Part II
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 makes her monthly appearance in Bonneville County Drug Court. Her counselor, Lisa Bridges,
and her probation officer, Lanny Taylor, report her progress to Judge Gregory Anderson. The program is
her last chance to kick the meth habit that ensnared her daughter and nearly landed Rachelle in prison.
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Rachelle’s 15-year-old was writing furiously at her desk, her whole body focused on the task, eyes wide and wild as her pen raced across the page.
Rachelle knew exactly what was going on. She’d spent many nights the same way. She’d start writing, get five pages along and realize she’d written the same thing over and over.
Her daughter was high on methamphetamine.
history repeats
Rachelle had been only two years older when she first used meth. But she had tried to keep her meth habit to herself, shielding her daughter from seeing too much too young, the way she had as a girl.
When they had moved to Rexburg in 1999, Rachelle lost her meth connections and eventually approached her daughter’s friends. She figured since they drank and smoked pot, they must know where to get meth.
“Yeah, I can get it for you,” one eventually said. Soon several were supplying her.
“Don’t say anything to my daughter,” Rachelle urged them. “I don’t want her to know about this.”
One of the boys would give Rachelle a ping-pong ball-size chunk of meth to keep her happy and out of their hair. He’d vanish into the daughter’s room with the rest of her friends.
Rachelle only shot up in her bedroom. She was sneaky. She didn’t think about what her daughter was doing down the hall. The girl was just a regular teen. She couldn’t know anything about meth.
But then Rachelle saw the wild eyes, the furious pen. She told herself her daughter probably wasn’t using that often. She didn’t even consider that the girl might get hooked.
If Rachelle could control her daughter’s use, it wouldn’t become a habit.
“Don’t give her no more dope,” she told the friends. “I don’t want her strung out all the time — she needs to come down.”
She made them swear there were no needles.
But when they moved to Idaho Falls, many of the friends followed.
needle lessons
Rachelle was high and feeling good when her daughter and a friend walked into the peach-colored bedroom one night.
“Mom, I wanna try the needle,” her daughter said. “I just wanna see what the high is like.”
At least she came to me, Rachelle thought. She could make sure her daughter didn’t feel the rush.
Rachelle took her daughter’s baggie, turned away and split the dope, keeping most for herself. She dissolved a tiny bit in water and shot the 17-year-old up — the same way the girl’s father had first done for Rachelle.
“So?” Rachelle asked. “Did you feel it?”
“Well, no, not really,” her daughter said, sounding disappointed.
“Good,” Rachelle thought.
“Don’t you ever do it again,” she said. “Cause if you do, you’ll get hooked on it and you’re never going to do it any other way and you’ll never go back.”
meth houses
Rachelle, meanwhile, was defined by her addiction: She craved, sought and used meth compulsively. It was no longer voluntary. Meth had modified her brain in ways that robbed her of control in the matter. Schizophrenics can’t control hallucinations. Parkinson’s patients tremble. Clinically depressed people cannot control their moods. Like them, Rachelle could not simply decide to stop.
The living room stayed clean and empty because both Rachelle and her daughter rarely left their bedrooms. Her daughter had dropped out of school. Rachelle didn’t have a job. She paid the bills with Social Security and child support checks. She paid for meth by dealing it.
Strangers slept on the couch. They kept the women supplied: You come into someone’s house to get high, you get the people who live there high, too.
One of her daughter’s friends who brought meth from Boise was hiding from the cops and had moved into the laundry room. People who owed Rachelle drug money sometimes were literally tied up there. A lock went on the door so Rachelle’s 4-year-old son wouldn’t walk in on meth deals.
Rachelle spent days at a time in her bedroom. She’d design Web sites, surf the Net, arrange and rearrange the furniture, organize and reorganize the closet.
Sometimes her little boy would walk into her bedroom and catch her with a needle in her arm.
“What’s that?” he asked the first time.
