Pubdate: Sun, 25 Oct 2009
Source: Gwinnett Daily Post, The (GA)
Copyright: 2009 Post-Citizen Media Inc.
Contact:  http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2480
Note: Letters can run as long as 400 words.
Author: Heather Hamacher, Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

TWO METH ADDICTS SHARE THEIR PERSONAL STRUGGLES

Editor's note: William and Jessica, who agreed to speak under the
condition that only their first names be used, both suffer from
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

LAWRENCEVILLE - William and Jessica come from completely different
places. He is a 53-year-old Vietnam veteran from Oklahoma, she a
29-year-old Georgia native.

But they find themselves together today, at Lawrenceville's Beacon
Place, coping with, among other things, their meth addictions.

William said he started doing meth in 1983 for a couple of
reasons.

"Most young people were runnin' around smoking it, it was a fad," he
said. "If you weren't in with the crowd, you weren't nothin'. I also
used it to self-medicate because of a chemical imbalance I've had
since I was 5."

For Jessica, at the tender age of 16, meth helped her escape the pain
of losing her mother to cancer. She began hanging out with
40-something-year-old men who supplied her with ice, or crystal meth.
On the rare occasion that their supply ran low, she would steal - from
her stepmother, from the office at Chamblee High School -whatever
could help her get that ever-important next hit.

She snorted and shot herself up with the drug for about four years,
settling for second-rate fixes only when cops busted her meth suppliers.

Nothing, she said, has ever compared to the way she felt being high on
meth.

"It made me feel really good," Jessica said. "I stayed up for days at
a time. It was euphoric."

As good as the high is, both will tell you that coming down is no fun
at all. And to avoid crashing, users must take a hit every hour or so,
and in increasingly larger, more brain-damaging doses.

When they absolutely had to come down from their not-a-care-in-the-world
stratosphere - whether to finally sleep or temporarily get a grasp on
life - Jessica got "really mean." William got really paranoid.

"I would see things," William said, "I would see people drilling
through my floors and little cameras popping up to watch me. I would
see people outside dressed in camouflage, ready to get me. I would
lock my door, scared to even go to the bathroom, thinking someone was
outside waiting."

One time, he said, while traveling on a four-lane highway, he stopped
in the middle of the road to open an imaginary gate. He drove through
the gate, he said, got out and closed it, and went on his way.

William last used meth in 2007. It's always been easy for him to get,
since family members have always provided it. Jessica's last contact
with ice, she said, was in 2006, months after she had relapsed. She
quit after realizing that it was messing her up physically and
psychologically.

But if it were in front of her right now?

Without hesitating: "I'd probably do it," she said. "Just to feel good
again."

William enlisted in the Army and was sent to Vietnam when he was only
15. He spent a year and a half in New Orleans, cleaning up bodies and
debris after Hurricane Katrina. He has seen his share of death and
destruction, which perhaps explains his anxiety and paranoia.

But even as he sat in a conference room, out of prescription meds,
shaking and becoming increasingly nervous, he said he'll never use
meth to self-medicate again.

"No way," he said. "It starts out as a really good drug ... it's a bad
drug. It's poison." 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D