Pubdate: Thu, 21 Jul 2005
Source: Creative Loafing Atlanta (GA)
Copyright: 2005, Creative Loafing
Contact:  http://www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1507
Author: Alyssa Abkowitz
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

FACES OF METH

How Three Men Are Fighting The Little White Powder

Editor's note: Paul is not the actual name of the man described in
this story. Because he is facing criminal charges, his name has been
changed to avoid jeopardizing his case. In addition, Britt's last name
has not been published to protect his effort to reinstate his
pharmacist's license.

Paul can't sit still. His hazel eyes dart back and forth behind
purple-tinted shades. He fiddles with his fake Dolce & Gabbana belt
buckle. He smokes a Marlboro Light, puts it out, lights another.He
asks for liquor. Beer and wine only, the waitress says. He moans, then
laughs. Customers turn and stare in the dimly lit Virginia-Highland
tavern. The waitress gives him a weird look. He orders a PBR.

He describes how he once bought four DVD players at a time. He kept
them for friends' birthdays. When the birthdays came around, he forgot
about the gifts. Either that or the DVD players were stolen. He
doesn't remember.

His friend, a girl in her early 20s with long blond hair, giggles. Her
pupils are the size of quarters. She stares across the table. She
tries to focus, but her eyes won't stop flickering. She twirls her
hair and shakes her thigh. It makes the table wobble.

"You look so familiar," she says to me. "Have we partied together
before?"

It's the only thing she says all night.

Paul looks through his cell phone. "I've got 200 names," he says, "and
three of them are friends."

He says he likes to dance. That's the only time he feels fulfilled,
when he can move to music.

Last year, while coming down from a 48-hour binge, he wrote himself an
e-mail to lift his spirits. When he feels down, he thinks about the
e-mail and tells himself that he's a fabulous person. That he loves
himself. Or at least he keeps repeating it.

"People don't realize it until it's all gone," he says, grinding his
teeth between sentences. "They'll die and be nobody, absolutely
nobody. Not me, though. I'm not going to be like that."

Brian Dew speaks loudly so he can be heard through the cell phone's
speaker. He's in Denver. The cell phone is in downtown Atlanta. Five
students sit around a white conference table on the ninth floor of a
Pryor Street building, listening."How's the hierarchy for the coding?"
Brian asks.

"It's basically done," one graduate student replies.

"Good," he says. "Now we need to find a volunteer transcriber."

The students look over pages of detailed notes and listen to Brian's
instructions. Be sure to have sufficient tapes. If the person wants a
cigarette break, give them five to 10 minutes outside. Be sure to call
the night before to remind the subject to show up.

His research team leader, a perky blonde with tan, freckled skin,
scribbles notes with a blue pen. She underlines important phrases in
pink or highlights them in yellow.

He switches to marketing. How will they publicize the study? Are the
new flyers made? What are they doing at Pride? They want to get as
many interviews as possible. The more diverse the participants, the
better the data will reflect what's going on in the city.

"I want it to move," he says. "The bullet eye is on
Atlanta."

Britt's early. He saunters into a room on the second floor of a church
off Peachtree Street. He takes a seat in a wooden chair in the back
row. He scratches the back of his buzz cut and lightly places his hand
on a friend's thigh. He's a dinosaur in this room. He knows the
routine too well. It's the only way he can live his life
normally.Sixteen other people - a man with a pierced chin and tattoos
crawling up his arms, a petite pregnant woman with short brown hair -
eventually settle in. Britt chats with a few of them. White candles
are lit, even though florescent light illuminates half the room. It
grows quiet.

"If you want what we have to offer and are willing to go to any
lengths to get it," Britt says quickly and monotonously, reading from
a laminated sheet, "then you are ready to follow these simple steps."
He knows the words like he knows his mother's voice. He's heard the
mantra at least twice a week for the past three years. He's grown
accustomed to listening to people's personal stories: The pregnant
woman worries about running into old friends at a baby shower this
weekend. She doesn't know how she'll be viewed. The tattooed man
speaks of finding a higher power. He recalls the time he wept so hard
on the steps of a club that he couldn't see. He doodles in a
sketchbook as he talks.

Britt speaks last. "I knew I needed to make drastic changes in my
life. But I wasn't really willing, and it took me a very long time and
a lot of consequences. It wasn't going to happen until I wanted it."

