OF LOVE AND DRUGS

Rob Watt Tried Everything to Stop His Daughter's Destructive Lifestyle
- - Even Giving Her Money to Feed Her Habits

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 city's downtown streets, stopping beside
groups of huddled street kids, asking if they'd seen his daughter.

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

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 said. "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. 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," said
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, he
said.

One day, Watt came home with his two-month-old 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 shatter, and
with his daughter in his arms, he kept on running, out the back, and
out of his brief, tempestuous marriage.

Roberta's mother made occasional visits to her daughter, usually when
broke, Watt said.

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

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

"I was caught in the middle of summer driving a five-tonne truck
carrying 12,000 pounds of hash. Six tons," Watt said. 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 in
China, and sells them to some of the world's leading outdoor-sports
companies.

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

He 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.

A few days later, while Roberta was in Nelson, B.C., binging on
ecstasy, meth, LSD, pot and dexedrine speed, Watt suffered a serious
heart attack.

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 said.

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

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.

The trouble started before Roberta can remember.

She knew by age 7 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.

"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," Roberta said.

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," she said.

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 recalled. Instead, she would criticize the
smokers, telling them, "You guys are all stupid for smoking pot," she
said. "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 said.

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 in the
future 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 said.

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

Roberta, by that time mainlining meth via needles, provided textbook
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-goods "fence" in his late 30s,
became her boyfriend when she was 14, and was a "major influence,"
said Vancouver Detective Rob Jaberg, who first came across Roberta
while he was on the beat in the downtown core.

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
said.

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 said. "I didn't refuse anybody sexually."

In June 2005, police responded to a reported break-and-enter in an
office and apartment building, where Roberta and Buster were shacked
up.

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.

Throughout her addiction, Roberta had stayed in school. She dropped
out 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 recalled.

Even now, drug-free after rehab, 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.'
"

The persona of an extreme drug abuser was alluring.

"Being that crazy, f---ed up hardcore chick was very important to me,"
she said. "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."

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
Jaberg, who wrote a letter to the court after Roberta's meth arrest.

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 said.
"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.

Roberta's turning point came when her 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 said.

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

She was sent to the Portage residential treatment centre in Montreal,
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.

What, exactly, propelled Roberta into that world is yet unclear. But
there is no question what saved her. It was that thing she had within
herself, that thing that kept her father from giving up, that thing a
Vancouver cop saw deep within a troubled girl: It was love.

Roberta started college in Montreal on Aug. 24.