ADDICT SOLD DRUGS WHILE RUNNING BUSINESS

Drug dealers aren't always scummy-looking people hanging around the edges
of playgrounds trying to get your children hooked on drugs. Sometimes
they're harmless-looking people - for instance, business owners - who are
trying to get your children hooked on drugs. "I could look at them and know
which ones I could sell to," former drug dealer and former restaurant owner
Scotty P. said. "If your kids are smoking cigarettes, they are going to try
(drugs) or they have already tried them. That's a warning sign from all
get-out right there. I've seen it. I grew up with it." People who have
attended some of the Marshall County Crystal Methamphetamine Task Force
town meetings have heard 36-year-old Scotty tell his story. He currently
works full time for a contracting company and has two part-time jobs, and
none of them have anything to do with selling drugs. Having just celebrated
his third year of sobriety, he willingly tells how he started out
"drugging" at the tender age of 11 or 12 and ended up addicted to crystal
meth and cocaine. Learning to use Growing up in the Detroit suburb of White
Lake, Mich., in the early '70s, Scotty smuggled marijuana from the baby
sitter. "I was able to get it, able to fit in," he said. "That's what we
thrive on, peer pressure and fitting in." After a couple of years he was
doing mescaline, speed and crystal T, a purified form of crystal
methamphetamine, as well as drinking. "It was easy to stand outside a party
store and get someone to buy it for you," he said. "It was mainly schnapps
and stuff, because it was cold." His parents divorced when he was in
seventh grade. That's when Scotty said his school performance went
downhill. "I skipped school in eighth grade," he said. Misbehaving gave him
an excuse to hide his feelings. "It's a mask, you know," he said. "Drugging
is wearing a mask, because you're not who you really are. I realize that
today. I didn't know it back then." The speed became an everyday thing.
"It's like that stuff they sell in gas stations now," he said. "All of it
is so addictive. You want it. It keeps you going. If you ain't got it,
you're down in the dumps." He and his friends would sell drugs at high
school: joints, marijuana cigarettes, for $1 each; hits of speed for $1
each and mescaline for $3 a pop. Scotty said he was kicked out of school -
ironically for not attending - in the 10th grade. After a falling out with
his mother when he was 16, he started living on his own, which he has done
since. "I know I'd spend $80 a week just on marijuana, not counting my
drinking and miscellaneous stuff," he said. He had brushes with the law,
once when trying to steal a sports car for a joy ride and again getting
arrested when some friends he was living with got caught growing marijuana
on their roof. He didn't try cocaine until he was 17, when he would have
been a high-school senior. By the time he was 21, he was smoking an ounce a
day, a $600-a-day habit financed by selling drugs. Looking for what he
called a "geographical change" to fix his coke habit, Scotty moved to
Marshall County at the age of 21 in 1987. His grandparents had moved there
10 years earlier, and he had been visiting since then. His grandfather's
death and grandmother's illness also gave him an incentive to move closer.
The geographical cure didn't work. "Within three weeks I found what I
wanted," he said. "I knew I had a problem before I moved down here. I
didn't want to do nothing about it."

Growing a business

He supported himself by finding a job in a pizza parlor, the kind of work
he had always done. Despite continued drug abuse, he worked up to a
management position and decided to strike out on his own, opening a
restaurant in the Claysville community in December 1989. "I had a great
booming business," Scotty said. "I had made a goal when I was younger to
own my own pizza parlor by the time I was 28. Well, I did it when I was
25." He has an explanation for what went wrong with the business:
"Drinking. Drugging. I was selling (drugs) right out the door of the place.
Big John (Colbert) was still sheriff then, and he came down and said, 'I
know what's going on here, and I'm going to catch you.' So I pulled out,
but it didn't stop my own habit." He was arrested in Huntsville with a
pound of marijuana in the trunk of his car, but his attorney worked a deal
so he was able to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. He didn't serve any jail
time, but got supervised probation. The arrest didn't phase him. "I settled
down," he said. "I met a good woman. It was a drug-based relationship."
Within a month he had blown $15,000 - money he got for selling his business
- - on drugs. After wrecking his car and breaking his back in the summer of
1991, he got addicted to painkillers, and renewed his acquaintance with
crystal methamphetamine. He tried to explain the drug's attraction. "It's a
long-lasting wire," he said. "It's a burst of energy. Everything's great,
no matter what you do. Driving in your car, listening to tunes on the
radio. Sex is good, your social life is good, you don't know if you're
acceptable in a crowd or not because you just really don't care. You're
motivated to do things that you really don't want to do. You'll basically
try anything. When you run out of money, you're going to take something
that don't belong to you and pawn it. It's worse than crack. I would have
sold the shirt off my back and the shoes off my feet."