Crank. Tina. Speed. Ice. Meth. Crystal. It's cheap. It lasts for
hours. It's highly addictive. And its use is growing at an alarming
rate in Atlanta.That shouldn't come as a surprise.

Law enforcement agencies in Fulton and DeKalb counties describe
crystal methamphetamine as one of their biggest problems. Earlier this
month, a new Georgia law was signed mandating that cold medicines
containing a key ingredient for meth production be placed behind
counters to thwart meth labs.

Meth can be made by combining cold medicine, drain cleaners, lye and
acetone. You can cook it up in a kitchen pot. It doesn't require a
Ph.D. in chemistry. Just practice. Shooting or smoking gives an
instantaneous rush. Snorting might burn your nose, but soon enough
you'll be numb from the chemicals.

And if you can't make it, it's easy enough to buy. For starters, I-75,
I-85 and I-20 intersect in the city, and I-95, which runs from New
York to Miami, cuts down the eastern half of the state. That makes
transporting mass quantities of meth a cinch. The Drug Policy
Information Clearinghouse reports that Mexican drug traffickers have
become the primary manufacturers and distributors of meth, producing
as much as 10 pounds of ice in 24 hours.

In June alone, 49 suspects - many of them Mexican drug runners - and
16 companies were indicted in Atlanta for supplying meth ingredients.
Last year, the Drug Enforcement Agency reported that almost 84
kilograms of meth were seized and 175 meth labs were busted in Georgia.

Compare that to New York's 10 kilograms seized and 53 labs busted last
year. Or Florida's 37 kilograms seized and 170 labs busted. Earlier
this year, officials seized 79 kilos of meth in Cherokee County alone.
It was the largest-ever bust in the East and the 15th largest nationwide.

And that's just the meth that's been caught. The drug is easy to
conceal; $100's worth of the white, odorless powder could fit in a
thimble. A little goes a long way. A quarter-gram could last a
weekend, at least when you first start.

Once you start, it's easy to get hooked. Some researchers think
crystal meth is as addictive as nicotine. Almost 9 percent of rehab
admissions in metro Atlanta are meth-related, up 5 percent from two
years ago. Outside the Perimeter, meth admission rates jump to 16 percent.

And counselors are having a difficult time treating meth addiction.
Couple that with the fact that drug addiction itself is the bastard
child of the medical community, and it becomes tough to receive funds
to study the epidemic.

Whatever the specific circumstances, meth affects the lives of
thousands of Atlantans. Just midway through his 20s, Paul already has
ended up in the one place he told himself he'd never be. Britt, a
former pharmacist, was forced out of his career - and into rehab on
four separate occasions. Brian, for whom addiction hit close to home
at a young age, now finds himself trying to understand the patterns of
meth addiction so he can prevent others from suffering the same fate.

There's no exact intersection of these men's lives; they don't know
each other and likely never will. But meth has led them to experience
the drug's power to destroy.

Paul rolled up a dollar bill, wedged it in his nostril and inhaled the
white powder. He didn't know what to expect. He'd never done it
before. But he wanted to bond with his fiancee, and he knew she loved
the stuff. The rush hit him hard. He instantly felt alive -- and
abnormally turned on. His fiancee did, too. So did the guy who snorted
it with them.Lips locked. Shirts flew off. Paul, his fiancee and a
random guy were soon entangled in each other's bodies. "That's pretty
much the beginning of the end of a relationship," Paul recalls.

Four years ago, Paul, who lived in Virginia at the time, kept running
into the same girl. She was a thin club kid with long brown hair whose
cuteness - and seduction on the dancefloor - caught Paul's attention.
After a couple weeks, they started dating.

"We were like a single entity on the dancefloor, and it rubbed off in
the bedroom," Paul says. "I've never, ever moved with anyone like
that, and never have since."

She had problems. But, he rationalized, everyone did. He liked helping
others and she was in need. She was struggling with anorexia. Her
method of dieting: snorting meth.

"She traded one problem for another," he says.

Paul, who was 22 at the time, proposed after dating her for a year.
She said yes.

She was a source of solace for him. It was the first time in his life
he felt close to someone. As a child, he'd spent nights trying to fall
asleep to the sounds of his mother screaming as his drunken father
dragged her through the hall by her hair.

