KICKING IT

Today's Meeting In Fresno Will Focus On Helping The Drug's Addicts.

Rachelle Dosty swore she'd never put a needle in her arm like she'd seen
her mother do to feed a heroin habit.

And Dosty didn't think she was repeating her mother's mistake when she
started shooting up methamphetamine at 15. She was only using it to
party, she reasoned. She wasn't addicted.

"At the time, I didn't see that I depended on it," says Dosty, 28. "Now
I think I needed it to get up and I needed it to go out and socialize,
regardless of if I was partying or not."

As Dosty talks, a small, knowing smile crosses Frankie Wilson's face.
The story is familiar to Wilson, 41, who is Dosty's roommate at
WestCare, a residential substance-abuse treatment program in southwest
Fresno. She never thought methamphetamine would change her life -- until
she ended up an addict in prison.

They didn't face their addictions until they got into treatment, say
Dosty and Wilson, who both grew up in Northern California. Dosty has
been at WestCare seven months; Wilson began treatment in March.

The women's stories are poignant statements of the need for treatment as
people meet today at the Central Valley Methamphetamine Treatment Summit
in downtown Fresno.

The summit is to develop a strategy for increasing access to programs
for Valley meth addicts. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Cal
Dooley, D-Fresno, are co-hosts.

Today's summit follows one in January held to discuss production of the
drug.

The seriousness of the methamphetamine problem in the Valley was
outlined in a special report last year by the Fresno, Sacramento and
Modesto Bee newspapers.

This summit's focus on treatment is important, says Brian Conway,
WestCare's deputy administrator, who sees a shortage of treatment
programs statewide.

The need for services will increase as Proposition 36, a new law that
requires drug treatment instead of incarceration for some drug
offenders, kicks into gear July 1, he says.

"We need the resources to deal with those who suffer the addiction,"
Conway says.

Three years ago, Dosty says, she wanted help, but treatment programs
either had waiting lists or asked for money to enroll.

Dosty's road from denial of a drug problem to acceptance of her
addiction and treatment took 13 years and left scars deeper than needle
tracks on an arm. Dosty found herself going in and out of prison for
drug-related offenses -- leaving her children just as her mother had
left her for her addiction. Dosty's three children are 13, 11 and 2.

"I was just basically hurting myself," she says, sitting at a picnic
table in a courtyard at WestCare.

Wilson was 28 when she began using crank. She was introduced to the drug
by her brother. Aside from smoking marijuana and an occasional drink,
Wilson hadn't abused drugs. She convinced herself using meth was just a
way to lose weight and she could maintain control over the drug.

But methamphetamine was already in charge.

Four years after she first "slammed" meth in a vein, she was
pistol-whipping women who owed money to her drug supplier. Caught with
drugs, she was locked up in one of the women's prisons in Chowchilla on
a four-year sentence for transportation and sales of methamphetamine.

Out of prison for 51 days, Wilson says, she sat at a church and cried.

"If I could have been sent to a program, maybe my life would have
changed then," she says.

Instead, she used drugs and was sent back to prison for another year.

Don Smith, 43, walks up as Wilson talks about her fight with meth.
Smith, WestCare's intake counselor, abused methamphetamine, alcohol and
other drugs for 23 years. He resisted treatment until 1995, when he was
faced with going to prison if he didn't sign himself into a one-year
program.

It was during therapy that he "had that moment of clarity," he says.

"I realized I've got a problem. I admitted defeat -- that I was
powerless and I surrender," Smith says.

Wilson says she knew she needed help when she "pictured myself as a fish
going to the bottom of the sea and hitting the bottom with my nose."

She began attending a group therapy session in prison and something
clicked. Being accepted at WestCare when she left prison "was like a
miracle come true."

Dosty agrees. Treatment, she says, "saved my life."