STUDENT STRUGGLES WITH METH USE

Part two in a series.

Methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that originated around the 20th
century by Japanese scientists, was designed to help asthma patients' ease
problem breathing. The drug was created as a man-made alternative to the
mahuang plant, which, after eating the leaves, helps during an asthma
attack. The plant contained ephedrine.

The man-made product eased breathing, but also produced great amounts of
energy.

In World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots took large doses before their
missions, and Nazi pilots ate smaller doses to stay alert on long bombing
runs over England.

Becoming popular among illegal drug users in the 1960s drug culture, meth,
with its intense highs, eventually scared even the hard-core users. The
drug faded from the scene by 1970.

In the early 1990s, with the influx of new, illegal drugs, and in a society
where teens are the market and twentysomethings are old-timers, meth made
its way back into the scene. First along the west coast, and by the late
1990s it crossed America to the east coast.

Denise is a 20-year-old college student nearing graduation with an
associates degree. She hopes to work for the same insurance company her
father worked with before his death seven years ago.

Every Friday night, she, her boyfriend, and several college friends get
together for a weekly poker game. Drinking and drugs are nothing new to the
group. There was always plenty of beer and she had been smoking marijuana
since her father's death.

Tonight one of her friends had brought a guest and he had a new drug - ice,
a form of meth.

She watched as he chopped the crystals into a powder with a razor blade,
and then formed a line. "It's going to burn the first time," he told her.

Her boyfriend, holding his nose and groaning, agrees. He had just snorted
his first-ever line of meth.

Denise holds one end of the short straw just inside her nose and places the
other end against the small mirror lined with the powder. Inhaling deeply,
running the straw along the white line, she watches as the powder
disappears until it's all gone. Immediately, she grabs her nose.

"Stupid," she shouts. "That burns. Man, am I stupid."

The burn finally eases and then the taste hit. Bitterness running down her
throat, it tasted like she chewed an aspirin.

"Never again," she tells herself. "I will never do this again."

Then the high hit. She feels incredibly strong. So strong that she looks
around for something to lift, something heavy. But she is too wired to
think about that for long. Now she wants to talk. Talk about getting
married, Talk about getting a nice house. Talk about becoming the insurance
agent she always dreamed of being. Talk about someday having a baby.

Denise crashes a few hours past dawn Saturday, the firestorm in her brain
finally out. She wakes just after 4 p.m., way past the time she usually
goes to visit her Mom.

Her nose is raw. Her muscles ache from being tense, quivering and tingling
throughout the high. Now she feels like she ran a marathon and then had a
fight with a bull.

"All this from a 2-inch line," she tells herself. "More, you want more of
that. You've got to have it." Next time, she'll get her own. Enough for
Friday night, and a little extra for Saturday to get her through the weekend.

Two months into her meth routine, Denise wonders how she'd made it through
the weekends without the drug.

Every Friday means getting high at the poker game. Every Saturday means
getting high at home. Through the week, she just tweaked, craved the next high.

Denise has graduated and started working for an insurance firm. Not the one
her father worked for, but a large agency with room for advancement.

One Thursday night a friend from college comes by and after about an hour,
pulls out a plastic bag with the crystal drug inside. Denise jumped at the
opportunity to share the meth. The following morning, about two hours
before she has to be at work, Denise wonders how she is going to make it
through the day with no sleep. She goes to the bathroom to splash water in
her face and notices her friend had left her a line of meth on a piece of
glass with a note that said, "To help you get through the day."

A year later, Denise was sitting on a friend's couch shaking, craving her
drug, "tweaking" as drug users called it. It began as a weekend
recreational drug, and then she found a craving for an occasional fix to
get her through the week. Now she found herself using meth every day.

During the past year, she had lost her boyfriend, her house, and her job.
She was using her boyfriends grocery money to purchase the drug, she went
into a raging fit because she was out of meth and destroyed her mothers
front door so her mother asked her to move out, and she quit showing up for
work and her boss eventually quit calling.

At first she bought the drug from friends. Now she gets it straight from
the cook. Cooks were getting easier to find. The cooking fad began in the
mountains and deserts of California. Legend has it two California cooks
figured out a way to make meth without the heat, eliminating the
distinctive cat-urine odor. Without the smell, cooks moved from the rural
areas to the cities and suburbs.

Casual cooks make meth that is typically 40 to 60 percent pure. The better
cooks would produce almost pure meth, which was 97 to 99 percent pure
meaning a longer high. The price for a hit of the higher-grade meth sold
for $40. An ounce went for $2,000.