In her, he finally had someone - someone he could take on cruises and
pamper with ostentatious jewelry, someone who would love him and take
care of him in return.

Or so he thought.

In the two months following their threesome, Paul and his fiancee
rarely touched in bed. She often turned her back to him before falling
asleep.

Shortly thereafter, she broke off the engagement.

Britt knew what he had to do. He'd just lost his pharmacy license and
his job at a drug store in Alabama. He'd been caught stealing opiates.
It had worked for about a year. But he knew it was bad. So he
voluntarily enrolled in rehab.For years, Britt had been dabbling in
prescription pills, Ecstasy and cocaine. But Tina was different. He
liked the way it made him feel. Alive and invisible. It helped him
forget that he was different, and that different was bad. He didn't
feel empty and lonely, unwanted and uncared for. He didn't have to
think about his parents.

When Britt was 18, his mother and father opened his mail and found a letter
from a friend. The note described the boy's feelings for their son. They
confronted Britt. He confirmed what the shrink the family had hired 10 years
earlier had suspected: Britt was gay. His parents pulled out the Bible. They
made Britt read Scripture that said the way he felt was a crime against God:
"Though shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: It is abomination."

Over the years, his parents had argued a lot. They tried to keep it
from him, but it was hard not to hear the shouts and slamming doors
late at night. Later he found out why. They blamed each other for
making him a sissy.

Britt's parents forced him to fish and hunt. They took him to an
endocrinologist who prescribed anabolic steroids. They wanted him to
be bigger and stronger. People picked on him at school and called him
a fag. But he couldn't run home and tell Mom and Dad. He was an
outcast in the conservative, South Georgia town of Moultrie.

He had nowhere to turn. Drugs were an outlet - an escape route that
opened tenfold when he went to pharmacy school in Birmingham. Soon,
however, he took it too far.

So he surrendered to rehab. Perhaps he'd be able to address his past
to combat his current problem.

But he wasn't ready. Britt told the rehab counselors what they wanted
to hear. He told them he yearned to get clean. But his thoughts and
actions didn't sync with what came out of his mouth. During group
therapy sessions, Britt's thoughts wandered. He'd think about ways to
obtain drugs and who he'd contact the minute he was out of rehab. He
thought the counselors' suggestions - attend Narcotics Anonymous
meetings, get a sponsor to help you stay clean - were stupid. Who were
they telling him what to do?

After 30 days of rehab, he was released. The day he got out he used
Ecstasy.

It was the day before Mother's Day, 1991, when Brian got the message.
He was shooting hoops with some church friends in North Carolina when
a sharp pain shot through his stomach. It was a random ache. He'd been
feeling fine all day. But the pain didn't stop, so he left the
basketball game and went home.When he walked inside, he saw the
answering machine light blinking. He pressed the button and heard his
brother's girlfriend's voice. She sounded scared. Her voice shook.
Brian picked up the phone to dial her number.

What she said shocked him. He couldn't move, couldn't talk, couldn't
cry. He tried all night to reach his parents, who were vacationing in
Florida, and finally reached them the next day. After he wished his
mother a Happy Mother's Day, he told her the news: His brother had
shot himself.

After the funeral, Brian, who was 23 at the time, began devouring
books about addiction. He wanted to understand why his brother lost
the fight to something that seemed so simple: Use or don't use. How
was it that something so small could consume a 25-year-old budding
artist with so much promise?

Brian kept up his research while working nine-hour days as a
stockbroker in Winston-Salem, N.C. He earned a comfortable salary but
wasn't fulfilled. So he started taking courses in psychology after
work at Wake Forest. One day, his professor told him he should
consider a career in the mental health profession. He had a knack for
empathizing. Maybe he could help those in need.

A year later, he turned in his tie for a stack of books and enrolled
in Appalachian State University's counseling program in addiction studies.

Paul couldn't stop crying at work. He didn't know how to get over his
broken engagement. His emotions were raging. He'd already been
arrested and released on his own recognizance for assault and battery
after he punched a guy in the face and wrestled another guy to the
pavement. The two guys had flicked him off at a stoplight.So he
decided to get out of the house more and try to have a good time. One
of his co-workers, a fellow security guard, had given him a bump of
meth to get through a long work shift. That turned out to be the start
of a meth binge that allowed him to party and work for four days
straight - without any sleep. He usually smoked a quarter-gram per
weekend, a half, tops. Sixty bucks per binge. That was nothing.

