. If they've got a good high going, you think, "OK."
After that, you're doomed."

While growing up on Des Moines' south side, Heimbaugh said she watched her
father quit drinking alcohol with relative ease. She also remembers trying
a number of drugs - alcohol, marijuana, acid, speed - during her teens and
early 20s without feeling as though she were addicted.

Almost immediately, however, Heimbaugh realized meth was different. Within
a couple of weeks of sampling the powder, she was using daily. Within a
month, she was in a nearly hopeless downward spiral.

In 1994, Heimbaugh moved to the Ozarks, where a friend showed her how the
drug was made.

"Seems like everybody there was making it themselves," she remembers.

Heimbaugh and her children, Chelsey, now 12, and Caden, 8, moved often,
staying one step ahead of drug agents and a growing number of informants
who might have sacrificed her to authorities in exchange for lighter prison
sentences.

She eventually moved back to Des Moines, where she bought meth at her
south-side apartment and in restaurants, convenience stores and car washes.

Over the course of nearly 10 years of using, Heimbaugh estimates she met
1,000 other addicts. At any given time, she estimates she knew at least 20
to 30 dealers whom she could call on to buy dope.

As much as Heimbaugh used, though, she always craved more.

"I kept trying to do more so I would be happy like I was at first," she
said. "But I just got angrier and more depressed.

"Eventually, I thought I was going crazy. I started hearing people talking
and imagining things. Still, I couldn't quit."

Two Failed Attempts to Get Clean

Methamphetamine targets the body's central nervous system, creating a
powerful high that lasts for hours. Addicts frequently stay up for days
while using, then suddenly lose energy and fall into a deep sleep. Those
coming down from a meth high can exhibit erratic or, sometimes, violent or
psychotic behavior.

Much of the time that Heimbaugh used the drug, her son and daughter lived
in a state of neglect.

The single mother was often away from home or slept for hours on end.
Boyfriends who were high on meth beat her, and she fought back. Friends and
strangers dropped by the family's small apartment at all hours to get high.

Caden remembers secretly unlocking his mother's bedroom door to watch her
use the drug.

"I caught her," he said. "I knew Mommy was taking people in there to use
the drugs."

Heimbaugh often left the children in the care of relatives, who grew
exasperated with her drug use.

Trips that Heimbaugh promised would take an hour turned into days.
Sometimes, she said, she drove to Osceola at 4 or 5 a.m., gambled on the
casino boat there until noon, shopped until evening, and then headed to
Prairie Meadows casino to gamble more - a pattern she repeated for days
without sleeping.

If she won, and she often did, Heimbaugh would splurge - on bicycles,
computers, stereos, remote-control cars. All of the gifts, she said, were
for the children to ease a guilty conscience.

Racked by depression, Heimbaugh sometimes cried inconsolably. Chelsey, at
12, her eldest, often came home to find her mother unable to wake up.

Heimbaugh would go through drug treatment twice: Once for a week, after
witnessing a homicide on the south side in the home of another user. She
cooperated with police, vowing to get straight and on the right side of the
law.

She got high the night she dropped out of treatment.

Then, in February 2001, Heimbaugh was hospitalized for three weeks after
she was abducted and assaulted by a boyfriend.

"He beat me all night," she says.

Her sobriety lasted about 24 hours.

After the beating, Heimbaugh's children waited up for her, sometimes until
2 or 3 a.m.

"We wouldn't go to school the next day because we were so tired," Chelsey
remembers.

At the time, Chelsey's only friends were 16- to 18-year-olds - friends of
her mother's drug buddies.

"I felt like I was the only kid going through it," the girl recalled. "I
really didn't think other kids had parents like my mom."

An Ultimatum From Her Daughter

By 2002, Heimbaugh was falling apart. Her car had been repossessed, and she
was on the verge of being evicted. Estranged from her parents, she said she
tried to kill herself twice - slicing her wrists and overdosing on an
antidepressant.

