Part I
By Nicole Stricker • nstricker@postregister.com
EDITOR’S NOTE: In these three articles about Rachelle, we changed the adults’ names and purposely blurred a portion of certain photos. Our goal was to protect the anonymity of the family’s underage children.
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Randy Hayes / Post Register
Rachelle, a 39-year-old mother of two, was addicted to methamphetamine for 20 years.
Her shaking hands reveal how meth has permanently damaged her brain. Now, after staying
clean for two years, she’s still rebuilding her life and wishing she could help her mother,
sister and daughter get off meth, too.
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The first time Rachelle lined up drugs on a mirror, she did it for her mom.
She doesn’t remember what woke her late that night, or even if she had been asleep. But she heard her mom come crashing home from the bar and padded down the hall to see what was going on. Mom and a strange man were at the kitchen table, laughing and fumbling over a mirror scattered with white powder, trying fruitlessly to arrange it into lines.
“Here,” Rachelle finally said, interrupting the drunken pair, “I’ll do it.” She took the razor blade, chop-chop-chopped the cocaine and made two neat lines. She was 12.
Rachelle isn’t sure how she knew what to do. Perhaps she’d seen it in a ’70s movie. Or maybe she saw one of her mom’s friends doing it.
She saw lots of things 12-year-olds shouldn’t, and had to make sense of it on her own. No one told her drugs and alcohol weren’t for kids. No one told her they were addictive and ruined lives.
She found out the hard way.
chances are
Rachelle, now 39, has an easy laugh. In her tight circle of friends and family, she uses humor to lure the spotlight, but she has always been uncomfortable in public. Today, she’s happiest at home in the company of her dog, ferret, six cats and hamster.
But for 20 years, she battled an addiction to methamphetamine. Friends were murdered and her daughter became hooked. Rachelle landed in jail and nearly went to prison.
She’s been clean since fall 2003 and hopes Bonneville County Drug Court will release her this spring. Yet the white powder still haunts her. She’s watching her daughter and mother grapple with it. Her sister may soon go to prison because of it. And her own twitching fingers and toes constantly remind her how meth damaged her brain.
She never intended to become an addict. She didn’t realize the crank she was snorting could rewire her brain. She never felt it hijacking her free will. She didn’t know that drug addiction is the only brain disease triggered by voluntary behavior.
Rachelle was three times more likely to try drugs by the age of 14 because she is the daughter of an alcoholic and grew up surrounded by addicts. Researchers know children like Rachelle are 10 times more likely to become addicts by adulthood.
Clean for two years, she’s still fighting tough odds. But in the beginning, she had almost no chance at all.
By 12, Rachelle had concluded from watching her mom that being drunk every night was perfectly natural. Rachelle tried it herself — it made her feel confident, funny and popular. She’d put on makeup and go to the bar with her mother, who’d tell the bartender, “This is my daughter. She’s 22.”
When mom was out, Rachelle and her sister would sneak out to drink and try drugs. Or they’d stay in and throw parties for neighborhood kids, some 10 years their senior. Mom even bought the beer some nights.
Rachelle was 12 years old and drunk when she lost her virginity. She was 14 and had a sexually transmitted disease when she dropped out of school. At 15, she was partying all night, sleeping all day and couldn’t hold a job because she always had a hangover.
She was 17 and had been working at an Idaho Falls truck stop less than six months when someone offered her meth.
her first time
Rachelle was mopping the diner floor at the end of her shift when the cook, a woman her mother’s age, asked if she wanted to try it.
She and her mom knew nothing about meth when the family moved to Idaho in 1984. For a boost, her mom sometimes took cross-tops, cheap amphetamine pills favored by truckers and bikers back home in Wells, Nev.
But Rachelle was always up for something new.
It was 11 p.m. and she was exhausted, but wanted to head to the bar with the other employees, as she did most nights. She was just 17 and partying with the adults made her feel cool.
The heavy metal door of the walk-in cooler whooshed open and Rachelle followed the cook into the cool, dim room. She was surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling shelves of food.
A greeting-card-sized mirror sat on one of the wire racks. The woman handed her a rolled up dollar bill. She bent down and snorted a line of the tan-colored powder.
It burned like hell, stinging her nose and throat.
But throughout the evening she drank all she wanted and didn’t get drunk. She felt sharp, alert and happy. She never got that sloppy out-of-control feeling she hated. So she did it again. And again.
Pretty soon, she was staying out late and having a hard time getting up for her afternoon shift. Her mom, the truck stop’s manager, was annoyed — not about the drug use, but about the tardiness.
Next thing, Rachelle was doing a snort of meth at the beginning of each shift.
“I got something for your hangover,” someone would say when she shuffled downstairs from the manager’s apartment.
She’d pull open the heavy metal door, step into the chilly air and scan the shelves for the little mirror, where a line of meth would be waiting.
playing with fire
Meth tightened its hold with every snort.