But then it got worse. Within weeks, he found he'd trade anything for
an ounce - 28 grams - of speed. Handguns, DVD players, other drugs. He
started consuming eight balls of meth (about 3.5 grams) every weekend.
He met a girl who taught him to inject it. The instantaneous rush jolted
him.

But the long binges caught up with him. In March 2003, he sent the
wrong security guard to an event in Maryland. The guard was only
licensed to patrol in Virginia. Paul was canned.

That night he went on a long binge. He tweaked every day until he ran
out of meth.

In August 2003, Paul heard a knock. He put his dog away and opened the
door. Two policemen tackled him. A woman from downstairs had called a
crime hotline to report him. The woman's daughter had smoked pot with
Paul, and the woman said he was selling drugs. Paul said he was just
smoking his own stash. The police found a roach in the ashtray and a
homemade gravity bong. They got a warrant. They found an eighth of an
ounce of weed and arrested him for marijuana possession.

A day later, he posted the $500 bond. He'd been evicted from his
apartment, so he moved in with his grandmother. Soon he started to get
restless, needed a change of venue. He had friends in Atlanta. But he
couldn't leave until his court hearing. In November, he pleaded guilty
to the marijuana charge and left on a bus that afternoon.

For the first four months, Paul didn't touch meth. He got a job at a
company that set up convention booths at the Georgia World Congress
Center. He stayed clean.

Then he met a friend who knew a bunch of users. He went with his
friend to a house off Cheshire Bridge Road and ended up tweaking for
four days.

His contact list grew. He met a bunch of gay kids who had a plethora
of meth. The kids would book several hotel rooms for a couple of
nights and tweak in them. Then they'd switch hotels and repeat the
routine. Paul did meth 24/7. He went through a gram - with a street
value of $80 to $225 - a day.

In May 2004, his partying was cut short.

He was staying at a hotel off North Druid Hills Road. While he was in
the shower, a girl he'd been tweaking with started knocking on every
hotel room door, looking for him. Management walked in as Paul was
getting dressed. They threatened to call the cops. He grabbed his two
bags and bolted. His cell phone had been disconnected the day before.
He had no means of contacting his friend, who'd left the hotel room to
score more meth. He sat on the side of the road for a couple of hours.
It got dark. He walked over to an apartment complex where he'd visited
a friend the night before. He was tweaked out of his mind. He was
sweating and couldn't stop moving. He'd been told by a maintenance man
to leave the property. He left, then returned. He soon got tired of
carrying his yellow bag and put it by a picnic table. He kept his
black bag with him.

A police officer sped into the parking lot. The maintenance man had
called the cops. Paul didn't run. He couldn't. He was too fucked up.
He told the cop he was homeless, was living hotel to hotel. The cop
frisked him. No weapons. The cop asked to look in Paul's black bag.

"Go ahead," he replied.

The cop found a sliver spoon with white-colored residue. The cop
tested the residue. Positive for meth. He handcuffed Paul and placed
him in the back of the cop car.

The yellow bag was found under the nearby picnic table. It had a paper
tag with Paul's name attached. Inside were a straw, several Q-tips, a
scale, unused baggies and a black and silver case. Inside the case,
the cop found two medium-sized bags with hard crystal. The bags
weighed in at 6.5 grams.

After he interned at Duke University in 1995, Brian's first hands-on
experience was treating addicts at North Carolina's High Point
Regional Hospital's Behavioral Health Center. He moved his way up to
heading the impaired professionals program, treating doctors and
lawyers unable to kick their habits.He loved the work but burned out.

"I really enjoyed the teaching end more than the supervision," he
says. "I really wanted to move on and do some other things."

So he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, one of the nation's finest counseling programs. He saw
a bit of meth addiction at UNC-G in the mid-'90s. But it was nothing
compared to what he saw in Atlanta when he took a position as an
assistant professor of counseling at Georgia State University.