“It’s just my medicine,” Rachelle said.
After that, she’d simply turn away if he caught her in the act — she wasn’t going to stop if she’d already hit a vein.
the raid
Dinnertime, Jan. 13, 2003. Rachelle was sitting at the computer desk in her peach bedroom with her 5-year-old son on her lap. They were talking about making chicken tacos for dinner. Unlike most of Rachelle’s memories, this time she knows the exact date.
She had been sleeping all day because she was out of meth. A woman flopping in her daughter’s bedroom was supposed to get some a couple of days before but had abandoned the deal after spotting cops. Tonight, the woman was flitting in and out of the bathroom, preparing to try again.
All at once the front door came crashing open and half a dozen cops flooded into the house. They rushed down the hall with their guns pointed straight ahead. Rachelle stayed seated out of surprise and fear.
“I don’t got nothin’! I don’t got nothin’!” she shouted.
As they searched her bedroom, a pile of meth paraphernalia grew on the bed and the floor. Gutted ballpoint pens for snorting meth. A glass case holding a glass meth pipe. Dozens of syringes from jewelry boxes on the nightstand, dressers and computer desk. Empty 1-inch baggies from every corner of the room.
“You ain’t gonna find no dope for Christ’s sakes,” Rachelle said. “I’m an addict, I’m a needle-user. There ain’t no dope left in the baggies!”
They told her to be quiet and kept searching.
“What are you going to charge me with?” she said. “There’s no dope in the house, so how can you charge me with possession?”
They told her they’d slap her with child endangerment. It started sinking in: “The cops are here busting me. This is a raid.”
Soon they told her she was going to jail for manufacturing meth.
“I never made anything!” she protested.
Then dread hit.
About a week before, the woman staying in her daughter’s room told Rachelle she knew people who could make meth if she got the ingredients. Rachelle woke up one morning to find the house reeking and the laundry room filthy. “Oh, I messed this up,” her roommate said, fussing over a hot kettle filled with white liquid and emitting a horrible stench.
The cops had found the trash can full of stripped matchbooks and empty cold medicine boxes.
gaming the system
In jail, Rachelle slept for a week. Mom would bail her out. But then the judge set bail at $50,000. She was stuck. She could get 15 years for manufacturing.
There were traces of meth in the baggies from her room. She pleaded guilty to possession and was out on probation in two weeks.
She immediately started looking for meth.
The 14 clean days in jail did nothing to dampen Rachelle’s craving. Meth doesn’t cause physical withdrawal symptoms like heroin does, but it’s just as hard to kick. It’s virtually impossible for addicts to stop using without treatment. Against a rewired brain, willpower alone doesn’t stand a chance. Fear of financial ruin, her daughter’s growing addiction and prison were nothing compared to her craving.
She was high the day she got out of jail. And every day after that.
She was high when she signed up for probation. High when probation officers came over for a house check.
She was high nearly every time she checked in with her probation officer, but he couldn’t tell. If she knew she had a urine test coming up, she’d stop using for a few days or take vitamins to try to alter the sample. In a pinch, she’d admit taking meth a few days before. He tried to work with her.
She gamed the system for seven months.
another bust
Another day sticks in her mind and in her court file.
Aug. 29, 2003. ShopKo. Back-to-school shopping with her boy. For hours. All he needed was a backpack, but she was high and completely transfixed. She painstakingly compared the backpack selection.
“Come on mom, let’s go, let’s go!” her son said, tugging at her pants. “I’m tired of this!”
“I gotta find the right backpack,” she said.
When they finally left the store, she knew the police cars in the parking lot were for her. She watched her rearview mirror. One would follow her, then turn off just as another got on her tail. Probation and police cars were waiting when she pulled into her driveway. Officers put her in cuffs as soon as she got out of the car.
Inside the house, her daughter, looking smug, didn’t say a word. Rachelle knew then what had happened.
