Series: Part 1 Of 5

FORCES OF HABIT: ADDICTION TOUGH TO BEAT

Editor's note: Abuse of alcohol and drugs is a Utah epidemic. One out of 20
Utahns has a substance abuse problem needing treatment. The Deseret News
examines addiction in a five-part series focused through the eyes of former
and current addicts as they run the gantlet of political, social, economic
and medical factors associated with those addictions.

Roger Ashworth smirks when asked about anti-drug slogans.

" 'Just say no.' 'Choose Life.' I didn't choose life, that's for sure,"
Ashworth says, briefly looking down as if he's watching his 19 years as an
addict cross the clinic's vinyl floor. He pauses another second, thumbing
his ring emblazoned with the initials CTR - "choose the right."

"It wasn't life; it was something else," he says, absentmindedly taking up
the straw in the soda cup that was dry at least four sips ago. "My life
became my drugs. It was like I was the drugs. That's all I did, that's all
I wanted, that's all I was."

When he was arrested and jailed for shoplifting in 1997, Ashworth had been
choosing the wrong for some time. He had a $700-a-day heroin and cocaine
habit. He was underwriting it mostly by stealing expensive items like
faucets and front door handles from home improvement stores, then trading
them in at the customer service desk for money or vouchers. "It was pretty
common to make $1,500 in three hours."

He shot seven years and who knows how much money up his arm before he
stopped for good two years ago.

He first started getting high in school, still going to church on Sundays,
"as normal and everyday as any kid." By the time he kicked, his need to not
get sick far outweighed any desire to get high.

"It's a very different motivation just to keep well," says Ashworth, who at
38 stays that way on a daily dose of methadone. "At some point with
everyone, the high flips over to needing the drug just not to get sick.
Every day after that becomes a chase, and finally you just can't do it any
more. You just wear out, and you stop, or else you die. But one way or the
other, you stop."

Substance abuse is hardly a problem confined to festering crack houses or
the shadows just off the State Street neon. It reaches into virtually every
social, religious and economic group in the state. There are suburban moms
addicted to pain pills, euphemistically called "Sandy candy," and
working-class dads grappling with secret heroin habits.

There are children far too young to carry the monkey; there are
grandparents too old to remember their last moment of clarity.

They come from good families. They come from bad ones, too.

They are rich and they are poor. They are the seemingly ordinary people
delivering your mail and teaching your kids and working behind the counter
at the gas-and-go.

Chances are you know someone addicted to drugs. If not someone in your own
family then maybe a co-worker or a friend or someone singing hymns
alongside you at church.

"Addiction affects people of all persuasions, it respects no boundaries,"
says prominent Salt Lake attorney Lou Callister, who started Project Hope
with his wife, Ellen, to help Utah addicts. Their son repeatedly battled
cocaine and alcohol addiction before he was killed in a car accident.

Roughly 100,000 Utahns, or one out of every 20, suffer from an addiction to
alcohol or drugs. One-fifth of all addicts are children under age 18.

The average Utah addict is 31 years old, white and LDS. Two out of three
are men.

But women are fast catching up. The number of women admitted to addiction
treatment centers increased by 144 percent the past year, compared to a 20
percent increase for men.

The problem, state officials say, is reaching epidemic proportions.

For decades, they watched as the cases of heroin, cocaine and alcohol
addiction have mounted beyond capacity of state resources. Now they are
seeing a "frightening increase" in the number of women addicted to
methamphetamine - better known as "meth" or "speed."

Roughly 1,700 women were admitted for methamphetamine addiction last year,
virtually identical to the number of men treated for the same addiction.
Until meth, there has never been a drug that women abused in the same
proportions as men.

Adding insult to social injury, statistics compiled by the state Division
of Substance Abuse say 90 percent of women addicted to speed have young
children at home. And experts say those children, in turn, run an
extraordinarily high risk of becoming addicts themselves.

The cycle of addiction carries horrific social costs in terms of lives
forever scarred by violence, disease and poverty. There are welfare costs,
incarceration costs, crime costs and medical costs. There is the cost of
broken families, scarred psyches and abuse.

Six out of every 10 cases where the state Division of Child and Family
Services is called to protect the welfare of children now involve drug abuse.

A 10th-grade dropout, Joshua was no stranger to drugs. Marijuana mostly,
and some pills. He had tried just about everything at one point or another
but had always been able to give it up without a second thought.

But 6 1/2 years ago, his best friend's mother opened a door that Joshua,
now 25, is struggling to close.

"She had some heroin and she shot me up," he said. "And then she shot up
her son. (She) wanted to get us hooked to help support her habit."

Joshua was soon shooting up every day but always believing he could drop it
anytime he wanted. But a year later, he knew he couldn't.

"It is the best feeling a human could ever feel, 100 percent total mental
and physical sedation," he recalls. "But after awhile, you still get high
but not as high. And then you take it just to function."

A year and a half ago, Joshua and his heroin-addicted girlfriend moved to
Salt Lake City to pursue treatment together. Their money ran out, and "It
wasn't long until we were strung out real bad. We were each doing eight or
nine bags a day."

"We were homeless, sleeping in alleys and under stairs," he said. One
night, they were caught shooting up in an alley, but the police did nothing
more than give them tickets for having drug paraphernalia (needles).

They panhandled, they stole, whatever it took to score heroin. Joshua was
caught shoplifting food at Albertson's. "We hadn't eaten in about two
weeks," he said.

A Salt Lake man - Joshua calls him a guardian angel - intervened and got
them both into treatment. He relapsed briefly after his girlfriend left
him, but Joshua says he has been clean for a year.

"I was doing so good when she was there with me," he said. "I didn't think
about (heroin). I think about it now. I think about it all the time. It's
hard not to."

"I think if I just do it and pass out, then I won't think about all that
has happened. Heroin is a reason to escape and it works."

Most addicts began experimenting when they were teenagers, and many come
from family or neighborhood environments where drugs and alcohol are
commonplace.

One Salt Lake addict, now in treatment, was 14 years old when her own "I
told myself it was a one-time deal, but I kept going back and going back.
Seven or eight months later I knew I was hooked."

And his life spiraled out of control.

"One day I am a successful young guy who had everything, and in a few
months I had quit my job, I wouldn't shower for days at a time and I would
never leave the house. I was hopeless." When his friends started going to
jail and his cash reserves had dwindled to next to nothing, he knew he
wanted out. He was desperate and depressed.

Five years ago, he entered a treatment program and has been clean ever
since. He is now a manager for a computer company, and he still gets a
daily dose of methadone to deal with the addiction.

"Nobody at this point has any idea of what I used to be," he said. "They
would never believe it."

Tomorrow: Addiction as a disease.