Denise had picked up a few hits on credit and heard the dealer was angry.
Worried he might cut her off, she borrowed some money from a friend and
went to pay her debt. The dealer was in a bad mood when he answered the
door. He yanks open the door and tells her she better have his money. She
isn't ready when he swings, catching her on the side of the head with his fist.

The beating lasts about 15 minutes. Finally the dealer tires and Denise
throws the money at him and is able to escape. She crawls back home, asking
her mom to hide her, protect her. She's learned her lesson. She's done with
drugs.

Two days later, tweaking, she's at another dealer's house making a purchase.

Two years later, Denise is sitting on an overstuffed couch in an apartment
with no power and no water. Curdled milk in bowls of uneaten cereal and
mold covered pizza slices left on plates are stacked in the dusty sink.

She can't bear to look at herself in the mirror anymore. Her skin is gray
with hollow, unblinking eyes. Her hair is matted. She weighs just over 70
pounds.

Boils, red, puffy and the size of nickels, cover her cheek. When she's high
her skin tingles as if roaches are crawling just under the surface so she
scratches. The scratching has caused lesions the size and shape of fingers
along her neck. Today, her skin tingles so she has scratched, opening the
sores that allow pus to run down her face.

She tries to focus on the woman standing in front of her.

Her mother, desperate to know if her daughter was dead or alive, has
searched drug houses and harassed addicts for news of Denise. Tears run
down her face as she looks at what once was her beautiful daughter. Her
big, brown eyes now looked in the direction she was speaking, but never
appeared to see anything.

She was begging her daughter to come home with her. To let her and Denise's
sister take care of her. But the love for meth won her daughter once again.

Denise began selling drugs to support her habit. She would buy more than
she needed for herself, then overcharge a less street savvy user for the
extra. Whatever money she made was used to buy more drugs.

She was cycling, staying high up to 5 or 6 days before her body collapsed
from exhaustion. She would often find herself coming down from a long high
on the floor of a strange motel room or on the couch in a drug house. Then
she would drag herself home and sleep for several days.

The human body is actually tolerant of meth. But all that means to a user
is that getting high a second time takes a bigger dose than the first time,
and a third time takes more than the second, and so on.

The brain, over time and extended meth usage, loses the ability to produce
dopamine, which is what spurs the high. The user loses the desire to eat.
Soon, all that's left is a skeletal frame with dead eyes and the desire
only for another fix.

Denise had a new boyfriend. Big Don, also a user who had an insatiable
appetite for meth, and no fear of needles.

She couldn't watch as Don filled the syringe with meth, the brown rubber
tube pulled tight around his lower arm.

Stoned, she got up to leave. At least she thought she was stoned. It was
getting to the point where she isn't sure anymore when she's sober, or when
she's stoned.

With nowhere to go, Denise found herself standing on the front porch of her
mother's house. When her mother opened the door, she wasn't sure if she
wanted to seek the safety of her mother's arms, or run to a dark corner in
the basement and hide. Before she could make the decision, the telephone
rang and her mother answered.

The hospital was calling after a car drove by the emergency room and
dropped off a man, saying to call this number and ask for Denise if they
had any questions. Don had overdosed and wasn't going to make it.

Denise's mother thinks to herself, "How long before I get this call about
Denise."

On a cold January night several months later, Denise stood shivering,
partially from the cold, but mostly from the drug coursing through her
brain. A police officer holds a small plastic bag he pulled from her pocket
in front of her face and asks what it is.

"I don't know, it looks like a plastic bag," She said.

Denise sighs with relief as the officer places the empty bag in an evidence
envelope. Just 12-hours earlier the bag held the high she was now feeling.
Being busted for drugs would mean a record. Being taken off the street
without an avenue for her fix. She couldn't handle that.

A few days later she was lying on her mother's couch when there was a knock
at the door. "Police, open up," she heard from outside.

Afraid, Denise ran to the basement and hid. Her mother opened the door.

The officers held up a warrant for Denise's arrest. The small bag, although
appeared empty, held .04-grams of meth, about as much as a grain of salt.

Denise's mother drained her retirement account to hire a lawyer. He was
able to talk the judge into allowing Denise to attend intensive counseling
and avoid jail and a lasting record.

She never intended to attend, but what the future held persuaded her to
change her mind.

Denise had spent some time with a guy she never loved, a guy that got her
drugs. She purchased a pregnancy kit and three hours later, checking the
instruction to make sure she was reading the test correctly. It was
confirmed, she was pregnant.

In the third and final series, find out what happens to Denise's baby. Will
Denise recover from her addiction, or will her family raise her child.