Bottoming out

May 6, 1999. Scotty remembers the exact date when he hit rock bottom. He
had worked for a contracting company from 1992 to 1998, but he wasn't
working there any more. He and his wife had been out "thievin'" all night,
breaking into a mobile home. They were getting evicted from their house on
Buck Island and had already sold their furniture to support their crack and
crystal meth habits. They were driving a truck that Scotty had borrowed
from a friend and still had two weeks later. The friend finally reported it
stolen. "The police saw the truck and followed us home," he said. "I took
off through the woods. We didn't think they were after her, so she loaded
the truck with most of our worldly possessions - our clothes, basically -
and was going to meet me on the other side of the island. They stopped her
and picked her up. She spilled her guts, because that's what we do when we
get caught; we think everything's gonna be all right if we get it off our
chests. If an addict gets caught, he's just going to spill his guts."
Scotty went on the run to avoid being arrested for burglary and receiving
stolen property: first to a hospital in Gadsden, where he threatened
suicide and was admitted for 10 days, then to the Love Center, a homeless
shelter, where he walked in and walked right back out. Next he stayed with
a cousin in Gadsden until he hit the guy over the head with a frying pan,
trying to steal his income tax check. The cousin threatened to call
Scotty's mom and tell her that he wasn't staying at the Love Center. Scotty
called his mother anyway and got her to finance a trip to his father's in
Michigan. When he got to Detroit, he called his father, forgetting that his
dad was now married to a police officer. He came back to Alabama and went
back to The Love Center. He walked to outpatient meetings. He attended
12-step meetings. "I walked in the rain, that's how much I wanted it," he
said. "They asked me if I wanted to go to rehab. I said yes." A church
sponsored him, paying for a bus ticket to Montgomery for a 28-day recovery
program. Another church paid for his bus ticket back to Gadsden. "I had to
get sponsored to get back because I had no money, no job, I had nothing,"
he said. "I'd hit my bottom. I was broke. Didn't have a wife no more,
didn't have nothing."

Facing reality

After rehab, Scotty returned to the Love Center and lived there while his
attorney made arrangements for him to turn himself in. "I couldn't take it
no more," he said. "I was tired of running." When he got to jail, he was
sent to Cedar Lodge in Guntersville, the drug rehab program run by Mountain
Lakes Behavioral Healthcare. He made it through 13 days of the 14-day
program, then got into trouble, so he spent four more months in the
Marshall County Jail. When he got out, he used his own money to go though
another rehab program in Sylacauga. "I was looking for the answer to 'How
do you say no when someone offers you drugs?'" he said. "The answer is that
I have a choice today. The third step (of the 12-step recovery program) is
that a decision is just a decision until you take action on it." The peace
he has found helps him stay clean from day to day. "I don't need to fight
nobody," he said. "I don't have to cause harm to my neighbor. I work under
God's will, not mine. If I don't do wrong, I'll be all right another day."
Scotty's 23-year-old stepson is not all right. He currently sits in the
Jackson County Jail. The boy was 12 when Scotty married his mother and was
already doing drugs. The young man hasn't lived outside prison since he was
18. When he got out last time, his stepfather got him a job. "That crystal
tore his world up again," Scotty said. "Now he's caught two more felonies
in Jackson County." There was a time when his stepson wrote in a letter
from Limestone Correctional Facility that he was saving Scotty a bed next
to his. "When I was in rehab, I had to write him a letter and say, 'I wish
I had heeded your warning,'" he said. "Here I was, sitting in the county jail."

Changing habits

"When I left the Sylacauga treatment center, I went to a halfway house in
Gadsden," Scotty said. "I was supposed to stay 90 days; I stayed 14 months
on staff and was able to help clients coming in. I didn't have no place to
go. I worked at Riverview Hospital as a cook, and was able to watch clients
on weekends, which in turn helped me, because I knew what it was like." He
had worked in construction for five years, but was scared to go back to it,
afraid that he would relapse. When he finally went back to that career, he
found an anti-drug boss. "My boss don't smoke," he said. "I wouldn't work
with someone who did. I can't. "I don't go to bars today. I've gone to two
clubs since I've been clean, and neither time I didn't enjoy myself,
because I saw people having a good time getting loaded. I was the
designated driver, so it was OK, but it's not something I can do."

Long-term consequences

Without getting a brain scan of someone before he uses drugs and comparing
it to a scan after he's been addicted for a while, it's hard to know how
drug abuse changes a particular individual's brain. Scientists do have some
data from tests on animals that show some long-term medical consequences an
addict faces, though. Researchers report that up to half the cells in the
brain that produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter, can be damaged after
prolonged exposure to relatively low levels of methamphetamine, according
to the National Institute on Drug Abuse Web site. Neurotransmitters are
involved in communication among neurons in the brain. Researchers also have
found that nerve cells containing serotonin might be damaged even more.
Chronic methamphetamine abuse can cause inflammation of the heart lining
and episodes of violent behavior, paranoia and anxiety. "Psychotic symptoms
can sometimes persist for months or years after use has ceased," according
to the Web site.

Dispensing advice

Believing he can only keep the peace he's found by helping others find it,
Scotty told employees of the Marshall County Court Referral Office to give
his phone number to any addict who's trying to get clean. "If they want to
call me, they'll call me," he said. "I can't twist nobody's arm to
recovery. It's like my stepson - I offered to be his sponsor. He stuck with
me for about a week. The second good paycheck he got after he got out of
prison ... he was gone, that quick." Scotty knows what would have happened
to him if he had not quit using. "I would be in prison, or I would be
dead," he said. "I really believe I would be in prison. I don't doubt that
a bit. "I had never really had to steal for what I wanted like when I was
fully blown. I went out and did things I had never done in my whole life. I
was 33 years old, breaking into houses for the first time ... since I was
15. I never thought I would stoop that low," he said. The former drug
dealer, now an abstinence advocate, offers some advice to people who are
considering trying any kind of drugs: "You don't have to be in the in
crowd," he said. "You don't have to try things because other people are
trying them. The pressure is on you to try to fit in, but it's not worth it
today. It's not worth your life just trying to fit in. Be yourself. Drugs
are nothing but deceit. You're wearing a mask of deceit. You're not who you
really are. "Just be who you want to be - yourself."