Pubdate: Thu, 11 Jul 2002
Source: Gadsden Times, The (AL)
Copyright: 2002 The Gadsden Times
Contact:  http://www.gadsdentimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1203
Author: Cindy West
Note: This is the fourth installment of a series on drugs

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."
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart