Pubdate: Sun, 06 Mar 2005 Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (WI) Copyright: 2005 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Contact: http://www.jsonline.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/265 Author: Graeme Zielinski Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine) METH ADDICTION ROBS FAMILY OF YOUNG MAN'S LIFE Drug Creeps Across Border, Catching Small Community Off Guard Chippewa Falls - The last picture taken of Justin Cherrier, from the late spring of 2002, describes a profound sadness, a 20-year-old in the deep clutches of addiction. Popular and beloved and quick with a joke, he had for a time obscured with smiles his enslavement to methamphetamine, the synthetic stimulant now described by officials as the No. 1 threat to public safety in northern and western Wisconsin. In his troubled twilight, though, Cherrier wept to friends and family about his wish to go clean, he entered a treatment facility, he made promises. But his use only accelerated. He subsequently would lose his job at a local manufacturing plant, dozens of pounds from his burly frame, and his car. Several months later on Father's Day weekend 2002, he would lose his life, shooting himself with a .30-06 rifle in a rusty Mazda parked in the family's driveway. His eldest brother found him. The paranoia, the wasting, the craving, the deep depression that Cherrier experienced during his precipitous decline are symptoms of hardcore meth users, but only now, with mournful hindsight, does his family know. "I had never even heard of crystal methamphetamine," said the brother, Travis Cherrier, 28, a gymnastics instructor in Minneapolis. "Now, looking back on it, you can see it. The insomnia, losing weight. . . . He had stopped caring about the Packers." Other family members recall Justin Cherrier making his grandmother duck down to avoid being seen in the window, sure that he was being stalked by dark forces. A friend remembers him warning of conspiracies involving transmission towers and helicopters. "I remember thinking, 'This isn't supposed to happen to families like ours,' " said his mother, Sue Cherrier, 51, a special education teacher at Bloomer High School. She spoke on a recent day at the family's new ranch home, just outside Chippewa Falls, on Lake Wissota. She is more voluble about her son, the third of four children. But her husband, Jerry Cherrier, also 51, a scheduler at a local computer manufacturing plant, is less talkative about their son, the grief still etched on his face. The family waited a year, just as the counselors advised, to move from the home where Justin grew up and where he died. The mementos of him at the house include three teddy bears, made from swatches of his clothes. They buried him near the entrance to the fairground in Chippewa Falls, where Justin used to delight as a child. Not far away, at Irvine Park, where he often played Frisbee golf, the family donated a bench in Cherrier's name. As in almost every other small community in hard-drinking Wisconsin, it is not uncommon in Chippewa Falls for teens to experiment with alcohol and even to graduate to smoking pot. As the life of the party, Cherrier gravitated to these behaviors. "We just thought he'd grow out of it," his mother said. Instead, he matriculated to harder drugs, including one that had in the late 1990s begun flowing into the community from the nearby Twin Cities. Over his last years, he went from hale and outgoing to retiring and morose, up at odd hours and often short of cash, hitchhiking long distances and receiving threatening phone calls. He was broke and in the spring of 2002 returned home, the best shot he had at staying away from the drug. Sue Cherrier said that her hard-won knowledge about meth abuse has made her current job difficult. "I tell (the students) about my Justin, but I don't know if they listen," she said. "Sometimes I just want to shake them and say, 'Wake up.' " - --- MAP posted-by: Beth