It Happens Everywhere

By TAD BARTIMUS

I think my friend is using drugs. 

We're not talking aspirin here. I mean a highly dangerous drug, probably crystal methamphetamine, a 1960s invention originally also known as "speed." In the new millennium it's called "ice," or Jenny Clear, rock, glass, batu or shabu, and is an addictive illegal substance that destroys lives and can permanently damage and kill its users.

"Crystal meth" is all around us, available from drug dealers in every city, most small towns, and even rural areas where highly toxic labs are easily hidden in isolated barns or abandoned houses.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration calls crystal meth "the fastest growing drug threat" in this country, and estimates nearly 10 million Americans have used the easy to make, easy to get, cheap and highly addictive psychostimulant. It gives the user a euphoric high, then drops them into an intolerable low, trapping them in a vicious cycle of ups and downs that worsens with time.
Several months passed before I realized that my friend no longer was a lively, outgoing, enthusiastic 30-something woman. She'd turned into a withdrawn pessimist who claimed sudden, exotic medical problems as excuses for not keeping appointments. I overlooked her "little white lies" about her schedule because she seemed exhausted all the time. I realize now that I didn't want to believe what was happening to her.

Once well-groomed, she began wearing wrinkled, torn old clothes, not caring if her hair was dirty and her face was smudged from yesterday's makeup. She lost weight and had permanent dark circles under her eyes.

A woman who's always lived on the financial edge, my friend blamed her eviction from her apartment on "a misunderstanding." She was vague about her new address. She suspended contact with several of us at the same time.

Four acquaintances in two days said she'd slipped back into "bad old habits with bad old friends." One even volunteered to tell me the name of a dealer allegedly selling my friend crystal meth. I urged her to tell the police instead; she laughed and said, "What good will it do? There's no more room in the jails."

I know that alcohol, though legal, is the world's most used drug, and that it has wrecked countless lives and brought untold pain to millions, including me. As a member of the baby boomer generation, I know lots of people who've smoked marijuana, all of whom inhaled. I have met several cocaine users and a couple of recovering addicts who once abused themselves with heroin.

But I was so naive about crystal meth that when I saw a flyer on the post office bulletin board warning local residents about the dangers of "ice," I wondered why anybody would be worried about the effects of frozen water! A 16-year-old explained what I was reading. Then this high school junior casually added that "quite a few" of her classmates were "high on ice a lot of the time." That's how I learned it is the scourge of my own community.
Now I also know crystal meth can be snorted, but is mostly smoked like crack cocaine; that inhaling fumes from the clear, large, chunky crystals resembling rock candy can turn a normal person into a paranoid psychotic; that using it dilates the pupils, races the heart, increases blood pressure and body temperature, and can induce addiction after the first "hit."

Social workers, law enforcement officers and drug counselors say crystal meth users stop caring for the people around them, leave their children to starve, assault friends and family and steal to get money to buy more "ice."

It is one thing to read about such things in the newspaper and see victims on television; it is quite another to realize a person you love is destroying her life.

I called a local help group and picked up a pamphlet that warned: "nagging, begging, threatening or scolding an ice user won't make them quit." Experts believe a user has to hit bottom and decide on their own to seek help. I was advised not to give my friend money, a place to stay, or a car to use. Otherwise I would only enable her to continue her life-threatening habit.

If this is supposed to be tough love, why do I feel like I am abandoning her to a terrible fate? If people are sick, don't I take them soup? If people are grieving, don't I bring them flowers? It is against all my better instincts not to try and help.

For now, that is a moot issue -- my friend has dropped from sight.

© 2002 The Women Syndicate

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