At Georgia State, Brian was introduced to Kirk Elifson. Kirk is a
sociologist there. He's been studying drug patterns in Atlanta for 27
years. He and his wife, Claire Sterk, a public health professor at
Emory - both leading drug researchers in Atlanta - took him under
their wing. Through his work with the couple, Brian was named the
Atlanta representative for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the
nation's pre-eminent drug abuse and addiction research organization.
As a representative, he attends meetings twice a year throughout the
country to report on Atlanta's drug trends to leading drug and public
health officials.

Meth had already hit the West Coast in the early '90s. It gained media
attention, particularly in California's gay communities in San
Francisco and San Diego. But now it was moving eastward. Brian
discovered that the amount of Mexican ice had skyrocketed in Georgia.
Part of I-20 runs along the U.S. border, and 90 percent of the meth
smuggled into the city is from Mexico.

Brian was intrigued. Meth broke most socioeconomic barriers. It
crossed age brackets and sexual orientations. Most people entering
treatment centers for meth were 35 and older. Some had never touched a
drug in their life, but were somehow caught in the hands of meth. What
was it about this drug?

Brian applied for a competitive, $100,000 federal grant from the
National Institutes of Health in late 2004. His application was denied
because the study outlined too many objectives for the two-year grant.
But he didn't let the lost funding stop him from his goal: to
interview recovering addicts - those who were abstaining from meth for
two weeks or two years - and find out its draw.

Each interview would be anonymous and be held in a church in Midtown.
He'd record the interview on tape and split the interviewees into two
categories: heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. He would develop
categories of questions: "Influences to Start," "Positive and Negative
Effects," "Stopping Usage," "Relapse," "Advice." In February, he
conducted his first interview.

By May, Brian had interviewed approximately 18 men and women. He'd
started to notice similarities between gay and straight users. They
talked about sex, a lot. He knew meth impacted the system that
controls pleasure mechanisms. It increased sex drive, made people less
anxious, and lowered their ability to make sound decisions. So addicts
engaged in sex, lots of sex and longer sex, many times without condoms.

He found several major differences, too. If users were heterosexual,
they tended to be white, less educated and have lower rates of
full-time employment. The gay and bisexual users, by comparison, had
large incomes, enabling them to support their habits. Heterosexuals
had started using drugs early on, around age 13. They tended to inject
meth more than gay users did. Homosexuals and bisexuals began the drug
in their late 20s and early 30s, and smoking meth was their delivery
of choice.

But Brian needed more subjects. And people would be more inclined to
talk if they were paid. In April, Brian, working with Kirk, received a
$10,000 grant through Georgia State's Mentor Program for the
interviews. The grant went into affect July 1. The money allows Brian
to offer $25 per participant. In late June, Brian and his research
team began advertising: "Would you like to get paid $25 for completing
an anonymous research study sponsored by Georgia State
University?"

Britt was 25 when he moved back in with his parents after his failed
attempt at rehab. His mother and father were crushed. It was a double
whammy: Their son was gay, and a drug addict. "It was the worst two
things I could've been, other than a pedophile," Britt says.

He tried an outpatient recovery program in Moultrie but couldn't stay
sober. Because he didn't have a job and had no money saved up, he
filed for bankruptcy.

The following year he moved to Atlanta. He wanted to get his pharmacy
license in Georgia. The pharmacy board denied him in 1991 because of
his past problems, which he was required to disclose. Upon being
turned down, his sponsor from the Pharmacists Recovery Network
recommended he go back into treatment. Perhaps the board would
reinstate his license if they saw an effort to stay clean.

So Britt enrolled in Talbott Recovery Campus, just outside Atlanta. He
stayed in the inpatient, $22,000 program, paid for by his parents, for
five months. It was a comfortable and serene setting (Jeb Bush sent
his daughter there) where Britt was able to skirt around his
addiction. The counselors recommended he go to St. Jude's, because he
obviously needed a different experience.

Located off Renaissance Parkway, St. Jude's treats more than 1,600
addicts and is free for Fulton County residents. It's a melting pot of
detox participants; unlike at Talbott, Britt was sleeping next to
homeless people. For seven months, he had to scrub toilets, wash
dishes and mop floors, in addition to holding a full-time job. And he
began taking responsibility for his disease.

Based on his two rehab stints, the pharmacy board reinstated his
license in 1992.

