MONEY FOR METH

The Story Of A Teenager Whose Dad Thought She'd Be Safer If He Paid
For Her Drugs

Today, Operation Phoenix brings you the first of several stories of
people who've journeyed deep into the nightmare of drug addiction --
and lived to talk about why they did it, what they learned and what
they think should be done to spare others that fate

No father should ever face the choice that confronted Rob Watt.

His sweet, bright, flute-playing daughter, Roberta, was 14 and
addicted to crystal methamphetamine.

She would disappear from their upscale Vancouver home for days at a
time. He would cruise the streets of the Downtown Eastside and the
city core, stopping beside groups of huddled street kids, asking if
they'd seen his daughter.

"I wouldn't know if she was dead in a dumpster, or hanging out with
her friends in an underground parking lot," says Watt, a successful
entrepreneur, but also a manic depressive with some heavy skeletons
rattling in his closet.

Watt knew meth could cause severe brain damage. And he knew what
those enslaved within its crystal prison would do to support their
habit: steal, counterfeit, sell their bodies.

While other kids Roberta's age were spending nights doing homework
and chatting online, Watt's daughter was drug-binging with thieves,
credit-card scammers, prostitutes, even kidnappers who said they'd
sold their victims into sex slavery.

Some 200 to 300 people are enmeshed in Vancouver's theft-driven meth
scene, says Vancouver police Det. Rob Jaberg. And many of these
addicts come from middle- and upper-class families, introduced to the
drug at parties and while nightclubbing, Jaberg says.

"They only have to do that stuff once or twice and they're hooked,"
Jaberg says.

Watt, after a year of watching his daughter becoming entrenched in
meth addiction, decided his efforts to persuade her to stop using the
drug were futile.

He made his choice. He quit trying to argue Roberta out of her
addiction and began giving her money to buy meth.

"I never wanted her to have to do anything she didn't want to do in
order to get drugs -- prostitution or crime," Watt says. "I wanted to
keep her under my roof."

Roberta Watt was born of turmoil.

Her father met her mother through a housemate. Rob Watt was 45, and
made his living trafficking marijuana. His wife-to-be was 19, and had
ambitions to be a stripper. One night, she came into his bed. Watt
soon learned that she was the youngest of "a terrible family of
eight," and that as a child she'd been sent out to steal food.

"I sort of fell in love with her out of feeling sorry for her," says
Watt, now 66. "I wanted her to get pregnant, and I wanted to marry her."

His wish came true, but the dream twisted, then shattered. His wife
smoked crack during her pregnancy and became violent toward him, Watt says.

When Roberta was two months old, she stopped breathing after her
drug-addled mother breastfed her, Watt says. At the hospital, he
refused to let staff take a blood sample from his daughter, fearing
test results would lead to her seizure by child-welfare authorities.
At home, he continued to worry about what his baby may have ingested.

"I spent the night with this little infant on my chest, listening to
her heart and waiting for something to happen," Watt recalls.

By this time, the family had moved into a house Watt had bought in
East Vancouver. Two weeks after the breastfeeding incident, Watt came
home with his daughter and was met by his wife outside. She began
beating on his car with a two-by-four. Clasping Roberta tightly, Watt
fled into the house, slamming and locking the door. He heard the
window beside the door explode, and with his daughter in his arms, he
kept on running, out the back, and out of his brief, tempestuous marriage.

Watt and Roberta moved to Vancouver's posh neighbourhood of
Kerrisdale. Her mother made occasional visits to her daughter,
usually when broke, Watt says.

"She'd sleep for 12 to 24 hours, and go," Watt says. "Sometimes she'd
steal stuff, and sometimes she wouldn't."

Meanwhile, Rob was making his living in the cannabis trade, until one
sunny day on Mitchell Island in Richmond.

"I was caught in the middle of summer driving a five-tonne truck
carrying 12,000 pounds of hash. Six tonnes," Watt says. The arrest
was transformative: he realized that going to jail would cost him his
daughter. He struck a deal with prosecutors, admitting guilt in
exchange for house arrest.

