I suppose that might be a touch ballsy, but I have been working on this for a month and a half or so. So here it is. There is also a version of this about 1,000 words longer, but this is the version that ran in the paper. It doesn't miss too much in this, but if any of you are feeling particularly interested I could send it to you.
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Living with addiction
Former addicts talk about the devastating impact of meth
Frank and Chance both began snorting cocaine at 13.
As their addiction continued they became fuel blown addicts and they stayed on drugs despite the devastating effects on their health, the break down in their relationships and the financial toil that drove them to crime.
Now finally clean, they tell a terrifying story. It is a story of despair and hopelessness, of violence and crime.
It is a story of drug addiction.
Both these men, whose names have been changed for this story, experimented with a wide variety of drugs, including the latest one to hit the streets of rural Alberta communities — crystal meth.
The drug gives users a strong and addictive high that can last for hours at a stretch. However, it also leaves long-term users with severe kidney and liver damage. In addition, long-term users are left with brain damage that may be permanent.
Crystal meth users are rarely only meth users. They experiment with a wide array of drugs. In the case of Frank, he came to the drug only after having a firmly entrenched addiction to cocaine.
Before long this coke addiction also become his occupation as he dealt the drug to others and used the profits to feed his own habit. It was through this line of work that he was exposed to crystal meth.
“I had been dealing coke for two years before I realized anything about speed or crystal meth,” says Frank. “I was 16 or 17 and someone offered to pay me off with speed.”
Speed is just one of many names for methamphetamine and while reports have claimed that the drug has the power to completely addict people from the first use there is little proof to suggest this is true.
“At first I wasn’t really addicted to it, I was well into cocaine at the time,” says Frank. “There was no euphoric feeling to crystal meth at first. I must have banged (injected) it at least a dozen times before I started to feel anything.”
While he takes complete responsibility for his actions, Frank says the social group he hung out with gave him little in the way of options.
“When I was 13 my friends mostly ranged from 25 to 65. Most of them wore leather jackets and rode Harleys,” says Frank. “You didn’t really say no to these guys. If they offered it to you, you just took it.”
Chance’s life followed a similar path, but for longer and to more desperate places. He spent years living on the streets and in jail, struggling for years to pull himself off drugs.
At 47, he bears the scars of a lifetime of drug abuse and has the appearance of a much older man, someone who lived too hard and too fast for too long.
Chance was also exposed to drugs at the age of 13 and while he doesn’t blame the circumstances of his life, he says they did play a role.
“I had an alcoholic father and I kind of learned how to deal with life from him.”
Chance says that he didn’t want to drink because he associated that with his father’s addiction.
“I found that I never really wanted to drink alcohol because that was my father’s thing and so I got into drugs and it didn’t really matter what kind of drugs,” says Chance.
Chance says in those early days, and throughout his addiction, he avoided dealing with problems by using drugs.
“When you’re not dealing with those feelings and those problems they just get bigger and bigger and so you use more because you just can’t deal with life straight,” says Chance.
“All I wanted to do was just fit in and I found that if I had dope
for someone I became the man.”
The young age at which both men started using drugs is not uncommon. When the Premier’s Task Force on Crystal Meth released their recent report, they focused many of their recommendations on youth.
Const. Dan Thibeau with the Westlock RCMP, says that in the three years he has been here he has seen a noticeable decline in the number of meth addicts. The decline has been particularly pronounced in youth.
“It seems to be more a late 20s to 30s and even upwards from there to the point where we are seeing people in their 40s, 50s and 60s,” says Thibeau. He says that unfortunately along with a decrease in the number of meth addicts they have seen an increase in the number of cocaine addicts.
Supply and demand
One of the greatest challenges with this epidemic has been cutting down on the supply and availability of the drug.
Unlike other drugs, meth can be made by combining a collection of legally-available chemicals and over-the-counter medicines. Even with stricter controls having been placed on those chemicals, meth is still on the streets.
Simply put, meth is cheap, easy to produce, and highly addictive. From the standpoint of the criminal organizations, which have made and continue to make fortunes through its distribution, meth is the perfect tool on which to expand their empires.
When their resources are worn down users frequently resort to crime to find ways to pay for their habit creating a two-pronged crime wave wherever meth is present.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Ian Sanderson, who is in charge of drug awareness and gang investigations for Alberta, says that because of the sheer profit potential of the drug there are dozens of criminal organizations dealing meth in the province.
“The criminal intelligence service of Alberta put out a report a couple of years ago and they identified pretty much every recognizable criminal group as having some type of connection to the meth trade,” says Sanderson. “For organized criminal groups the whole thing is about money and controlling their share.”
He says his department is watching how the drugs are being moved around the province in an attempt to track the progression. He says the trends in the meth problem here have mirrored the progression of the drug in American states like Washington, Oregon and Colorado.
“To compare ourselves to places like the U.S. and see how bad it could really go, we haven’t reached that. And a lot of that is we started our response before it became an absolutely out of control problem province wide,” says Sanderson.
Alberta reacted faster to the problem so Sanderson is hopeful the province won’t follow the same course as those states.
Sanderson says that law enforcement is unsure as to exactly where the meth is now coming from. Over the past few years police broke up a number of large scale labs that were distributing the vast majority of the meth available on the streets.
Since then the labs have disappeared but the drugs continue to show up. Sanderson says his team is working hard to figure out just where today’s supply is coming from.
“One of the things we are diligently working on is determining whether these labs have just gone further underground or whether they have left the province,” says Sanderson.
Sanderson says, based on the American example, a worrying trend would be the emergence of home-based labs.
Because meth production is a relatively simple chemical process it can be manufactured by amateur chemists in their own homes. These small labs produce a insignificant amount of the drugs on the street, but can eat up a lot of time for law enforcement.
“If the trend continues the way it did in the United States then we would see more of these home-based labs, which become the majority of the work that law enforcement responds to even though they only produce five per cent of the drug,” says Sanderson.
He says the portability of the smaller labs makes investigating them particularly hard.
“You can do the process in about an hour. To get the information to do a search warrant on that place would probably take 100-200 hours,” says Sanderson. “They are easily moved. They can be up and gone in about an hour.”
The life
Both Frank and Chance spent time dealing drugs to pay for their own habits and as time progressed they gradually became involved in more serious crimes.
“I resorted to dealing and that lasted until I was about 18. Then I was lucky enough that my dad put me through judo and I put myself through a few years of kick boxing and I turned to enforcing to get my drugs,” says Frank.
“I started as fists for hire and it eventually became guns for hire. It just kept getting worse and worse.”
In time, as the demand for his line of work began to subside, Frank eventually gave up on finding pretenses for his violence.
“I would just make up an excuse and do a home invasion and just take what I needed to get high,” says Frank.
Sanderson says meth always brings an increase in crime.
“There is a direct link to an increase in many types of crime, including violent crime assaults perpetrated by its users and things like vehicle theft and identity theft.”
Sanderson said that the nature of the drug makes users more paranoid and aggressive.
“People who are involved with it tend to develop a psychosis so that they don’t tend to deal well with authority figures. There is an officer safety issue when people are coming down from this drug,” says Sanderson.
He says the effects of the drug also make users more predisposed to crime.
“While they are on this they are not eating or sleeping and their brains are extremely active so they tend to burn off that mental energy by thinking about criminal activity,” says Sanderson.
Chance also used crime to help pay for his habits, but he became more involved with organized crime.
“We lived like rock stars. We had planes, we travelled in limos and that was at an early age for me and all of that was happening because I had got into the drug scene,” says Chance.
“People would trip over themselves to come hang out with me so I thought at the time I was on top of the world.”
For Chance his criminal life became one more thing to juggle in an act that was already becoming hard to balance.
“I lived a triple life. Here I am hiding from other people that I am in a gang and I am hiding from the gang that I am still using,” says Chance.
His life finally caught up with him and he was put in jail for three years.
In jail he stayed away from meth and cocaine, but still turned to drugs to solve problems.
Road to recoveryWhen Chance was released from jail he began a life on the streets in Vancouver and Calgary. It was there that he was first exposed to treatment.
“I tried with all the brain power that I had and all the skills that I had, which was nothing to try and stay clean and sober,” says Chance. “I thought treatment centres were for the rich and I thought detox was for heroin addicts.”