Then he met Mark. He was at the Armory, a gay club in Midtown known
for disco and drag shows. Mark was 6 feet tall, muscular, with dark
hair. Britt found him highly attractive. They started dating. Britt
told him about his problem. Mark, too, had a problem. He drank every
day. But Britt stayed sober, unaffected by Mark's drinking - until the
trip to Key West in 1996.

On the way to the Keys, Britt and Mark stopped in Tampa at a friend's
house. Britt wanted to fit in with his boyfriend and his friends. He'd
been good; he should reward himself. He asked for a glass of wine.

When they returned from Key West, Britt and Mark started frequenting
Backstreet. Britt occasionally would pop Ecstasy or do some acid. Then
his drug use progressed. He used Special K, GHB and meth. He could get
his hands on Tina pretty easily now, unlike in the early '90s. He
could do a bump and go to work the next day and be OK. His weekends
got longer and longer. His bank account ebbed. A gram of the most
potent ice cost about $240.

He became a daily user. He'd go through an eight ball every two days -
roughly $2,000 a week. He was late to open the drugstore where he
worked. Customers complained. Then his boss found drugs missing. Britt
was fired.

He got in touch with a friend who also was a pharmacist and meth user.
They decided to open an independent drug store in Midtown that
specialized in HIV treatment.

Britt popped pills or injected meth every hour. His relationship with
Mark was on the rocks. He cheated. Nothing mattered anymore - not his
family or friends, not his health or his job. Just meth and getting
it.

In 1999, Britt and his partner sold their pharmacy to CVS. He
continued on as a CVS employee, despite the $700,000 he claims he made
from the sale. It was the worst possible good fortune. Because of the
money, he didn't have to stop using. He could use even more. He'd stay
up for three days at a time, sleep for 12 hours and repeat the
routine. Suspicions rose at work. He was fired, again, and lost his
license for the second time.

He holed up in his Midtown condo for a month. He didn't return phone
calls. His mother came to Atlanta and begged him to go back to
treatment. He said he didn't want to. All he wanted was to stay home
and do meth.

In June, his mother finally convinced him to go back to Talbott. In
rehab, he felt like he was coming out of his skin. In December, he was
allowed to leave for Christmas week. By then, he had made it to
Talbott's three-quarters house, the final segment of inpatient
treatment during which a patient leaves for work but must sleep at the
facility.

Even though their relationship had fizzled, Britt and Mark maintained
their friendship. On Christmas, Britt and his parents went to Mark's
Midtown condo. Five years earlier, Britt realized his parents finally
had accepted he was gay. During his and Mark's visits, his mother had
stopped making up the guest bed; he and Mark could sleep in his old
room.

While his parents and Mark chatted, Britt excused himself to go to the
bathroom. He went upstairs and rummaged through Mark's dresser. He
found a pipe and some meth. He was so excited his hands shook. He took
a hit - and for the next seven days holed up in his own Midtown condo,
doing any drug he could get his hands on.

When he returned to the treatment center, he failed a drug test. The
staff tried to help him for a couple of months, but discharged him in
May 2001.

Three months later, Britt started hallucinating. He was taking an
antidepressant that the recovery center had prescribed for his
depression. Combined with other drugs, it can cause
hallucinations.

Britt continued using meth, but this time it was different. He acted
out sexually in seedy bathhouses and spent nights at the sleazy
Cheshire Bridge Motor Inn. He started seeing shadows in his periphery.
He thought people were after him, that his family had conspired
against him. He heard voices. He thought the treatment center had
bugged him. The voices sounded like counselors asking him questions
about good vs. evil and why he had been put on Earth. The voices told
him to leave Atlanta and drive to Augusta.

During his drive, the voices told him he was the star of a reality TV
show called "Britt Is Missing." He tried to escape from the television
cameras. He couldn't. He stopped at Parliament House, a gay club in
Augusta, to try to drown the voices. But they got louder. He
high-tailed it out of there, crying and shaking. The voices wouldn't
stop. He smoked meth as he drove down a two-lane country road. The
voices told him to drive off the road, because the curtains were going
to open any minute. His fans were standing around, waiting to cheer
for him.

He saw the trees lining the street. The voices told him they would
open for his curtain call. He veered off the road. The trees didn't
move.

