Series: Part 6 Of 8

THE FACES OF ADDICTION

Five Men And Their Struggles With Meth

'It's A Miracle I'm Even Alive'

Mark begins many of his sentences: "When crystal meth took over my life."

By the time the Long Beach man was in his 30s, he had graduated with a
double major in English and journalism and nabbed a high-paying job as a
real estate executive, where he ran multiple businesses and oversaw
hundreds of employees.

A decade later, he had hepatitis, lupus, a full-blown attack of liver
disease and a mouth full of sores. He had lost 60 pounds and the ability to
speak. A severe abscess almost cost him his leg.

For years, Mark was a fixture on the party circuit, where he ate Ecstasy by
the handful, often mixing it with the depressant GHB. Still, he kept his
distance from crystal meth for a long time, even as its use swirled around
him. He considered it a dirty drug, ridden with stigma and filth. He didn't
want to end up like the tweakers he'd see at clubs - emaciated, skin
hanging off of their bodies, eyes sunken into their heads, like skeletons,
he said.

But one night, in a bar bathroom, he snorted a line of crystal and stayed
awake for days.

"It was like watching ^iThe Wizard of Oz' for the first time," he said.
"Life turned from black and white to digicolor and thoughts started
processing faster."

Smoking crystal was a more intense experience than snorting it, and
shooting up, also known as slamming, was like "soaring from zero to lust in
seven seconds," he said.

"When it hits you, it's like being hit with a cold wave that travels
through your lungs as it moves through your capillaries," he said. "It's
very violent - and then the heat blast hits your head, like standing over a
boiling vat of water ... I wasn't happy unless I felt that convulsion I
felt as the needle went in."

But with every high, Mark's self-esteem would drop a little lower. Within
seven years of using, his 6-foot frame had dropped to 149 pounds. He would
spend as much as $10,000 a month on meth for himself and drug-using
friends. He took up chain-smoking cigarettes to hide the chemical smell of
the drug that clung to his clothes, his hair and his skin.

It became harder to sit through meetings and interviews at work. Work
became an afterthought, something that took away from his drug habit. The
week was starting on Wednesday and ending on Thursday, he said.

So in 2003, he quit his job, embarking on an 18-month drug run. He slammed
his way across Long Beach at a zombie trot, driven by craving and lust,
robbed of emotion. He remembers that time as a haze of dark, filthy motel
rooms and anonymous sexual partners.

"I never had sex protected," he said. "It would have been an insult.
There's all this bravado that goes along with crystal meth. The addiction
allows us to think that if we're really masculine, if we're really men,
real men never use protection. ... There's no explanation except for the
fact that the drug takes us away from caring."

Mark said his first moment of clarity came while sitting alone in a hotel
room in a bath towel, high on heroin, ketamine and meth, when he caught a
glimpse in the mirror of his emaciated body and pale, sun-starved skin,
covered in abscesses.

"I knew that I had seen myself for the first time and what I saw made me
sad," he recalled. "I realized I was about as far away from myself as I
could get."

He had sunk so low that the same night, he said, his dealer refused to sell
him drugs and begged him to get clean.

The next day, he called the Gay and Lesbian Center. His plea was simple,
but absolute.

"Hi, I want to be clean," he said to Ron Morrison, founder of three crystal
meth anonymous meetings in Long Beach, who answered the phone.

Sixty days of violent withdrawal followed that phone call: vomiting,
sweats, diarrhea and fatigue.

"It's a miracle I'm even alive," Mark said. "It's a miracle I didn't die
from a heart attack, a staph infection, dehydration ... that I wasn't shot
to death in a hotel."

The desire to use never goes away, but for him, it's been replaced by a
deep appreciation for simple things, like redecorating and spending time
with his two godchildren, whom he was formerly banned from seeing. He
attends daily, sometimes twice-daily, 12-step meetings. And he's working
again, as a portfolio manager for a local company.

Though his addiction cost him years of his life and alienated many old
friends, it has given him a sense of compassion toward others, he said.

"It's leveling the playing field in life," he said. "I feel like we're all
one symbiotic organism on the planet."

Mark, now five months sober, keeps a picture of himself from his using days
in the kitchen. His eyes are dilated and his clothes hang off a starved,
stick-thin body.

When asked whether he's afraid of relapse, Mark is quiet for several moments.

Finally, he speaks:

"All I can tell you about is the next 20 seconds. But I know what being
clean feels like now."

'The guilt alone just rushes over me'

Sean has a "romance" with needles.

"I pull back and see the blood come into the register," he said. "I've
become in love with the ritual."

Sometimes, he spends hours searching through collapsed veins and callused
skin for a place to inject.

"And when I get it, it's not even good," said Sean, a Los Angeles resident
whose name has been changed to protect his identity. "I'm so irate already."

The rare times he's been sober, he has vivid dreams about injecting meth,
and when he starts using again, he wishes he hadn't. But he can't stop.

Sean, a straight man, was diagnosed with HIV in January after having
unprotected sex with a man while high on crystal meth.

The drug, he said, stimulates the sex drive so dramatically, that "you
don't care (if the sex) is with a man or a woman."

'It's like a warm, hot rush that starts at the top of your head and moves
to the bottom of your feet and straight to the crotch," he said. "Just
smelling it, you get a sensation in your crotch."

But recently, sex has become secondary to shooting up, he said.

Sean has been using since 1994 and even though he's lost his wife, his job
and the custody of his children, he can't stop.

