Reporter’s notebook: Meth

As a youth, I was always fascinated by the mind and how it works. I thought about careers in criminal law or criminal psychology, but life took me in a different direction. Still, I never lost the curiosity about the mysteries of human behavior.

Another interest – music – kept me in close proximity to the drug culture even though I didn’t get involved myself. I have a knack for getting people to talk, which fed my curiosity.

While researching for this article, I recalled a few incidents where I’d seen people using meth.

In 1998, I worked with a young girl named Amy who was sucked in to meth addiction before she was 21 years old. To make a long story short, she had reached out for help, but lacked the self-will to take it. Her parents, who lived in Wisconsin, asked me to get her to the airport so they could get Amy into rehab.

The night before her early-morning flight, Amy stayed at my house to save time the next morning. She ‘borrowed’ my car at about 4 p.m. and didn’t come back. Coincidentally, a tornado hit Salt Lake that day. My concern for my friend was compounded by worry about my only transportation.
I had an idea where Amy might be and set out to bring her back. I found Amy at about midnight. The house was a converted apartment building in a seedy part of Salt Lake City. Sure enough, my car was parked nearby. I literally stepped over drugged-out bodies on the porch and knocked on the door. Amy let me in with a whispered warning that I shouldn’t have come there – it was a dangerous situation.

Amy took me into the kitchen where two women and a young man were alternately smoking meth and shooting heroin. When the man passed me the pipe, I bluntly said, “Thanks but I’m trying to cut back.” I didn’t want them to think I was such an outsider, which might escalate the situation.

I was amazed by the conversation. Amy’s ‘friends’ were trying to turn her out – get her into prostitution. She was young, pretty and vulnerable. The two women who coached her looked old, haggard and spent. One woman stuck a needle in her own vein as she told Amy how good life as a prostitute could be. As the drug entered her blood, her words trailed off and the woman’s head bobbled and fell to her chest, the needle still dangling from her arm. Fifteen minutes later, she awoke with a jerk and continued talking as if she never stopped.

“Is this what you want?” I silently pleaded with Amy. We finally left after 4 a.m. and I successfully got her to board the plane. I never heard from her again and can only hope she got the help she needed.

I moved to Sedona shortly afterward. Several years later I went home to visit family and old friends. I ran into a guy I used to shoot pool with who invited me to a house party. It turned out to be a small group – about five people – gathered in an old auto shop.

My acquaintance introduced me to the strangers as an old friend. “She used to be a cop,” he announced. I was never a cop, but I did work in law enforcement for nearly 10 years. One guy who seemed to be the leader of this group looked at me narrowly. He was shirtless and his chest was caved in, I presumed, from years of drug abuse. “Psychiatric discharge,” I lied, which seemed enough to keep me out of trouble.

I sipped on beer while those people smoked meth from tiny glass pipes for two hours. Both pipes eventually broke, having been dropped on the cement floor several times. I watched wide-eyed as the man with the sunken chest took the filament out of a light bulb and deftly poked a little carb hole in the delicate glass. That night I learned what lengths addicts will go to get a fix.

In 2004, I interviewed two Sedona children who had lost both parents to meth-related deaths in less than a year. The girl, then about 12, showed no emotion as she described finding her dead mother. “Dad, mom’s dead,” she said flatly, recounting how she broke the news to her father who was passed out on the couch.

In 2006, I interviewed several female inmates at the Yavapai County Jail in Prescott. Of about 40 women in the cell block, about 90 percent were meth users, whether that was directly the reason for their incarceration or not. Most said they used meth because they couldn’t afford pain medication for various injuries or ailments.

“Oh, it takes toothaches away like that,” Nick said, snapping his fingers when I asked if this was true. “It’s a straight-up pain killer.” He joked about the serious side-effect that some people loose teeth to meth abuse. “Hey, if you lose your teeth there’s no more pain.”

One inmate, Britney Bessler, is now serving a prison sentence for her part in a shooting death during a drug deal gone wrong. As she flipped through crime scene photos in her court papers, Bessler cried. “He was my best friend,” she said of the victim.

These memories were crystal clear (pun intended) as I talked to several meth users for this article. I imagined them in that dark space where the fix is the only thing that matters – above their jobs, their lovers and their children. I still don’t know why they start using. I don’t understand it. But, I feel compassion because each one is shrouded in a dark sadness and almost tangibly reaching out for help.

I sense a disconnection between these lost souls and the machine that purports to save them.

The women at Prescott’s jail said the system is designed to keep them down, once they are in it. Fines are set so high that people must choose between paying them or buying food, medicine and paying rent, they said. Court-ordered counseling is a farce, they said, a sham that keeps people employed but does little more than go through the motions with little real benefit for the users.

Real treatment is too expensive, they said. As Nick put it, many can’t afford $12,000 for private treatment and, in his perception, the alternative is to get arrested and be put into less effective court-ordered treatment.

A MATForce report stated there are ample funded sources for treatment in the Verde Valley but addicts don’t often seek treatment. They are usually forced into it by family or the legal system.

As I reported the story, I sadly realized how both sides are so close, yet miles apart. Sedona City Councilman Rob Adams acknowledged that people like Nick – those who don’t qualify for state help, but don’t have the money to get treatment on their own – may be falling through the cracks.

I don’t have the answer. I can only hope that by telling the story from the other side, the public can discern truth and misconceptions on both sides and work toward a real solution.