By July 1, Brian's office phone was ringing off the hook. The flyers
posted around town had worked. Brian's research team had completed 35
interviews with a broader range of participants. By the end of the
year, Brian is hoping to interview 30 more people abstaining from meth
- - then switch gears and begin interviewing active users. "We want to
get their perceptions of what it means to be abstinent, what it means
to use, and what keeps them from being able to stop," he says.

That might offer insight as to how rehab facilities can better treat
meth addiction. But to bring active users into the study, Brian needs
funding. In late June, he resubmitted his proposal for the NIH grant
he didn't receive a year earlier. Brian believes he's polished the
study's focus. He will receive a verdict in early 2006.

When Brian listens to his interviewees talk about the draw of meth, he
often thinks of his brother. He remembers the time after his high
school graduation when he and some friends drove to the beach to
celebrate. He was relaxing on the sand when his brother appeared out
of nowhere, completely fucked up. Brian was embarrassed. His family
had always done a good job of shielding others from his brother's
behavior. But here he was, standing in front of Brian, high on drugs,
rambling. Perhaps he didn't know where to turn.

Brian doesn't beat himself up for not doing more. His brother's
disease gave him compassion and understanding - and the ability to
teach the importance of empathy in counseling addicts.

"I often wonder what would've happened if he'd been able to reach his
potential," Brian says. "He had a very bright future, if he could've
just dealt with his disease."

During his first week in DeKalb County jail, Paul slept. Now, two
months later, he's established a routine. He wakes at 5 a.m. for
breakfast, then goes back to sleep until 9 a.m. From 10 a.m. to 2
p.m., he works out, eats lunch and showers. Then he's locked in his
cell until dinner. He usually reads during this time, or writes
letters. He's started exploring Islam. His roommate prays five times a
day, and Paul began asking what it was all about. His roommate handed
him the Quran. Since then, Paul has tried to get his hands on any
Muslim literature he can."I won't say I've found religion," he says,
dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit still damp with sweat from his
workout. "But I've started questioning a lot of things that are going
on and trying to find placement for them."

He writes letters to his brother, aunt, mom and friends. He reads an
Alcoholics Anonymous book and is trying to start the 12-step program.
He's well past the first step - admitting he's an addict - and is
writing letters to make amends with former friends and family, as part
of step No. 8.

And he's made a list of what he's going to do when he gets out: try
kickboxing and meditation, attend NA meetings, shop at herbal stores
and get colonics. "I want to completely cleanse myself," he says.

On July 14, Paul's bond - originally set at $3,000 cash because he's
considered a flight risk - was reduced by a magistrate judge to
$2,000. He can't afford that, so he'll wait in jail until the district
attorney indicts him or until a friend bonds him out. But Paul's not
sure if he wants to be bonded out. He's in a structured environment
where he can't be drawn to destructive activities.

"I figured out I was put here for a reason," he says. "There's
somebody looking out for me somewhere."

When Britt woke up in a jail cell in South Carolina, he began to pray
for the first time since childhood. Amazingly, he'd only suffered an
abrasion on his arm. His BMW was totaled.After a day-and-a-half, a
friend from rehab bailed him out. When he returned to Atlanta, the
first thing he did was smoke ice with the friend. He did more drugs
until Nov. 20, 2001, when his bank account was wiped out. He was dead
broke.

The next day, he checked himself back into St. Jude's. It was his
fourth attempt at rehab. This time was different, though. He readily
admitted he had a problem.

Two years later, he reconciled with his family by giving a formal
apology at his parents' house in Moultrie. He and his mother cried
together as he sat in the den and told them he was sorry for the pain
caused by years of addiction.

Today, he attends Crystal Meth Anonymous meetings religiously, three
or four times a week. It took him a year-and-a-half to complete all 12
steps of the program. He often leads the meetings and is a sponsor for
other meth users who are trying to kick the habit.

He's still screened randomly and still attends recovery meetings with
the Pharmacists Recovery Network. He's in the midst of trying to get
his license reinstated. In November, he'll celebrate four years of
sobriety.

On a Friday evening, Britt mingles with a handful of recovering
addicts at a CMA meeting. He laughs with a couple of guys who sit in
the back row with him. At the end of the meeting, Britt gathers with
the other attendees in a large circle. They wrap their arms around
each other's shoulders and repeat - some of them for the thousandth
time - the serenity prayer.

"You got to keep coming back," they say. "It works if you work it."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin