METH TAKES OVER THEIR LIVES

Second in a two-part series

Julie Lovell thought she had found a way to make some quick extra
money. Friends showed her an Internet recipe she could follow in her
own kitchen. Using $200 worth of ingredients, she could make nearly
five times that much by selling her finished product. It would only
take three hours to make, and she could quality test the finished
product on herself.

The 45-year-old grandmother already had a ready customer base with a
high demand for her product. In 2003, police showed up outside her
home in rural Posey County, Ind., and seized three garbage bags from
her front yard. Inside were the remnants of her homemade
"methamphetamine lab," coffee filters, drain cleaner and traces of
over-the-counter cold medicine that contained pseudoephedrine. The
bags' contents were enough for investigators to leverage a search
warrant for Lovell's home. Lovell was arrested and charged with
felony drug dealing. She was tried, convicted and sentenced to six
years in prison. Now she is incarcerated at the Rockville
Correctional Facility, 30 miles northeast of Terre Haute, Ind. Lovell
says she still is amazed at how fast and furious the drug took over her life.

She said she became a methamphetamine addict within a week of taking
the drug and turned into a dealer when she realized how easy it was to make.

"All it takes is three hours and four chemicals and you've got
yourself a patch of dope," said Lovell. The fact that a Posey County
grandmother could turn herself into a drug dealer offers a glimpse
into why Indiana legislators passed the "Meth Protection Act," which
went into effect in July. It restricts the sale of
pseudoephedrine-based products.

The number of clandestine meth labs has skyrocketed 3,400 percent
since 1994. Last year, police in Indiana shut down 1,549 meth labs -
almost one-third were in Southwestern Indiana near the Illinois border.

What impact the new law will have remains to be seen. Since it went
into effect, the number of drug labs seized by police has dropped 27
percent, according to Indiana State Police. Evansville police say the
number here has stayed constant, in part because of the influx of
"crystal meth," a purer, more potent form coming in from Mexico.
Lovell was arrested before the new law, and she doesn't know whether
that would have stopped her from making the drug. She now is counting
on a new treatment program, launched earlier this year by Indiana
corrections officials, to help her kick her addiction. The pilot
program - introduced in three state prisons - targets meth addicts.
The program at Rockville, where Lovell is incarcerated, is the
nation's first prison-based treatment program for female offenders
with methamphetamine addiction.

A handful of women from the Evansville area is enrolled in the
program, which lasts nine to 12 months and requires participants to
live in a unit separate from other inmates. Meth is a drug, say
program participants, that makes you do anything to get your hands on
it. "You do things you'd never do when you're sober," said Tamea
Cullison, 45. "You lose your sense of shame." The Evansville native
was sent to Rockville in April after she pleaded guilty to multiple
charges of forgery and robbery. She said she stole money from friends
and family because of her meth habit. Her meth-fueled crimes cost her
family everything, she said, including the Country Skillet, a
neighborhood restaurant on Evansville's West Side. For 17 years, it
provided free Thanksgiving dinners, which fed hundreds.

But there is no free Thanksgiving dinner this year. Cullison said her
family was forced to sell the restaurant because of the damage she
did to the finances. "I can hardly live with the shame of what I've
done," said Cullison. For Maggie Revels, also from Evansville, the
addiction was fueled in part by the "easy money." Revels, 50, said
she once made $32,000 in two months by selling methamphetamine laced
with cocaine, designed to create a longer-lasting and more potent
high. "You get to the point (on meth) where you don't care about
anything or anybody. You don't take care of your family, you don't
take care of your children, you don't brush your hair, you don't even
brush your teeth. It's like, 'just leave me alone, with my little
pile of dope."

The women say any attempt to curb the production and availability of
meth is worth the effort. The drug had a deadly hold, one they were
unable to break on their own.

"After you're in this (treatment) program long enough, you don't
think of yourself as having been arrested," said Revels. "You think
of yourself as having been rescued."