The first step for Chance and all addicts is admitting that they need help. “I thought it would be fairly easy, but it’s changing your whole way of thinking. Taking what you think is the truth and turning it right around,” says Chance. “You have to be humble enough to be teachable and that was the hardest part.”
Diane Hyndman, an AADAC addiction counselor who works with recovering addicts in Westlock, says the key for any successful recovery is that the addict wants to change.
“It’s that old cliché, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. So a husband will bring a wife, or someone will bring in their kids and try to make change happen for this person, but unless the person in their own mind is willing to make a change it isn’t going to happen,” says Hyndman.
Frank says admitting he had a problem took longer than it should have.
“I had seen buddies overdose, I have seen guys get shot. I overdosed myself half a dozen times,” says Frank. “I had bypassed everyday life. There was Frank the family guy and Frank the addict for about a year and then it just became Frank the addict.”
Both men emphasize the importance of a 12-step program in bringing about their recovery. They describe their addiction as a failing they have always had and they needed to put their faith in a higher power, any higher power, to be able to move past the addiction.
They also emphasize the importance of having a sponsor who has been down the same destructive path and has found ways to cope.
Chance’s road to recovery was a long one and he says it didn’t work at first.
“I have been in and out of detox 52 times. I have been to nine treatment centres. It wasn’t easy. If you are from the street, it’s not something that is easy,” says Chance.
“The only way I knew to stay clean without changing myself was jumping from treatment centre to treatment centre. It gave me about a year living clean, because I couldn’t buy anything while I was living there.”
It was only when he finally started to change his thinking that he managed to stay clean. “You have to step outside of yourself. You have to get completely out of the way and buy into the program of recovery.”
For Frank cleaning up meant hitting rock bottom.
“I went over to this guy’s house for a New Year’s party and we tied into a quarter pound of blow and a couple of ounces of meth over the course of 11-12 hours, except I was at gunpoint the whole time,” says Frank.
“They kept getting me loaded, which wasn’t a chore for them. I was more than willing to do their dope. At the end of 11 to 12 hours they just let me go.”
When he left that party he left drugs behind. In his last act as a user he shoved a half gram of crystal meth up his nose and called his sponsor.
He then went to a marathon meeting for cocaine and crystal meth anonymous and has been clean ever since. He remembers the exact time he started the recovery process — 7:47 in the morning of Jan 1, 2005. “I think I was a full blown addict before I stuck my first needle into my arm. I hit bottom when I was 14 and just spent another 10 or so years identifying that fact,” says Frank.
Frank says the challenge was realizing that the only thing that mattered was that he was prepared to change.
“All the things that I have said and done don’t matter. What matters is that I wanted to stop and I said I would stop and then I didn’t. And telling yourself that you will never do that again and then doing it again. And the feelings inside, the wanting to pay rent, and show up on time, and to go to the birthdays and to be a family man. The biggest thing is the emotional and spiritual vacuum inside,” says Frank.
He says that one of the problems in getting better in Westlock was that so many of the people he knew were still using. “You’re either a doper and if you think about recovery they assume you’re a rat. It makes it hard.”
Hyndman says that if addicts return to a life surrounded by addicts then they will definitely end up using again.
“If I have somebody go to treatment and their supports are drug-using people, they are going to relapse,” says Hyndman. “Not only are they trying to kick the habit, now they need a whole new set of friends.”
Chance says part of the reason he agreed to be interviewed for this article was that he hopes it could stop the next generation of addicts.
“If I could keep one person clean for another hour by doing this, then I am happy. Or if something that I have said has triggered them to maybe think about getting better then I am even more happy,” says Chance.
He says parents have to understand that if their child is using drugs it is likely just a symptom of some other problem they are having.
“When your kid is using it is not their problem, it is your problem. Usually when a kid picks up drugs it’s not the problem, it is the solution to some other problem,” says Chance.
Frank says he hopes people understand that addicts don’t wear signs.
“You don’t have to be drinking out of a paper bag to be an alcoholic, and you don’t have to have a rig hanging out of your arm to be an addict.”
Sanderson says the one thing he want people to know is that recovery is possible. “They are not write-offs, they are not throwaways,” says Sanderson. “There is an awful lot of help for these people. There is life after meth.”