Each hit released a flood of the brain’s feel-good chemical: dopamine. And every torrent of the neurotransmitter changed a few more brain circuits. The organ, by design, modifies itself to encourage any behavior that causes that much pleasure, just as it discourages behavior that causes pain. With each snort, Rachelle reinforced brain connections that made it a little tougher for her to pass up the next one.
Although snorting meth was corroding her nasal passages, it wasn’t the swiftest route to her brain. She was getting hooked, but not as quickly as people who injected meth. People like Wade, another cook at the truck stop.
They met when Rachelle was 18. Within a year, they were living together and he was offering her the needle.
She was sitting on a barstool in their trailer near Ammon. He told her to wrap her fingers around her bicep and pump her forearm up and down. When her vein popped out, he eased the needle in and pushed the plunger.
The effect was so immediate and powerful it knocked Rachelle off the stool.
She couldn’t get up. Her heart was racing. She felt like her eyeballs were vibrating. Her eyelids fluttered and the room flashed light and dark.
“That was an overdose,” was all she could think. “This is going to kill me.”
It was over in a minute but she never forgot. Too much, too fast. It scared her to death.
“I never want to do that again,” she told him.
decade of dabbling
Rachelle avoided the needle but she kept snorting meth — on the weekends or whenever she could get it — for 10 years. It consumed the years when her peers were starting families and careers.
If she didn’t have money or connections to buy it, she’d get drunk. In a pinch, she’d load up on stolen cold pills. When she went without meth for weeks or even months, she told herself she wasn’t hooked. She just did it for fun.
But when she did binge, she felt guilty. She was a bad mother to the daughter she had with Wade. She’d leave the girl, as young as 5, alone for hours or with her grandmother for days while she and her new husband, Jeremiah, were at the bars near her new home in Rupert. Shame straightened her up for days, weeks or even months.
When she learned she was pregnant in 1997, she cleaned up her act. But a miscarriage, her 11th in 10 years, sent her back to the bottle, drinking so hard she could barely get drunk anymore. Determined to die, she emptied the medicine cabinet, gulping down Jeremiah’s bipolar medication.
Then she panicked and changed her mind.
At Minidoka Memorial Hospital, doctors pumped her stomach, then told her she was still pregnant — probably with the surviving twin of the miscarried child. It was the boy whose name she’d already chosen.
She stayed sober for seven months.
meth runners
Rachelle had been high for three or four days when she went into labor. Back at Minidoka Memorial, lying in the hospital bed, she started to crash. It was almost time to push, but all she wanted to do was sleep.
For the final month of her pregnancy, she had been going on meth “runners” for days — staying high for six to 12 hours, then taking more when she started to come down. When either the dope or her body gave out, she’d sleep like the dead for two days, wake up, find more meth and start all over again.
Rachelle doesn’t remember how she got to the hospital. Neither her husband nor the doctor knew she was high. Amazingly, her 7-pound baby boy was healthy and showed no signs of meth addiction or fetal alcohol syndrome.
Rachelle was scrounging the streets for meth within hours of leaving the maternity ward. It was early 1998, she was 31 and her son was 3 months old when she stumbled into an abyss few meth users escape.
the needle returns
Rachelle and her sister were out of meth. It was late. They were high and looking for more, driving around Idaho Falls.
“I got some from Wade before,” Rachelle’s sister said. “Let’s go see if he’s got some now.”
Rachelle hadn’t seen the cook in years. They got to his house, sat down in the living room and talked for a while. Then the women asked if he had any dope. He did.
He gave some to Rachelle’s sister to keep her busy and happy.
“Rachelle, come here,” he said. “I wanna talk to you for a minute.”
Rachelle followed him to the bedroom and he closed the door. He sat down at his desk and opened a shallow drawer. Laid out inside were a small baggie of meth, a spoon and a syringe.
“Do you wanna try this?” he asked, indicating the needle.
Rachelle remembered her last go-round. “No, I’m too scared.”
But her nose was raw from snorting so much meth. She stared at the needle.
“If you wanna try it, we’ll try it,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I do and I don’t.”
Smoking meth, which she learned from her sister, didn’t do much for Rachelle’s brain, which demanded more and more. Among tweakers, the needle holds a special draw.
She wrapped her fingers around her bicep and pumped her vein up. There was the needle and then a warm rush going through her body. Every nerve ending felt stimulated. It was like falling in love, making a new friend, eating a great meal and having an orgasm all at once.
“Whoa,” she sighed feeling fantastic as the rush mellowed.
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shooting up
And that was that.
Once Rachelle got a taste of meth in her veins, she rarely used it any other way. And by becoming an IV user, her odds of ever quitting plummeted to minuscule.
At 31, she’d been using meth, one of the most addictive known drugs, for half her life. Now she was taking it in the most addictive way possible. Few of the choices she’d make from then on would be her own.