Then, on a July morning last year, Chelsey looked her mother in the eye and
confronted her for the first time.

"I told her I couldn't take it anymore, and I was leaving," the 12-year-old
remembers. "I told her I didn't like her or what she'd become."

When Heimbaugh was admitted a third time in a psychiatric ward at Iowa
Lutheran Hospital, the 32-year-old had aged years and had dropped almost 50
pounds, weighing just 82 pounds. Her drug counselor told her the hospital's
treatment unit was full, but Heimbaugh persisted, saying she wouldn't
survive another day.

The thought of losing her children's love, she said, finally gave her the
strength to quit.

"Even today, I can still see the way Chelsey looked at me that day," she
said. "When somebody loves you, you can see it in their eyes. I looked at
her, and I could see it wasn't there anymore. It was just a look of pure
hate, and I couldn't stand it."

More than a year has passed.

Heimbaugh and her children are starting over. After months of living at her
parents' modest home on the south side, Heimbaugh is moving soon to her own
apartment - a big step.

She's also taking classes at Des Moines Area Community College, hoping to
become a chemical dependency counselor. She wants to help teenagers
experimenting with drugs - kids, she says, who haven't yet been through all
that she has.

Caden clings to his mother like a long-lost toy recently found. Chelsey
guards her as if she's a scared animal in need of rescue.

Slowly, the mother is earning back her children's trust.

In one way, Chelsea said, the experience was good. Neither she nor her
brother plans to have anything to do with drugs. She can easily recognize
someone who is high, and she intends to stay away.

On the other hand, the seventh-grader said: "I think I'm still angry about
stuff, like her lying to us, like when I asked her if she was doing drugs,
and she said, "No." " "My prayer was answered"

Surrounded by former drug haunts, Heimbaugh goes out of her way to avoid
dozens of people she once considered friends. She works daily to restore
her family's faith in her as a mother. She attends four support groups
weekly and helps to lead a fifth. Like many other former addicts, she's
rediscovered God.

"I just know when I got down on my hands and knees and prayed for help, I
got into treatment. My prayer was answered," she said. "Now, I pray for God
to show me the road I'm supposed to be going on and give me the strength,
the knowledge and the wisdom to overcome things that would normally bring
me down."

Shortly before school recessed for the summer last year, Chelsey invited
her mother to Weeks Middle School to talk about what they went through
together, at an event called Healthy Choices Day.

Heimbaugh scanned the middle-school auditorium, recognizing children of
parents she used to snort meth with. She saw some kids who wore the same
empty expressions that she saw in her children when she was using.

She was reminded that almost every one of her friends went to prison or
lost children because of their addictions, and felt immense relief that she
hadn't.

"That was a really big day," she said. "I saw so many kids who I knew were
going through this with their parents. But the biggest part was when it was
over, and they gave me hugs and they told me they were proud of me. I just
can't describe what it did to me inside."

Reinforcement like that, Heimbaugh said, has helped keep her away from meth.

She tears up easily thinking of what her children went through or at times
when they cuddle close to her, whispering words of affection.

"I know if I would have grown up with a parent like me, I wouldn't be as
forgiving," she said. "I know I did a lot of things I can't take back. All
I can do now is try to give them the life they should have had."

Still, the cravings hit her on a moment's notice. There are moments she
still thinks enviously of someone experiencing that first high - the one
she believed would make things better.

"But now," she said, "I really don't think I would ever go back to it. If I
do, I'll end up dying. I know that. I don't have the strength to go through
it again."

Why She's Talking

Candy Heimbaugh broke her active meth addiction through six weeks of
intensive inpatient and outpatient drug treatment at Iowa Lutheran Hospital
- - her third try in treatment. She said she wanted to be interviewed because
she wanted to do what she could to help other people, especially young
people, cope with meth addiction. "It's just amazing how it takes over your
life," she said.