Seeking a new life with a legitimate job, Watt entered into a
partnership in a budding company that made ski-boot liners in a
Vancouver warehouse.

That was 17 years ago. Today, Intuition Sports makes its products --
liners for ski and snowboard boots, mountaineering boots and
wakeboarding bindings -- in China, and sells them to some of the
world's leading outdoor-sports companies.

n

Watt constructed an idyllic, upmarket life, complete with flute and
horseback-riding lessons for Roberta.

She sang in the Vancouver Bach Children's Choir, and was able to read
music by Grade 3.

Roberta and her father filled the house with pets: rabbits, Peking
ducks, hamsters, turtles, snakes, chinchillas, a baby Canadian goose.

"I didn't know much about parenting," Watt says. "I let her grow up
in a little bubble of protection."

Perhaps Roberta bore within her a predisposition to addiction.
Perhaps her mother's sorry life haunted the outwardly happy little
girl and pushed her toward catastrophe. Perhaps her father's decision
to take in two other children of his ex-wife's alienated Roberta to
the point that she felt driven to rebel. Perhaps extreme drug abuse
was a fast track to being cool in school. Or perhaps she was just a
girl who found a short cut around the emotional upheaval of adolescence.

When that girl turned 14, she began her descent into hell. And her
father went with her.

n

Watt was happy his teen daughter had no interest in drinking. What he
didn't know was that by age 13 she had started hanging out with older
kids, taking ecstasy and snorting cocaine.

And he didn't know that, for Roberta's 14th birthday, a man in his 20s had

given her a present fated to take her down -- a baggie containing the
crystal splinters of methamphetamine.

It was only a few days after her birthday that Watt took Roberta on a
trip to Nelson to visit his dying father. Once there, Watt gave
Roberta money and pot, and told her to "go out and make some friends."

She met a young couple, he 24, she 17, and the trio embarked on a
drug spree, binging for 11 days on ecstasy, meth, LSD, pot and dexedrine speed.

She didn't tell her father about the hard drugs, but said she was
having too much fun to leave Nelson, so Watt agreed to let her stay a
few days longer.

Back on the coast, Watt had a serious heart attack. To the dismay of
Watt's friends, Roberta did not immediately come to her father's
bedside. She was drugged out and distressed, broke, calling crisis
lines seeking help to get home. She finally arrived in Vancouver as
her father was recovering from surgery.

On the way home from Lions Gate Hospital, one of Watt's friends broke
the news. His daughter had developed a serious drug problem.

"It was such a shock to me," Watt says.

n

For Watt, supporting his addicted daughter meant trying desperately
to keep her off the streets. For Roberta, the lure of the meth scene
in the Downtown Eastside and Granville Strip constantly drew her away
from her father's protective bubble.

"She hung out with interesting characters," Watt says. "It was like
stepping into another world for her."

The teen girl fell in with "Buster," a counterfeiter and drug dealer,
and with a host of identity thieves who sent out young addicts like
her to steal bank statements and other documents from
apartment-building mailboxes. There was "Angel," a now-dead biker who
once imprisoned her for three days in a room at the Downtown
Eastside's Stanley Hotel. A third acquaintance was a heroin addict
who would attach himself to those plunging toward rock bottom.

By 16, Roberta had moved past snorting meth to injecting it. Then she
began shooting heroin as well.

Watt did everything he could to keep her at home. He let her bring
friends over, and they would hole up in her room upstairs, doing drugs.

Throughout, Watt kept his business going, making frequent trips
overseas. His fears pursued him.

"Many was the time when I was in China or Italy, or in my own shop,
with tears running out of my eyes," he says. "All I knew was that my
commitment was to Roberta first. I would prefer to go down the tubes
with her than watch her go down, having abandoned her at any point."

When he went away on business, he would hide money in different
places around their house, and call Roberta every day or two to tell
her where to find stashed cash for her drug purchases. He estimates
he was giving her $10,000 a year.

II In Part 2 tomorrow: Roberta and her dad hit rock bottom -- and find a way out