Pubdate: Sun, 30 Jan 2005
Source: Advocate-Messenger, The (KY)
Copyright: 2005 The Advocate-Messenger
Contact:  http://www.amnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1253
Author: Todd Kleffman, Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

METH ADDICT GLAD SHE GOT BUSTED

Unlike most of the other inmates at the Boyle County Detention Center, 
Elizabeth Key considers herself lucky to be there.

If she wasn't in jail, Key said she would either be dead or still living in 
a methamphetamine induced hell wishing she were.

"This is the best thing that ever happened to me. If it hadn't happened, it 
would have been a lot worse than this," Key said recently as she motioned 
around the bleak gray setting of an interview room at the jail.

"The last few months before I got busted, I cried every day. I had a lot of 
suicidal thoughts. I was so miserable. I prayed every night for God to do 
something to get me off drugs, but I couldn't lay it down."

Key, 29, is now eight months into a five-year sentence after she pleaded 
guilty to possession of and facilitation to manufacture methamphetamine.

The time behind bars has been a blessing that has allowed her to reclaim 
her life and start anew, she said.

During a two-hour interview, she appeared to answer questions frankly and 
didn't blame anyone else for her predicament. By talking publicly about her 
experience, Key said she hopes someone might recognize themselves or a 
loved one heading down the same path and choose a different direction.

She also knows that speaking out against meth on the front page of the 
newspaper won't hurt her chances when she goes for her first parole hearing 
in June.

"I want my family back, and I'm going to do whatever it takes," she said.

"Even if I have to serve all five years."

Arrested in March 2003

Key was arrested in March 2003, after a family member asked Lincoln County 
deputies to check on the welfare of her two young children.

When the officers arrived at her Moreland apartment, Key, as usual, was 
high, and a packet of meth fell from her bra to the officers' feet.

Once inside the apartment, deputies found materials used to make meth and 
James "Little Jimmy" Wilson Jr. of Junction City, Key's boyfriend, who is 
currently serving a 10-year sentence for manufacturing the drug.

They also found Key's two children, a girl and boy who were ages 3 and 1 at 
the time. Key watched as the officers took her babies away.

"When I seen them carrying my kids out of there that night, it was over for 
me."

Key said her arrest turned out to be her ticket to salvation.

She said it ended her seven-year relationship with meth, the last four of 
which she used it every day.

It cost her her marriage and her children (she's seen them only three times 
in the last eight months).

It destroyed all of her important relationships with family and friends.

It gave her an irregular heartbeat, fogged over many of her memories.

It turned her into a slave and stole her ability to see any beauty in the 
world.

Powerless to stop her addiction

Key said she knew meth was unraveling her life but felt powerless to 
prevent it.

"You may love your kids, you may love your family, but the drug just takes 
over your mind," she said.

"I've done coke. I've done pot. I've done crack. But there's nothing that 
gets you high, gets you 'up' like meth. There's nothing like meth. It just 
takes ... you."

Key and her husband first did meth together in Bowling Green, she said. It 
was sexually thrilling and boosted energy to super-human levels.

"It makes you feel like you can do anything," Key said.

But it also led to violent domestic fights and undermined her marriage. Her 
husband pulled back from the drug, Key said, but she could not.

"I left my husband because of meth," she said. "I wanted dope every day."

With her two babies in tow, Key fell in with Wilson and began to sink 
deeper in the meth quagmire.

To save money, Wilson began to cook up his own drugs at his Junction City 
apartment, Key said. Associates would shoplift the needed cold pills and 
other ingredients.

With an investment of about $11, Wilson could make a batch of meth with a 
street value of about $500, she said.

They consumed most of it themselves.

"I was doing half an ounce a day," she said. "That's a lot."

Meth called "walk away drug"

Experts call meth the "walk away drug" because users walk away from all 
responsibilities, even their children, who are abandoned to the point of 
becoming "meth orphans." Key admitted such descriptions were true to her 
experience.

Though she said "I always made sure I fed my kids" and never exposed them 
to the toxic, explosive process of cooking up the drug, that was about the 
extent of her responsible parenting.

Getting high mattered more than nurturing her children, and she was high 
nearly every day of their lives, she said.

"I wasn't a good mother. I wasn't a loving mother. I put my kids in danger."

Key said she regularly drove under the influence of meth with her kids in 
the car, often arriving at a destination without remembering how she got 
there or why she came.

Sometimes she would stay high for two weeks at a time, never sleeping, and 
then crash, leaving her children unattended for hours.

With growing meth use comes growing paranoia. That led Wilson to move his 
cooking operation from Junction City to Key's apartment in Moreland.

Key said she never cooked a batch herself, but enjoyed watching Wilson go 
through the process, which she likened to "a big science experiment."

"Cooking is an addiction to itself, just watching it being made. It's 
exciting," she said.

"I watched him do it, I knew how to do it and I know I would have done it, 
eventually. I could have blown the place up with me and the kids in there."

In the latter days of her addiction, Keys said her life shrank in upon her 
and smothered her like a plastic bag.

She would shun family and friends who tried to intervene, until all she had 
left in her life was the need to get high.

"Chasing the red dragon"

She would hit phases meth users call "chasing the red dragon" or 
"tweaking," when the overwhelmed body simply can't take anymore and shuts 
down, leaving the addict all doped up with no place to go.

Key said she would make it through those times by endlessly washing and 
folding clothes that were already clean and folded.

"I was a prisoner in my own home," she said. "I didn't want to leave the 
house. Colors on meth are just washed out, gray. The world was dull. There 
was no beauty outside."

That was how far Key had fallen when the deputies came knocking and finally 
provided an answer to her prayers.

In the nearly two years since then, Key said she is learning to replace 
that desperation with hope.

She is trying to reconcile with her husband and rebuild the broken bridges 
to her family.

And she is allowed to visit her children at the jail, once a month for 
about an hour and a half.

It helps her see the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel she has been 
traveling.

"When I get to see my kids, no drug could get me that high, now that I'm 
straight," she said.

"I know I can't make up for what I've done and not done in the past. All I 
can think about now is what I'm going to do when I get out."
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