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.' "
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MAP posted-by: Beth