A Madness Called Meth: Chapter Fifteen

NICKI'S ROAD

One Meth User's Struggle To Make It Back

In the northern corner of Fresno amid $200,000 homes in newly constructed
subdivisions with names such as "New Century" is a small dirt-and-gravel
road that leads down a short hill. The road takes visitors along the edge
of an orange grove and stops at a single-wide trailer. Once the car engine
stops, the only sound is the croaking of frogs from a nearby pond. It's a
clear day in May.

A brown-haired woman steps out of the trailer, a tow-headed baby on her hip.

"Hi. I'm Nicki," she says, smiling, and for a brief, fragile moment, she
looks happy.

Nicki Lujano is a recovering meth addict. She is 37 years old and the
mother of four children by four different fathers. She hasn't worked in
more than six years. She hasn't paid her bills in close to nine.

Once inside, sitting with her boyfriend, Dane DowDell, Lujano starts to
explain how she came to this place. She reels off her situation with
efficiency, as if she were reading a grocery list.

"You've screwed your credit up. You've lost your kids. You've lost your
car. You don't have a place to live. You let someone give you a screwed-up
haircut. You're losing your teeth."

Screwing up was the easy part. Now with more than a year of clean time, the
hard work is under way.

"This is a slow process," Lujano says, "this undoing of what you did."

Nicki Lujano has been in drug treatment since April 1998. Her patchwork of
substance abuse started when she was 15, with alcohol and marijuana. She
has kicked around from place to place -- Southern California, Oregon,
Virginia and back to Fresno. In each place, a new drug found her. Lujano
will tell you she used "responsibly" until 1991, holding down a job and
keeping up appearances. In 1993, she did her first line of meth.

"I can't remember the very first time," she says. "I had a friend who kept
trying to get me to use, but I said 'No. No. No. No. No.' I guess I stopped."

Crank slid easily into her life. First on the weekends. Then two days a
week. Then whenever she wanted to party, which was always. The next five
years were spent in a fog of meth and parties. But even before that, all
she really liked to do was get loaded.

Since her teen-age experimentations, Lujano's only real clean time was in
the late 1980s in Virginia. Two driving-under-the-influence convictions
take most of the credit for those three years of sobriety.

Her current round of sobriety also is courtesy of the courts. But she says
it's different. This time she knows the score. She knows what she'll lose.

"I know now if I use I'll pay the consequences. Unfortunately, my kids
will, too."

Her children -- Kristina, 1; Chelsey, 3; Aymee, 4; and Catelyn, 11 -- are
her goal. The only children who live with them regularly are Kristina,
DowDell and Lujano's daughter together, and Dalton, DowDell's 9-year-old
son with another woman.

Baby Kristina crawls across the brown carpet of the small, dark living
room. The view keeps it from being a cave: Golden hills roll gently toward
the still pond; a treehouse stands ready for after-school occupants; past
the pond, though out of sight, is the San Joaquin River.

They get little company.

"That's why I like this place. If you don't know where it is, you'll never
find it," DowDell says. "People would never know from the looks of this
neighborhood to find this."

A friend, one of their few clean and sober acquaintances, helped them find
the trailer in November. It used to be the home of the orchard
groundskeeper. When he left, it was creaking and leaking. The place came to
them as a cheap fixer-upper. Today, it's neat and friendly.

Lujano picks up Kristina and kisses her gently on the head.

"I can't remember any of my girls crawling," she says. "They were just
bringing themselves up."

Nicki Brenda Lujano was born May 9, 1963, at what was then called Valley
Medical Center, the same hospital her father worked in for 35 years. Her
parents -- dad a supplies manager, mom a bartender -- never were married.

After earning her high school diploma, Lujano had a string of jobs,
including stints as a cashier, paper laminator and data entry worker at a
dashboard instruments company. But when the meth started working on her,
she stopped working.

In 1998, she entered the welfare-to-work program GAIN, Greater Avenues to
Independence. It offered to help her clean up her drug problem before she
started job training. She agreed. But she still used, on and off. She would
stop long enough to pass her drug test, then start again.

It caught up to her in May 1999 when she was arrested and charged with
felony possession. She was placed into Drug Court, Fresno's program to
defer prison for first-time drug offenders.

Then in September, two of her girls' fathers took her to family court. She
took a hair follicle test and failed. It came back chronic. The results
shocked her because she had stopped using a few months before -- but years
of drug use don't fade in a few months.

