CRACK-USING MOM WAS HER IDOL

Recovered Addict Recalls Becoming Fascinated by Her Mother's Drug
Use

Today, Operation Phoenix brings you Part 2 of Roberta Watt's story,
the first of several about 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 save
others from that fate

Cigarettes. Marijuana. Ecstasy. Cocaine. Crystal meth.
Heroin.

It was not an unusual progression, but what sets Roberta Watt's drug
career apart is the age at which she started, and the velocity of her
fall.

Outwardly, Roberta appeared to be on track to a successful life. She
had a loving, devoted father. They lived in Kerrisdale, one of
Vancouver's wealthiest neighbourhoods. Like many children in the area,
she grew up taking horseback lessons. Once a week, a music teacher
came to give her flute lessons in the living room.

But behind that idyllic picture lay a darker story. Her father, Rob
Watt, now 66, was a former cannabis trafficker who had built a new
life around his beloved daughter. Roberta's mother was a crack addict
who kept her seesawing from elated attachment to crushing
disappointment.

The trouble started before Roberta can remember, even before she was
born, with her mother smoking crack during the pregnancy.

She knew by age seven that her mom was an addict, but that awareness
didn't diminish what she felt for the woman who bore her, and who
visited irregularly.

"Whenever she was there, it was like, 'Oh my God, she's here. She's
actually in front of me,'" Roberta says by phone from Montreal.

"I idolized her, the way she looked, the way she laughed, her hands,
the way she picked me up. I just cherished every moment I had, because
I never knew when the next one would come."

She remembers the painful conversation in which a family member let
slip that Roberta's mom was actually on drugs during the times she
visited her daughter.

"It was a big eye-opener," Roberta says.

Particularly hurtful were the family discussions of her mother's life,
in which people she loved said terrible things.

"The second I saw her, I would be so happy that she was there that I
would forget about it all," Roberta says. "I really loved her."

Roberta was a clean-living, active girl. But her home was frequently
full of extended family, marijuana smoke clouding the air.

"Everybody was just waiting for me to smoke pot so I could be part of
the family," Roberta recalls. Instead, she would criticize the
smokers, telling them, "You guys are all stupid for smoking pot," she
says. "Everyone was all like, 'When is she just going to chill out and
smoke a joint?' "

When she finally began smoking, at age 13, her home became a gathering
place for her friends.

"You could come over and smoke pot," she says. "Everyone loved that .
. . I always had the best pot, and it was free. My dad gave it to me."

Her father believes cigarettes and drinking posed a far bigger threat
to Roberta than marijuana, and sees no connection between her early
pot use and the hard drugs that followed.

Three months into high school, at age 14, Roberta decided to take
ecstasy. "I tried it once, and for about five months I did it every
single weekend," she says.

After she took the drug three out of five days during spring break,
friends warned her to slow down. As would occur again and again, when
even hardened addicts would worry about her extreme drug abuse,
Roberta didn't listen.

She was hanging around with much older people, and started snorting
cocaine. Coke had an added fascination. It was the drug that had
hooked her mother.

"I really wanted to see what all the fuss is about . . . what my mom
was finding so attractive in this drug, that could be more important
than me and [her] four other kids," Roberta says.

She loved the cocaine high, and kept chasing it. She knew hard-drug
use would upset her father, who had pulled his life together while
serving house arrest when she was three for driving a truck carrying
six tonnes of hashish.

Her father, she says, put an "intense amount of love and effort and
investment" into raising her.

"Me to my dad, I was like his saviour, I was the thing that was just
going to make him whole," she says. "We were like a team -- it was us
against the world."

As Roberta began to hurtle down the slippery slope of addiction, her
father remained unaware.

"He thinks I'm just smoking a bunch of pot. He's giving me money, and
freedom, and everything else a rebelling teenager wants."

Former Vancouver policeman Al Arsenault encountered countless addicts
in nearly 15 years patrolling the Downtown Eastside beat. He met
Roberta while working on a documentary film about crystal meth,
produced by the Odd Squad, a group of cops and retired officers.

Roberta, by that time mainlining meth via needles, provided
textbook-perfect material to illustrate the horrors of drug addiction.
To Arsenault, she looked like a terminal case.

"When you're mainlining, it's as far as you can go," Arsenault says.
"That's hardcore. I just thought, 'Crystal meth, young girl,
mainlining: you're done.'"

The company she kept drew her deep into the drug underworld. Buster, a
meth dealer, counterfeiter and stolen-property "fence" in his late
30s, became her boyfriend when she was 14, and was a "major
influence," says Vancouver Det. Rob Jaberg, who first came across
Roberta while he was on the beat in the downtown core.

"He generally likes the young girls," Jaberg says. "He's a real piece
of work."

Hoping to loosen the charismatic Buster's hold on Roberta, Jaberg
pointed the department's identity-theft task force -- a group focused
on meth-driven fraud -- in Buster's direction.

Roberta, meanwhile, began trolling the alleys and bedbug-infested
rooms of the Downtown Eastside, selling meth and pot. "I had a lot of
dope, and I had a lot of money, and I was a good businesswoman," she
says.

In the Downtown Eastside, and among the street kids in the city core,
Roberta found an increasing sense of self, and easy
gratification.

"I was having sex with people in alleys and in parked cars and in
stairwells, anywhere," she says. "I didn't refuse anybody sexually."

In June 2005, police responded to a reported break-and-enter in an
office and apartment building near Cambie Street and Broadway, where
Roberta and Buster were shacked up. Buster hid in a room across the
hall.

"When police went in one end, Roberta went out the back," says Jaberg,
currently a member of the identity-theft team. "There were police out
back, too. She was carrying her boyfriend's stash of drugs."

Roberta was charged with possessing 77 grams of meth, for trafficking
purposes. Jaberg, who works in the department's identity-theft task
force, kept in contact with Roberta.

"I saw some hope in her," he says. "Ultimately, she's a good
kid."

Though he felt the bust was a "wake-up call" for Roberta, he watched
as she continued down the path to ruin. She started injecting heroin
along with meth, and her room at home was strewn with needles, Jaberg
recalls. She was becoming unkempt, and had lost the brightness of
demeanour he'd seen before.

"She deteriorated faster because of the heroin," Jaberg
says.

The opiate drug became a refuge for Roberta within the frantic world
of meth.

"It felt like I was just in heaven. From being so jittery and so up
and going crazy all the time, picking at myself," Roberta says, "I
became totally calm."

Through her addiction, Roberta had stayed in school. She dropped out
of Point Grey Secondary midway through Grade 10, but continued in
alternative programs, shooting up before class, during breaks, even in
the back of the bus on her way home.

She became obsessed with needles, sometimes drawing out her own blood
just to inject it back in.

"It was this total love affair with this way of mutilating myself,"
Roberta recalls. "I was not this young girl, I was just this total old
haggard lady that was wanting to die, and I was trying to get as high
as I could before that happened."

Even now, drug-free after rehab and poised to begin college in
Montreal, Roberta struggles to explain why she left the posh comfort
and love of her family home for the chaotic drug underworld.

"It would be really easy to say, 'Oh, because my mom was an addict,'
or it would be really easy to say, 'Oh, it was my dad who enabled
it,'" she says.

She remembers being ostracized as a schoolgirl when another female
student turned friends against her. She remembers the sense of
betrayal she felt when she learned her mother was on drugs during
visits. But most of all, she remembers feeling what so many youngsters
feel as they enter the teenage years, the sense that nobody
understands them, or sees the world the way they do.

The persona of an extreme drug abuser was alluring.

"Being that crazy, f---ed up hardcore chick was very important to me,"
she says. "It's a really loud identity."

Her new life, she discovered, brought a sense of self-hatred that felt
good. And it turned the focus of those she loved toward her.

"The feeling was so appealing to me, of pain, of self-loathing, of
pushing the people that cared about me away, making them feel the pain
with me," she says. "I liked the reaction when people would be worried
about me."

She took pride in the status she'd gained as a girl swimming
successfully with the piranhas of the underworld, and impressing the
bottom-feeders.

Nobody, she says, could stop her from pursuing the mind-bending
highs.

"I just wanted to feel this over and over and over again," she says.
"I'm 15, and I have my dad by the balls. He's not going to get in my
way. I would go to school in Grade 9, not having slept for three days."

She was taken one day by a biker nicknamed "Angel" to a room in the
Downtown Eastside's Stanley Hotel. The man used her for sex for three
days, refusing to let her leave.

"I needed to go to school," Roberta says. "I said, 'I promise to come
back, just let me go to school.'"

Finally, on a trip to the washroom, she bolted.

In March 2006, a friend of Roberta's suffered a near-fatal overdose in
the home where Roberta and her father lived, and two years later,
armed men committed a home invasion at their house.

Roberta brought trouble and pain to her father's life. He gave back
unconditional love. The man who had provided marijuana to his daughter
had watched her fall victim to much harder drugs, and he fought with
all he had to keep her safe.

There were many friends, even in the drug scene, urging her to clean
up. There was her father's lawyer, who argued in court that Roberta
was a good candidate for rehabilitation, and directed her to the
program that has, so far, saved her life. There were police, including
Arsenault and fellow Odd Squad producer Sgt. Toby Hinton, and
meth-scene expert Jaberg, who wrote a letter to the court after
Roberta's meth arrest.

"Roberta appeared to be very intelligent, quick-witted, and pleasant
to talk to," Jaberg wrote in the May 2007 letter. "In my opinion,
Roberta was victimized by a predator who manipulates and preys on
young women in order to get them to do his bidding."

Jaberg set up a meeting to talk with Roberta and her father about ways
to get her out of addiction. The officer has mixed feelings about Rob
Watt's decision to fund his daughter's addiction.

"While he enabled it, he strived to keep her safe," Jaberg says.
"Other parents, they would lose control, then who knows where their
daughter is, or their son?"

Roberta reached a deal with the Crown that her drug charge would be
dropped if she went to rehab. While waiting to get into the program,
she continued her heavy drug use.

Her turning point came when her despairing father sat her down, and
made her see, for a moment, outside her own world.

"I just want to ask you if I should prepare myself to live like this
for the rest of my life," he asked her.

The sincerity of her dad's plea overwhelmed her.

"I felt for the first time the amount of pain that I actually caused
somebody else," she says.

She agreed to go to detox, believing she would fail, but found herself
inspired by the stories, and healthy lives, of recovering addicts who
spoke in the facility.

For her rehabilitation, she was sent to the Portage residential
treatment centre in Montreal, in a pilot program of Vancouver Coastal
Health. Her 11 months in Portage solidified her new, drug-free life.

She finished high school during treatment and afterward.

Roberta started college in Montreal on Aug. 24.