WELL VERSED IN REHAB

Two years ago, during the peak of her addiction to crystal meth and in
the middle of a binge, Zoe Ainscow watched her friend "go crazy" on
the drug.

She looked on through her drug-induced buzz as her friend spent hours
carpet surfing, or scrounging for leftover drugs on the floor.

His desperate search finally produced a pile of carpet fluff, which he
arranged in a line and snorted.

"I wrote what I saw, watching him go crazy," Zoe says.

In a crack shack on the North Shore, getting high with 40-year-old
cocaine addicts and 15-year-old youths gone astray, Zoe wrote poetry
amid the chaos.

"I would get high and write," she says. "I would sit there and flail
(get high) on poems."

Zoe, now 19 and clean, was high for two years, from age 16 to 18,
during which time she dropped out of school and was kicked out of her
house.

When she wasn't hacking up white phlegm -- the byproduct of lungs that
have been crystalized from inhaling meth -- or stealing to get money
for the drug, she was writing.

And at her worst, when she looked in the mirror and saw the emaciated
figure of her former self -- a mere 85 pounds of skin and bones -- she
wrote.

"I wanted to remember what I'd seen."

Meth was dissolving the part of her brain that stored her short-term
memory.

Here is an excerpt from her poem Last Breath:

"Listen young child I'll whisper it soft, Pray to your God's I'm not
your last breath, Don't follow the devil to crystal meth."

"I love writing poetry," Zoe says, "and I did it before I started
using meth."

Before she spiralled into a homeless drug addict, Zoe attended Sa-Hali
secondary, where one day a classmate offered her some meth.

On that day, she says, she was suffering from a blinding depression --
the trough after a peak of exuberant high and the low point in the
undulating life of a bipolar sufferer.

"We left at lunch and did it. I used meth to escape my reality, but in
the end it became my reality," she says.

People with an undiagnosed mental illnesses often abuse drugs to tame
their symptoms, says Patrick McDonald, a drug-treatment supervisor at
Kamloops' Phoenix Centre, which offers drug-rehabilitation programs
for youth.

"The two are absolutely hand-in-glove," he says. "There's a tremendous
connection."

McDonald says city drug counsellors are aware of the link, and are
always liaising with local mental-health officials.

Their approach, combined with meth awareness campaigns in the media,
McDonald says, is helping to win the war on meth in Kamloops.

The number of the drug's users in the Tournament Capital is
dropping.

Two years ago, 45 per cent of those admitted for drug rehabilitation
at the Phoenix Centre abused meth.

This year, that percentage has dropped to less than
30.

Psychiatrists and drug counsellors are working together to diagnose
people and provide them with drugs to safely corral the symptoms,
which is what eventually happened with Zoe.

She was staying at home after a binge in January.

She slept for a week.

When she woke, she felt "jib rage" -- extreme anger resulting from
meth withdrawal.

She realized she needed help, so she admitted herself to Royal Inland
Hospital's psychiatric ward.

She underwent detox -- waves of nausea, painful body shakes and
intolerable cold sweats -- and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

"Being in the hospital opened my eyes," she says.

She celebrates her 120th consecutive drug-free day today. She has a
full-time job and plans to study psychology at Thompson Rivers University.

Staying clean has not been easy. Sometimes the devil she wrote about
calls her back to her former vice.

Then she reaches for one of her many books of poetry, starts to read
and the meth Mephistophelan disappears.

"Really my poetry makes me realize how stupid it all was. It just
reminds me of what it was like.

"How this is what I did in two years of my life. I wasted two years of
my life."