METH ADDICT MUGSHOTS USED AS ANTI-DRUG WEAPON

Charlie Sheen, are you really now the poster boy of hard drug
use?

There's at least one police deputy in Oregon who thinks you have tough
competition from some lesser-known bit players immortalized in pictures.

A few years ago, Deputy Bret King of the Multnomah County Sheriff's
Office stood next to a cell and watched a young woman locked in a
chemically induced psychotic battle with herself.

He looked down at her mugshot, and saw who she was - then looked up to
what methamphetamine had turned her into.

A search through the police database soon found a twisted gallery of
before-and-after shots of other addicts.

A local policing exercise soon became a worldwide life-lesson when
King spearheaded "Faces of Meth", a drug awareness project that went
viral.

"Those mug shots "| struck the same chord with viewers that it struck
with me when I see a young person on drugs booked in to jail," King
told QMI Agency.

"They speak to people. In a single image, the incredible waste, the
hopelessness, the loss of health, freedom, and sanity in many cases is
captured."

Now, King and his sheriff's office have released a raw follow-up, From
Drugs to Mugs - a 48-minute documentary that uses the same sad
portrait formula that hit home in Faces of Meth.

It also includes front-line interviews with addicts.

The lawman says the new lecture - largely intended to give kids an
unfiltered glimpse of what some meth, heroin and cocaine users see in
the mirror - uses the vanity of youngsters.

The prospect of a scarred face, from clawing at imaginary insects
crawling under the skin, or teeth that are blackening and falling out
from receding gums, can be as much of a motivator as losing a job or
being arrested.

Tell young people hard drug users can sometimes look forward to cysts
on the faces or even their groins, and you have their attention.

The documentary is for sale online with money raised going back into
drug awareness projects.

At least one user depicted in the latest project came forward recently
to tell King she's now glad her image might cause someone to rethink
life choices.

Though some users are less certain about their actions.

As King goes about his campaign, he's up against powerful pop culture
forces, including stars that live lives in constant party-mode.

They include bad-boy Sheen, whose famous face couldn't be farther from
the mug shots King counts on. During one radio rant, Sheen reportedly
told his audience: "'Stay away from the crack"|unless you can manage
it socially. Then go for it."

Certain of his cause, King says the ravages of drugs can go beyond
skin deep.

"If anything, it demonstrates how out of touch someone can become when
in the grips of addiction," the deputy says of Sheen.

"I encounter a lot of people like him. Their lives are falling apart.
Their careers and their marriages fail, they're in trouble with the
law on a semi-regular basis, their health is failing, but, in their
eyes it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they are
habitual drug users.

"It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic."

And King has seen enough pictures of pathetic to know.