METH ADDICTION IS THE DEADLY SPEED TRAP FOR UTAH WOMEN -- BUT THERE IS HOPE

She shot heroin and methamphetamine into her arms for five days straight.
She did not eat. She did not sleep. Her mother and aunt intervened just in
time, or who knows? Justien might have kept right on binging, landing in a
grave at age18.

Liz showed up at her parents' upscale Salt Lake City home a month ago after
smoking and snorting meth for days. "I was so on edge if I had gotten a
paper cut that day, I would have killed myself," she says. She kicked in
the antique front door of the house and started screaming at her mother and
24-year-old sister. Minutes later, Liz, 27, had thrown her mother across
the kitchen, dislocating her hip. "The cops were on their way to arrest me,
and I was never in jail before," she says.

She did not go to jail. Instead, Liz checked in at the Volunteers of
America Women's and Children's Center in Murray. She got a bed, a safe
place with locks on the door and an opportunity, after years of trading sex
for drugs, to do nothing more than sleep for two full days. This was the
start of her detox, a process of pure cold turkey. Twenty-seven days into
sobriety, she can still feel seven years' worth of methamphetamine leeching
out of her system. "It's a demon," Liz says. "Honestly, today I woke up for
the first time without feeling completely numb and empty."

Liz and Justien are roommates at the VOA, drawn together by their raging
drug habits and homelessness. And like nearly 70 percent of female
methamphetamine addicts in Utah, they are mothers of young children.
Justien's daughter is 15 months old and lives with her ex- husband. Liz has
a 3-year-old daughter who lives with her middle-aged parents.

Every woman at the VOA has a tale of hitting bottom, a cold, clear moment
when she realizes that walking through life like a corpse is no longer an
option. Her eyes may open to her children for the first time. The Murray
center is one of a handful of drug treatment facilities in Utah that allow
women and their children together. It can be a powerful motivator, says
Kathy Bray, director of detox services for the Murray center.

"A lot of women will use their children as an excuse for not getting
treatment," she says.

The average stay at VOA detox is 21 days. Then the women "graduate" to an
outpatient rehab facility. Though Liz and Justien showed up without their
daughters, most women in detox have one or two children in tow. The
youngest client in the center's four-year history was a 5-day-old baby, who
struggled through meth withdrawal, just like his mother. Other women have
been admitted in their last trimester of pregnancy, battling to stay sober
through labor. The women come to the VOA addicted to alcohol, heroin and
painkillers, but by far the drug of choice is, and has been for years,
methamphetamine.

An annual report released in June by the state Division of Substance Abuse
reveals that of 6,580 women admitted for drug rehab in 2001, more than
one-third were treated for meth addiction. The drug remains easy to find,
easy to make and highly appealing to women. It is a no- fail avenue to
weight loss and a quick escape from life's pain and pressures.

"For a while," says Orem-born Justien, "it was a field of flowers."

The chokehold this drug has on women shows no sign of letting up, and even
with the hope of programs like the VOA, fewer than half of women in Utah's
drug treatment programs will stay straight.

Justien swears, after 49 days of sobriety, this is it. "I am done living in
darkness."

Same for Liz, who has tried to kick the habit before but failed.

"This time I'm doing it for me. I can feel it all the way to my toenails
and fingernails."