WOMEN'S CRAVING FOR METH RESULTS IN PRISON SENTENCES

McLOUD -- Vicki Gantt doesn't tell her 8-year-old son why she's in prison.
She only tells him that she made a bad choice. Before prison, she tried to
get "clean" for her two sons. She made dinner, kept house and helped her
boys with homework.

For a while, she pushed aside the urge to buy a few grams of
methamphetamine, inject it and let the high consume her.

But in the end, she chose meth.

Her boys went to live with relatives, and she went to the Mabel Bassett
Correctional Center to live in a dormitory with 40 other women, most of
them there because they couldn't stop using drugs.

"I wasn't there," the 43-year-old said through tears. "I chose the drugs
over my kids, and I just hope they can forgive me."

Oklahoma imprisons more women than any other state, and women go to jail on
drug offenses more than for any other crime.

Nearly 48 percent of women sent to prison last year went for drug
possession or distribution, compared with about 31 percent of the men.
About 44 percent of those women were first-time offenders, a Corrections
Department survey found.

Oklahoma's female imprisonment rate -- 130 women per 100,000 people -- is
more than twice the national average, according to a 2001 study.

Gantt beams when she talks about her 8-year-old son's swim team triumphs
and how her 19-year-old son has enrolled in college.

What she doesn't talk about are the swim meets she's missed or the birthday
parties and graduations she'll experience only through sporadic letters,
read and reread on her bunk in her dormitory cell.

The drug that sent her to prison is highly addictive.

"If you can bake a cake, you can pretty much cook a batch of meth," said
Londa Johnson, drug court supervisor in Pontotoc County where the Ada woman
was sentenced.

Meth interacts with the part of the brain that releases dopamine, the
chemical that tells the body it is experiencing pleasure.

Gantt said meth's high made her feel like she could do anything, she said.

"When I was on meth, I could draw when I couldn't draw," she said. "I could
write when I couldn't write."

Penny Willoughby was working as a computer programmer making $55,000 a year
when she smoked meth at a party using a pipe made from a pen and a light bulb.

"It just gave me a good head rush," said Willoughby, just four months into
a two-year prison term. "I remember we listened to CDs all night. On meth,
you just lose time."

Weekend meth use grew into using every morning before going to work. She
smoked in the bathroom as family members waited outside the door.

After a few hits of meth, Willoughby said she could sit in front of her
computer and work on programs for sometimes seven days at a time.

"I needed it to stay awake," she said. "I was working so much, and I could
do so much when I was on meth."

By the time she stopped, though, she was living in a tent, on food stamps
and making tacos at a fast-food restaurant.

Gantt's arrest came when she was teaching a class full of preschoolers at a
Head Start in Holdenville.

Her mother found a baggy holding a small amount of meth in Gantt's purse
and called police. Gantt's older sister, Sheri Hurley, said the family
didn't know what else to do.

"That was the last-ditch effort at saving her life," Hurley said. "We
thought she was going to be dead. At that point, we had tried everything."

Gantt was sentenced to drug court, where she attended meetings and
submitted to random drug testing. But constant supervision and the threat
of going to prison wasn't enough to keep her off meth.

Willoughby said she's reformed. Prison has given her time to think and time
to change. She carries a Bible and attends weekly religious meetings.

"I can honestly say I'm not going to go back to it," Willoughby said. "I've
been given a chance to start my life over and I need to do that."

Gantt isn't so optimistic. She said she's used the drug while in jail and
still calls it an "instant pain reliever."

As a convicted felon, Gantt said she'll never teach again when she leaves
prison. She's up for parole in three years.

"I'm afraid," she said. "How am I going to feed myself? I might have to
start selling drugs just to feed myself."