The Falsest of False Gods

The Scourge of Meth

A significant piece has been published recently in the NZ Herald on P-addiction and its consequences.  Here are some excepts:

Two days before Christmas, Lisa lost her baby daughter.  She lost herself 18 months before in a glass pipe of crystal meth passed to her by an older man, "from a very respectable profession".

"It became a huge problem. It hooked me quickly. I chased it every day. My entire life tumbled down in 18 months."  Lisa (name changed to protect privacy) smoked up to a gram a day. She kept the cost down by selling meth to friends and selling her body working as a prostitute from home while her daughter was at daycare. Men would come from 10am to 2pm.  "I didn't think it was wrong. I just wanted more."

Her clothes hung off her skeletal size six frame. She was 49kg. Her body was shrunken but her mind raced. She rarely ate. Her hair was different colours -- she would dye it herself at 2am. She didn't sleep. She would text friends at odd hours. She was so paranoid she couldn't even go out to put the rubbish on the road. She picked at her face. Once she tried to slice it open with a razor.

She would hallucinate, hear voices or see people that weren't there. Once she rang the police thinking there were prowlers in her yard. When the police knocked at her door, convinced it was the prowlers, she nearly opened the door with a loaded firearm.  When her parents had taken her daughter for a break to the South Island, Lisa stole their savings. She spent it on meth.  Arriving back at Christmas, Lisa's parents kicked Lisa out of their Tauranga home, filed a protection order against her, and kept Lisa's 2-year-old child, their granddaughter.  

That night, as Lisa drove alone in the dark, with no money, homeless, carrying just her clothes, she had a moment of clarity, realising she had to get clean.  "I loved my daughter more than anything in the world. Without her, my entire life was destroyed. I told myself I would get off the meth and get her back."

The piece profiles two women who have subsequently kicked the addiction through a tortuous path of suffering.  That they have managed to come out the other side is wonderful: that they had to go through it is not.  This was a self-caused affliction.

It's eight years since Lisa smoked her last crack pipe. . . . "P used to be seen as a gutter drug -- even heroin addicts thought P users were scum, but it's changed, and people are using it socially, and women, mothers who hide it as they do it at home. I have watched the demise of some, it is too hard to watch."

That Christmas in 2008, Lisa was saved by the one friend she had left who didn't do drugs. "Everywhere was closed as it was Christmas. I stayed in her house, asleep most of the time. I had huge boils on my face. I had no money ... eventually I got into Hanmer Clinic."

Having her daughter taken off her had "scared the s**t" out of her. She had to learn at Hanmer -- where she attended two years -- how to live without meth. She started home detention for the theft of the money. She got a job, the anklet still on.  "Every time someone believes in you, it gives you a boost."  Eight years on, Lisa is happily married, a mother of four -- as well as her daughter, she has three other children. When her daughter was about to start school, Lisa relinquished custody.

"It was right for her, she had a bond with my parents and it wouldn't have been right to unsettle her." She has a good relationship with her parents and her daughter. Slim, glamorous, and beautiful, you would never pick her out of a line up as once being a P-addicted hooker.

But it is not all happy endings.  Lisa was recently diagnosed with cancer. The irony now is she must take lifelong drugs to control the disease.  Lisa still sees a counsellor. Recovery and staying healthy is something she needs to do still. Despite this, life is better than good.  "Life is amazing. If I had lived a normal life before then being diagnosed with cancer would have been a huge deal, but given all I have overcome, I know I can cope."

P-use and P-addiction is rife in Northland, Auckland, Waikato--and now, the Bay of Plenty.  Whilst we are thankful for every life saved, every person pulled back from the brink, it is a plague worse than the Black Death.  The only difference is that this is a self-caused, self-chosen destroyer of life.