Shooting drugs gets them to the brain more quickly and efficiently than snorting — hence the intense rush. That euphoria, and the flood of dopamine causing it, rewires the brain even faster and makes the new wiring more robust.
Each injection taps primitive pathways designed to ensure survival. Rachelle was overworking neural systems meant to reward humans for doing healthy things that help the species thrive — eating, making friends, finding a mate, having sex. Those behaviors flood the brain with dopamine, sending a clear and strong brain response: “That was good. Keep doing that.”
Meth puts those systems in overdrive. The more intense the pleasure, the stronger the drive to do it again.
A month after Wade shot her up, Rachelle spent three hours locked in her bathroom poking a needle around in her arm until she found a vein.
Everything else in her life took a back seat. She was selling meth to support her habit and her Rupert apartment had turned into a flop house. Her door was always open and people were in and out constantly.
During the day, most of them had jobs and things were quiet. Rachelle would send her 11-year-old daughter off to school, clean the house and tend to her baby boy. At night, people would come and go. They’d sit around laughing, listening to music and snorting, smoking and shooting meth.
Rachelle assumed her daughter thought the crew was just hanging out. They confined drug deals to the bedroom. They waited until the girl went to bed before lining meth out on the coffee table and heating the end of a glass pipe to snort smoky “hot lines.”
Rachelle’s mom, herself the daughter of an alcoholic, had drunk and dabbled with drugs in front of Rachelle and her sister when they were children. But Rachelle kept her habit private. Her own mom would go off on benders for days, but Rachelle stayed at home with her kids.
She policed them more than her mom had done. When Rachelle’s 12-year-old daughter sneaked out and got drunk, Rachelle tracked her down, brought her home and sent her to her room.
mom's little helper
The way Rachelle saw it, meth energy made her a super-mom.
Her kids were well fed, the dishes were always done and the laundry was clean and folded. She rarely lost her temper, even when they’d get evicted. She’d spend evenings sewing pajamas for her son. She made Christmas wreaths. She created cards and wrote letters from her computer.
At night, she and her sister would pack up her son and drive around. When they weren’t looking for drugs, they’d cruise alleys for discarded furniture or electronics. They’d bring home lawn chairs, televisions, stereos. One night they picked through the Dumpster behind an Idaho Falls florist. Rachelle came home and set to making dried flower arrangements.
And then there was the cleaning.
The green carpeting in a Rexburg rental trailer seemed to highlight every little speck. The kids ran in and out one October day, tracking in crushed leaves.
Rachelle got out the vacuum cleaner.
She vacuumed and vacuumed, trying to stay on top of the mess. As she headed down the hallway, she realized she’d been at it for hours. When she vacuumed past the bathroom — where her sister was on her knees scrubbing the floor — Rachelle yelled, “Will you please unplug this mother-****** because I cannot stop! I can’t stop!”
spin cycle
They were moving — Rupert, Ririe, Rexburg, St. Anthony, Idaho Falls — because she was spending most of the rent and utility money on meth.
She’d use as much as she could get her hands on, get fired, stop paying rent and spend all her time getting high until she got evicted. They would land in a new city where she found some cheap housing deal, get a job, clean up for a while, regain control.
Eventually, she’d hook up with old suppliers or find new ones. She’d decide she could handle the drug and resolve to be just a weekend user. Within weeks, her house would turn into a drug den and the cycle would start over.
Every time her high faded, she’d feel shame, guilt and depression. Sometimes she’d quash those feelings with another bump of meth. Other times she’d think, “I wanna get off this stuff,” and call a rehab center. They’d make an appointment for a week down the road. She was usually high again by the end of the day.
She’d search the Internet for “how to get off meth.” A few days later she’d be searching “how to make meth.”
“How to get off meth.”
“How to make meth.”
“How to get off meth.”
“How to make meth.”
giving in
By 2002, she had landed a small rental on the south side of Idaho Falls. Her spotless bedroom was a dainty shade of peach.
But in drawers and jewelry boxes, she hid dozens of syringes, baggies of meth, spoons, glass pipes and hollowed out pens. She’d been a meth user for 19 of her 36 years.
Her computer desk was usually spotless, but not today. She contemplated the half-ounce of meth sitting there.
One of her daughter’s teenage friends had brought it from Boise. It filled the better part of a sandwich baggie and was more than enough to keep her happy and bring in hundreds of dollars to boot. She and the boy sitting on a stool next to her had been celebrating by snorting, shooting and doing hot lines.
“Well, I’m never going to get off this stuff,” Rachelle said, mostly to herself. “An addict is all I’ll ever be, so I might as well get used to it.”
She loaded a syringe and stuck it in her arm.
Science and Medicine reporter Nicole Stricker earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She can be reached at 542-6763.
Monday
Facing prison and her daughter’s escalating meth habit, Rachelle enters drug court.
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