MINISTER WHO KICKED METH HABIT NOW LEADS AREA SUPPORT GROUP

To Steve Box, methamphetamine is not just a drug. It's a demon. It grabs
hold of your mind and makes you schizophrenic. It makes you hear voices.

It makes you paranoid, suspecting that the people who love you most want to
harm you. It makes you sit in your sleepless stupor and devise ways to kill
them. At one point, a voice told Box to put lighter fluid on half of his
body and light it.

Box, now a Pierce City minister who works a day job in between traveling
throughout the country spreading his message, believes it was God who
delivered him. The path Box was going down was the Highway to Hell, to
borrow a phrase from the rock group AC/DC, when Box could have had heaven.

Meth is a demon, he says, parading in sheep's clothing. You'll think it is
the best thing that could happen to you - before you become a paranoiac
killer and thief.

"Things will start appearing to you on the TV screen. It's like there's an
intelligent voice that's driving a person to destroy, to kill ... If I
could write a story or movie to show the public what people on meth see, it
would be worse than any horror movie."

A football star at Joplin Parkwood during the mid-1980s - at 35, he's still
a rock of a guy - he threw a scholarship with the University of Missouri
down the toilet.

Box started with marijuana in high school and soon was on to bigger and
stronger drugs. He says the war on drugs shut down the cocaine pipeline,
and cocaine addicts turned to meth, something you can cook in the kitchen.

He married and started making and selling exercise equipment, but being his
own boss just allowed him to indulge the demon.

Along Box's tortured journey, he would try to return to the religion he
first espoused as a child. It never stuck.

Even when he started to attend Shoal Creek Revival Church, the demon
summoned him. "I went for a period of a year and a half, and I used meth a
handful of times." Then, for reasons even he doesn't understand, he went on
a nine-day binge. On the last day, he had his wife by the throat, accusing
her of having an affair.

It was his brother David Box Jr., another church member and the Rev. Bill
Harvill who finally pulled Box from the demon. Box went out for some beer,
and saw the three men standing in front of his house. "Bill said, 'Let me
put Jesus back in control,' and he laid hands on me. All of a sudden" - Box
mimicked a lightning bolt from his head down his body - "I was sober. I
didn't have cravings anymore."

Box, sitting in the attractive kitchen of the Shoal Creek Revival Church
west of Monett on Thursday, said he dedicated himself to reading the Bible.
He found verses he believes talk directly to the making of drugs. He wrote
the book "Meth = Sorcery," sells it where he preaches, and has sent 15,000
free copies to prisons. He and his wife, Daella, are starting a support
group for those hooked on meth, and believe that for those who attend their
July 13 outreach meeting at Shoal Creek, "The Lord will set them free that
night."