Earlier that morning, Rachelle had called the sheriff’s office and reported her daughter a runaway. The girl had been out all night, and Rachelle suspected she was lying about her drug use. She assumed the girl’s probation officer would find her, give her a drug test and bust her.
When a team of sheriff’s deputies and probation officers went to Rachelle’s house, they found drugs on two young men but not Rachelle’s daughter. She told the officers she ran away because her mom was using meth in the house.
Another search. Another pile of baggies, spoons and a pipe from Rachelle’s bedroom. They pulled syringes out of several jewelry boxes and her purse.
She went to jail for 90 days.
only one option
She slept for days. After a month, her head started to clear.
Some life.
Her mom and sister were high when they visited her in jail.
Her daughter was high when she visited. Then she stole a car and took off for Arizona, where her father lived.
During one visit, Rachelle’s 5-year-old boy cried about two little girls he encountered while staying with his aunt.
“Mom, don’t be mad, but they were sucking on ...” he said, pointing to his privates. Rachelle couldn’t hug him. She was behind Plexiglass and bars.
If she was ever going to get herself and her family clean, 90 sober days in jail was the start she needed. She signed up for drug court, a program Bonneville County has pioneered to treat drug users rather than sending them to prison.
She was terrified. She’d heard the regimen was hard and failure meant prison.
For the first two weeks of the program, she was released from jail each day to find a job. At a gas station on Broadway in Idaho Falls, a fellow inmate told her he had meth to sell.
“I’m on frickin’ drug court!” she yelled. “Don’t you be talking to me about that!”
What if she slipped? What if she couldn’t hold a job? She’d go to prison. She’d lose her son.
She couldn’t sleep. She’d lie in her cell and sob so hard her eyes were swollen the next day. And she couldn’t turn to her family. She was forbidden to associate with suspected meth users, including her mom and sister.
She got out of jail and moved back home after she found a job. Drug court required her to attend daily classes and check in weekly with the judge and Lanny, the drug court probation officer. But she had no driver’s license or insurance and had $400 worth of fees to pay before she could legally drive. So she had to bum rides.
She made it to work. She showed up for her classes. She passed all her random drug tests. She was toeing the line. She saw no harm in sneaking an occasional ride to work with her sister.
back in cuffs
“Oh no, it’s Lanny,” she said, checking the caller ID on her cell phone one day.
“Where are you?” her probation officer said.
“Driving down the road.”
“With who?”
“... Donna,” Rachelle lied.
“Can you get to my office?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there in a few minutes, I’m right here on 17th Street.”
Rachelle’s sister pulled over to the curb half a block behind Lanny’s office. Rachelle got out and walked around the building to the front door, where Lanny was waiting.
“Why did you walk up?” he asked. “Why didn’t she just drop you off at the door?”
“Well, she was going to go over to the mall and do some shopping,” Rachelle lied again. “She’s got the kids with her.”
“Can we get her over here so I can talk to her?”
“Um, OK.”
Rachelle called her friend Donna.
“Can you come up to Lanny’s office? He needs to ask you about you giving me a ride.”
When Donna walked in, Lanny said, “Come with me,” and ushered her back to his office. Rachelle stood alone in the waiting room.
After a minute, Donna emerged and walked out of the building without a word.
“Who have you been riding with?” Lanny asked.
Rachelle told him the truth. He put her in handcuffs and took her to jail.
moment fo clarity
Rachelle got 30 days in jail for riding in a car with her sister.
She had to put her kids in foster care. She spent the entire month reading on her bunk and didn’t associate with anyone. And then something clicked.
“These people, my probation officer and counselors, they’ve never been to jail,” she thought, staring at the speckled ceiling tiles. “They’ve never done dope. They don’t drink. They’ve got to be doing something right in life that I’m not doing.”
Time to stop fighting their rules.
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.
Tuesday
• Clean for two years, she still struggles, watching her mom, sister and daughter grapple with meth.
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