'YOU CAN'T SEE HOW BAD IT'S SCREWING UP YOUR LIFE'

PENGILLY - Joe and Jenn Schmidt wouldn't have admitted four months
ago that methamphetamine was ruining their lives.

They didn't see it that way.

The truth, to them, was that meth was their only solution.

"You think everything's O.K. when you're on it," Joe Schmidt said.
"You can't see how bad it's screwing up your life."

He said that they would often get meth for free for letting people
weigh out the drug at their Twin Cities home, getting it ready for
sale; or for letting addicts crash at their house after being kept
awake for days by the strong amphetamine.

But, still, he and his wife would spend thousands of dollars on meth
every week.

"We just had to file bankruptcy and we thought it had nothing to do
with that," Jenn Schmidt said with a wry smile.

Between bankruptcy and her husband's construction business tools
getting stolen, the young couple was left with no money, no assets and
no way to make a living. They had to move back to the Iron Range in
January to live with Joe's parents in Pengilly.

Though Joe Schmidt had worked as a subcontractor in the siding
business in the Twin Cities and drove snowplow, and Jenn Schmidt had
gone to college and worked at a hospital, their methamphetamine
addictions kept them from truly moving forward in life.

"It's kept us where we were," Joe Schmidt said. "I'm at the same spot
I was at when I started drugs. I had my own business but I didn't make
any money off it. All the profit went toward drugs."

Now, at age 27, he looks back and sees 10 years wasted.

Joe Schmidt was introduced to methamphetamine by a supervisor at his
first full-time job, when he was 17. He was having trouble staying up
through night shifts and, when his supervisor asked if he wanted
something to help, Joe accepted.

"One night, I tried it and that was it. I liked it," he said. "I could
work longer hours and didn't need sleep."

It was that constant energy Joe Schmidt became addicted
to.

"When you get off of it, you have to take three days to just sleep and
eat," he said. "My problem was, I worked every day, all day."

He didn't have time to be sober, he thought.

Jenn Schmidt remembers her husband pushing himself until he just
couldn't go anymore. She has watched him have whole conversations,
clean the house and eat a bucket of cereal while asleep, she said.

"I'd keep going until my body fell asleep," Joe Schmidt said. That
half-consciousness turned dangerous a few times, when he couldn't
focus his mind at work and cut himself.

Jenn Schmidt's situation was no better.

She was introduced to methamphetamine when she was 16, "by friends, if
you want to call them that acquaintances, I guess," she said. "At
first it was just occasional but the last couple of years, it was
around all the time. It was around more than pot."

They both also experienced the physiological effects, including
constant itching and stuttering. But they just pretended they didn't
have a problem.

"If you've never done it (meth) or been around people who are on it,
you can't see it," Joe Schmidt said. "You just think, that person's a
little weird. I can spot someone high a mile away."

So they kept hiding it from everyone, even after moving back to the
Iron Range.

"Even when we were living in the Cities, we never came up to visit our
families," Jenn Schmidt said. "We'd rather do drugs."

Meth is just as easy to get in Greater Minnesota as it was in the Twin
Cities, she said. It was even easier in Pengilly for her and her
husband, both Range natives, because they know more people in the area.

"We didn't do meth for the first month we were up here," Jenn Schmidt
said. "Then someone heard that we were into that and sought us out."

They fell quickly back into their old lifestyle, believing it wasn't
hurting them or anyone else.

"No one knew," Jenn Schmidt said. "That's why it was O.K." to keep
using such a dangerous drug.

"The meth made it O.K.," Joe Schmidt said. "You couldn't plan for the
future. It really clouds your mind. But you could work."

"But then you would work for the drug, for your next bag," Jenn
Schmidt said.

"Yeah," her husband agreed. "Your next bag becomes your future. You
start not caring about anything else."

The couple, married for four years, even stopped having emotions for
each other. They were numbed by the drug and focused only on their
next bag of methamphetamine; where their next high was coming from,
they said.

But they were lifted out of their drug-induced stupor by their
families in June.

Joe Schmidt had decided his wife needed help.

"It was easier to help her," he explained. "I couldn't help
myself."

So he made Jenn Schmidt tell her parents about her addiction in May.
About a month later, she was ready to admit herself to an inpatient
treatment center, she said.

The day before, though, Joe Schmidt's parents got worried about the
couple, whom they hadn't seen for days. His parents called Jenn's
parents, and the couple's meth use was finally bared for everyone to
see. The two sets of parents staged an intervention.

"I was scared, confused," Joe Schmidt said. "I had tried quitting for
years but I always had to go to work ... I couldn't help myself. I had
to wait until someone else found out."

The couple agreed with their parents that they needed help but when
they went for treatment, they ran into many obstacles. Some places
wouldn't take the married pair. Others weren't covered by county funds
and the county would not approve the couple for out-of-county
treatment centers that met their needs.

So Joe Schmidt and his father created a program of their own. Whenever
Joe planned to go anywhere, he had to tell his parents every detail of
his outing; and he was not allowed to spend time with old friends or
take phone calls.

The plan worked well for him and he is now completing his third month
of sobriety. His wife, though, has had relapses and her preoccupation
with the drug has strained their relationship.

"You think it's O.K. when you're on it," Jenn Schmidt said about not
caring about anyone or anything other than the meth. "You just think
everyone else is against you."

She saw her husband's attempts to help as malicious.

"She was willing to give up our marriage so she could go do drugs," he
said.

But Jenn Schmidt has been sober for more than a month, now, and is
starting to live a normal life without methamphetamine.

"Now we're getting to be human again," Jenn Schmidt said. "We'd tried
getting off before but it's easier to quit now because our families
know."

"Before, we never thought we were hurting anyone," her husband added.
"It was our lives and we could do what we wanted. But it wasn't until
we realized how much we were hurting our families" that the severity
of the situation set in.

Help from their parents and keeping too busy to think about
methamphetamine has helped them stay clean, they said. But it has been
a battle

"Don't even try it," Joe Schmidt said about meth. "Once you go there,
it's so hard to quit. It's a lot of work to turn it around. We've
started over too many times to do it again."

They have also found strength in each other and their
relationship.

"We're actually getting along now, so that's a bonus," Jenn Schmidt
said, smiling.

"Now that we're sober, we see that we're better off now than we were,"
Joe Schmidt said. "We have nothing. We're living with my parents. But
we have each other and we're sober."