She lost Aymee and Chelsey.

It was what she needed to change.

"Everything has been so drastic," she says. "But believe it or not, it was
a blessing."

Lujano attends the King of Kings Women's Program twice a week -- Tuesdays
and Thursdays. The groups meet for an hour and a half each session. There
she gets drug and alcohol education and parenting classes and talks about
how she feels.

She'll graduate this month. If all goes as planned, Lujano will go before a
judge with all her certificates, paperwork and recommendations to get her
two younger daughters back.

Until then, she goes through the daily heartache of living without them.

Amazing things can happen in the most nondescript rooms. A rectangular
table and several plastic chairs dominate the space. They are framed by a
TV in one corner and an infant-rocking swing in the other. It is a quiet
Friday in June at the King of Kings Women's Program.

"How are you feeling today?" Juanita Myers asks.

"Fine," Lujano replies.

They talk briefly about Lujano's mouth. She recently has had three teeth
filled and three teeth pulled. (Doctors speculate that chronic meth users
lose their teeth because of poor hygiene or that something in meth weakens
their gums). Because Lujano is an addict, the only pain pills they give her
are Motrin. In all, the doctor wants to pull nine teeth. The chitchat ends.

"Lately, we've been talking about how you don't have that glow you had
before you started the program. Can you tell me what happened in between
the time you completed the program the first time and now?" Myers asks.

"All of it?" Lujano asks back, hoping for a no.

Lujano graduated March 1 from the King of Kings Women's Program. The next
day, she came back in. DowDell had relapsed. He lost his job and had too
much free time.

"That brought back old feelings," Lujano says. "He's been through so many
programs, and this is my first program."

"But we are talking about your recovery," Myers counters. "He still has
things to lose, but you have none."

Lujano dutifully lists the things she has to lose: "My kids. My home. My
friends."

"But the most important thing you can lose?"

"My sobriety."

"And what happens when we give up on ourselves?"

"We get caught up again."

"So everything we worked for is nothing."

"That's what sucks," Lujano says, dropping her head to the tabletop.

And so it goes. Throughout, Myers holds a black pen at ready above a yellow
legal pad.

She writes nothing down.

Myers has been talking to women like Nicki for three years. She is the only
counselor at the program, which provides outpatient care for women who are
pregnant or have young children. Three people work in the compact office in
Fresno -- Myers, an assessment counselor and a day care assistant. She sees
10 women per group, up to two groups a day.

Like so many of her counterparts, Myers is herself a recovering addict.
While her drug was crack, her road back was just like everyone else's.
Myers has five years in recovery. She didn't use any formalized treatment
programs, instead relying on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and her family.

Each addict who comes into treatment has her own reason. Sometimes it's
thanks to a judge. Sometimes it's the loss of children. Sometimes it's
because she just can't do it anymore.

But once inside, the treatment is remarkably similar. Meth addicts don't
have the option of drug therapy like heroin users. If they come in on a
high, the first few days to weeks are spent in detoxification.
Anti-depressants or sleeping pills can be prescribed to combat the initial
emptiness of stopping. But most of the time is just spent sleeping.

Once the program starts, a lot of time is spent in chairs. Most county-run
treatment programs are based on the 12-step philosophy and the idea of
addicts helping addicts. A counselor guides a group through the process.
Education on drugs, nutrition, parenting and sexually transmitted diseases
is part of the agenda. But it's really about sharing. It helps just to know
someone else hurts like you do.

In the conference room, Lujano and Myers continue their exchange. Most of
her talks with Myers are done in group, but strangers are not welcome.

Everything is complicated. Even getting a car to come to the session is a
struggle. Though DowDell has a car, she hates to ask for it. Instead, she
borrows a friend's beige Toyota hatchback. Duct tape is supporting the
driver-side door.

Lujano hopes to start classes at Fresno City College in the fall. Her goal
is to finish a two-year program and become an X-ray technician. She was
going to start this summer.

The forms got sent in, but she never got around to picking classes.

It has all become frustrating. "I feel like I've got the short end of the
stick," she says.

"This program teaches us to be selfish," Myers reminds her. "Sometimes you
have to put yourself first. You are forgetting about Nicki. What Nicki
wants to do. What Nicki has to do."