He recently traded his long hair and goatee for a shorter, floppy style
because he's a fugitive. But half a lifetime of drug use is evident all
over his body. Glassy blue eyes are set deep into a long, oblong face.
Crooked, yellow teeth line his mouth and he clicks a tongue piercing back
and forth as he talks. Scars stretch the length of his forearm and run down
his palm. He shakes his head at his reflection in a Starbucks window as he
somberly recounts his losing battle with the drug.

"The guilt alone just rushes over me," he said, staring at his face. "I
can't believe I'm doing this."

His use skyrocketed, after his wife, now clean after her own struggle with
crystal meth, left him seven years ago. After that, he began shooting up
six or seven times a day. He bought a 9 mm pistol and a Harley. He started
carrying knives. He thought people were watching him through the windows
and climbing on the roof. He heard imaginary helicopters outside his door.

In the past 10 years, he's been arrested 20 times. Once, he stayed awake
for 29 days.

Lately, he's been feeling sharp pains in his kidney, his eyesight is
deteriorating and the drug is wreaking havoc on his teeth.

"My teeth are rotting from the inside out," he said. "I'll be eating a soft
turkey sandwich, and my teeth will fall out."

Sean is articulate, but deadpan when he speaks, acknowledging that he's
never met his potential and that he never learned to love himself.

"I think, what is it going to take?" he said. "What is it going to take to
get me to stop? ... But I'd rather be high for that second than risk what's
going to happen that day."

'Mental obsession for the drug'

When Michael Adams moved to Los Angeles in 1979, he landed right in the
middle of a thriving gay civil rights movement in full political swing.

At first, life was great. He built bars, restaurants and homes for a
general contractor and played clarinet in a band. He marched on Washington
and attended some of the first gay pride parades.

But in 1982, his friends started getting sick from a mysterious disease.

Two years later, Adams himself was diagnosed with HIV and given two years
to live.

"I lived in the middle of this holocaust," he said. "People were dying left
and right."

He moved to San Francisco, where he was intravenously introduced to crystal
meth.

"It was a sexual thing, immediately," he said, chuckling sadly as he
remembered.

By then, he was working for a high-end painting company, restoring
Victorian homes.

Within six months, he was jobless and living on the street.

"I was homeless on and off for 20 years," Adams said. "I'd have periods
where I pulled myself together and put it away, but ultimately, the mental
obsession for the drug would kick in and I would succumb to that and go out
and get it."

During that time, he feasted on unprotected, promiscuous sex, and
contracted syphilis, chlamydia and herpes.

Now, when asked how long he's been sober, Adams quickly, and proudly, says:

"Two years, two months and 21 days, but who's counting."

He's since picked himself back up. He's singing in the Gay Man's Chorus of
Los Angeles and his T-cell count is the highest it has been since he was
diagnosed with HIV. For the first time in his life, he's taking his
medications as prescribed.

Adams attributes much of his recovery to the 12 steps.

"The 12 steps work absolutely for the disease of addiction. I did that drug
for the first time and it made me feel good. Ultimately, what I'm looking
for is to feel good about myself. And I think there are ways to do that ...
without spreading AIDS."

'People were dying around me'

Ron Morrison wanted to die, and he did everything he could to make it
happen. It turned out life had other plans for him.

Depression that Morrison had been struggling with all his life intensified
as soon as he was diagnosed with HIV in his mid-20s.

But instead of cutting back on his crystal meth use, the Long Beach man
escalated his habit and refused his prescribed medications.

"I thought maybe by increasing the usage, I would enjoy my high and it
would all end quickly," the 48-year-old recalled. "People were dying around
me and I thought that the drug culture, the whole thing, was depressing."

Five years ago, that almost happened when he found himself in a three-month
stay in the hospital with endocarditis, a heart disease, contracted from
intravenous needles. By then, he had been addicted to meth for 30 years.

"I gave away all my belongings and thought I wasn't going to get out of the
hospital," he said. "I quit my job."

Morrison wasn't expecting to survive the infection. But when he finally
did, he felt he'd been given another chance at life. But for several more
years, he couldn't escape the clutches of the stimulant.

"It's totally different than any drug," he said. "It does something to your
mind. It pops into your mind and you've gotta have it."

Now clean, he relies on own experience to help others battling addiction.

"I realized God had another plan for me and there was definitely a reason
for me being here," he said.

About a year after getting sober, he opted to start his own crystal meth
anonymous meetings. Now, he runs three meetings, volunteers at an AIDS food
bank, at the Gay and Lesbian Center and at an HIV testing site.

"Today, my life is totally about honesty," Morrison said.

'I'm tired of living this way'

It's Jimmy Smith's third time at the Redgate Memorial Recovery Center and
his tenth time in treatment in 12 years.

He thinks it's different this time.

Smith never had trouble scoring meth in Long Beach. He knows what tweakers
look like. He tells stories of spotting a meth user searching through the
trash in Belmont Shore, and then having unsafe sex with him in a nearby garage.

He recalls shooting up with a man who heard voices and talked about things
that didn't exist. He didn't know whether he was schizophrenic or just
really high.

The drug desensitized him and sex was rough and usually unsafe.

Smith, 39, said that now, he's learning to have respect for himself, to
stop being self-destructive. He's learning to be a better person.

He attributes his crystal meth addiction to loneliness and low self-esteem.

"I never felt completely whole," he said. "I never accepted myself
completely as a gay man. For me, it was about not wanting to feel and being
afraid of my homosexuality."

"I'm tired of living this way. It's so unproductive."