But living with DowDell makes every problem a shared experience. They have
been together almost two years. They met each other high. They are getting
to know each other sober. Some things haven't changed.

"One thing about being an addict is that you know how to manipulate," Myers
explains.

"It's all about him. You have to quit focusing on him and trying to make
everything perfect for him."

"The manipulation carries on out of addiction?" Lujano asks.

"The character defects don't go away because we aren't using."

Crank consumed Dane DowDell's life for 15 years. He has been in prison five
times -- the first for a 1993 petty theft conviction; the subsequent four
were for parole violations. Born in the Los Angeles area, he moved to
Fresno when he was 7; he's been using drugs since age 11. He has been in
and out of treatment programs; Fresno's Tower Recovery program is his
latest shot at sobriety.

He met Lujano as her supplier. She would come over and buy drugs. He
remembers her as talkative. Things progressed from there. DowDell has been
out of prison for more than a year. Now 39, he says it's time to give up
his old life. He wants to -- for his kids, for Nicki. He says he is trying.

But quitting the drug doesn't clean up what it did. Lujano's criminal
history means the driving job she wanted is out of the question. Bounced
checks and unpaid bills have left her credit a mess. Her teeth are falling
out. Being sober hasn't proved to be that rewarding yet.

"I did start thinking, 'What is the difference?' I could be getting high
and feel like this," Lujano confesses. "I mean, you go through everything
in recovery, and now you're toothless."

To combat the cravings, addicts are taught tools -- critical thinking and
everyday coping skills that were lost in addiction. Without them, even
small problems turn into major dramas.

Myers and Lujano brainstorm answers for Lujano's current funk. She has been
feeling trapped at home with the children. But she doesn't feel right
asking DowDell to watch them so she can have some free time. A baby-sitter
never crossed her mind.

Changing the surroundings is key for users. It also is one of the hardest
steps to take. Lujano and DowDell have tried to stay away from old friends.
When they were in their whirl of meth, people -- friends -- were constantly
popping in and out. Now life is quieter. It's been a welcome change, mostly.

"I'm kind of bored a little bit now and again," Lujano admits.

The boredom isn't just from the quiet. For meth addicts, finding new ways
to have fun is a challenge. Meth floods the brain with dopamine; dopamine
triggers pleasure. These tidal waves of fun can, over time, damage brain
cells. They also can deplete the brain's overall levels of dopamine. The
result is exactly the opposite of a user's intent: less pleasure.

The normal things most people enjoy just aren't fun to recovering meth
addicts. In essence, they must go through pleasure rehabilitation. The
first step is to understand how crank affects their bodies. Once addicts
understand the mechanics of their addiction, it's easier to understand why
they feel the way they do. This also makes it easier to deal with its
fallout. For instance, knowing that the average meth craving lasts only 60
to 90 seconds helps them get through the attack.

But understanding is one thing. Changing is another.

"This process, it's like being born again," Myers tells Lujano.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not saying turn your life upside down, but try something different,"
Myers suggests.

"Say there is a play. Maybe you go and find out, 'Hey, I like plays.' "

Lujano listens closely, her chin resting in her right hand.

"Do things that are out of character for you. Do something different,"
Myers says, and then pauses. "You know where we end up if we don't," she
says looking at Lujano with a grin. "Hungry, homeless, dirty and tired."

They both laugh. Lujano leans back and then places both hands on the table
with a soft thud.

"Well, I've got all my issues taken care of," she says, smiling.

For the moment.

It's a week into July, and the timing seems right to sell off odds and
ends. But it is harder to get rid of the past than it seems. A Saturday and
Sunday slip by. Perhaps next week.

In the meantime, Lujano is trying "something different." She sees plants
popping up all over their property, chrysanthemums and wild flowers. She
starts thinking. Gardening is definitely something she has not done before.
It turns out fussing over the yard and having dirt under your fingernails
can help pass the time.

A neat row of stones lines a newly planted garden surrounding the trailer's
front steps. Lujano also plants three trees -- a plum, a hibiscus and one
with large green leaves (she doesn't know its name). The tallest stands
more than 5 feet; the smallest comes barely to the waist. Much care is
taken planting, transplanting, fertilizing and watering.

Despite her best efforts, the leaves on all three arewilting softly. Nicki
Lujano watches over them quietly.

"I hope they make it."

Epilogue, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1502/a05.html