Part III
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
Clean for two years, Rachelle is still struggling to rebuild a life ruined by two decades of meth addiction.
She focuses on her 8-year-old son and tries to accept that she can’t save her mom, sister and daughter
from their meth habits.
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dozen pairs of eyes were on Rachelle as she stood up, tried to remember all the points she needed to hit and mustered her nerve.
The basement room in the new counseling center smelled fresh, and the beige walls and carpet were meant to be calming. But the lights in the low ceiling were bright and a little harsh. And the people looking at her were all addicts. They knew.
To pass Step 1 of her first drug court class, Rachelle had to explain how her addictions had harmed her health, family, friends and strangers. She had to confess how often she had blacked out and from whom she’d stolen. She had to recall the most sleazy and embarrassing things she’d ever done.
Rachelle looked around the circle, took a deep breath and told them she got high because she was scared to face life. She only felt fun and likeable when she was drunk or high. Meth had controlled her.
Admitting these things to herself had hurt. Now she had to say them. Out loud. To a room full of people she barely knew.
She felt like she was standing naked on a curb in a rainstorm.
She felt dirty.
She talked for 15 minutes. Then she was asked to leave the room while the group discussed what she had said. She stood in the dim hall and wondered what they were saying. After five minutes, they called her back in, but no one clapped — she had failed.
“We have some feedback for you,” they said. She had only talked about how her habit damaged herself. She said she hadn’t hurt anyone else because she didn’t sell drugs to kids, she didn’t steal, she just stayed in her house and did her thing.
Not good enough, the other addicts said. Not honest enough.
Think more about how your habit harmed others, they said. Try again another time.
Next time, she talked about the parade of strangers she let walk in and out of her house when she had a preteen and an infant at home. She told about her little boy, molested while she was in jail. The daughter she shot up with meth.
Some life. Some mother. She had been out of control and was just as low as any other drug addict.
She sobbed her way through it.
Then she stepped out of the room and waited.
This time, applause. She had passed Step 1.
Bumpy Road
After being addicted to methamphetamine for 20 years, Rachelle was now trying to rewire her brain and rebuild her life. She had wanted to get clean dozens of times but never knew how to do it on her own. This time, busted and threatened with prison, she was eligible for a drug court treatment program. It was her only chance of staying out of prison and her best chance of getting clean.
Such programs have been more successful than any other treatment for meth addicts like Rachelle. More than crack or heroin addicts, people trying to break free from meth need constant supervision, structure and the threat of punishment to get and stay clean.
Beating meth addiction means more than simply surviving withdrawal symptoms — there aren’t many besides powerful depression and craving. Beating meth requires behavior modification classes like Rachelle’s, which teach addicts how to change their thinking patterns and resist meth’s pull.
Once Rachelle decided to quit second-guessing drug court’s rules, the program became easier for her. She accepted the advice of her counselors and probation officer and no longer lived in fear of failure, relapse or prison.
Yet she still struggled.
It takes most addicts 14 months to complete the four phases of drug court. Rachelle’s been there for more than two years. She’s been sanctioned for every possible offense except relapse.
She sneaked rides with her sister, a known meth user.
She forgot to make her morning call to her probation officer.
She showed up late for her urine test or didn’t go at all.
She lost her job.
Every time she messed up, she had to start back at Step 1 in her classes. And each sanction usually meant jail time or inmate work detail.
Jail Again
“What more can drug court do for you?” her probation officer said. “You’ve been here long enough. If you don’t start making the right decisions, I don’t think we can do any more for you.”
Rachelle has never had a job she liked. But getting and keeping a job is a drug court cornerstone.
Her back hurt from hoisting the laundry at a Super 8 Motel. Last July, when the boss refused to let her take time off for a drug court camp, she simply stopped showing up for work.
When the judge found out, he ordered two weeks in jail with daytime work release. She needed someone to watch her son, now 7. She figured her daughter could handle it for a measly two weeks.
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Randy Hayes / Post Register
Rachelle struggles to tackle housework since getting off meth. She
avoids dirty dishes and sometimes hides them in the oven.
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Within a week, the 18-year-old, who is still addicted to meth, had people over and left the boy with a drunken friend. When Rachelle’s probation officer and counselor found out, they came unglued.
“All this treatment and you’re still making these kinds of decisions?” her counselor said. “Rachelle, what’s wrong here? You need to be taking care of your son.”
Her son hated foster care, but she had no choice and made arrangements for the remaining few days of her jail stay.
Relief washed over her. Why hadn’t she done that in the first place?
Rachelle believed what she had read. People stop maturing when they become addicts. She caught herself making decisions like a reckless teenager, not a 38-year-old mother of two.
Brain Retraining
Changing thinking patterns is hard work.
Drug court classes and therapy sessions teach addicts like Rachelle the lessons most people learn as children: right and wrong, consequences of poor decisions, responsibility for your actions, taking charge of your life.
Rachelle’s also learning to avoid situations that might push her toward meth.
She stretched the rubber band around her wrist and snapped it against her own flesh every time she thought about getting high. Snap. Snap. Snap. With each welt she was retraining her brain to link thoughts of meth to pain rather than pleasure.
Now she trusts herself to stay clean, but reminds herself that people do relapse — people who’ve been clean for years, people who know they’ll spend a decade in prison if they’re caught.
When Rachelle was an addict, her brain changed to reinforce everything associated with meth, linking the flood of pleasure to people, places and things. The rooms where she bought and used it. The people she got high with. The needle itself. The sight of them can put addicts on an almost robotic path to relapse.
Rachelle was surrounded with those cues. When she got out of jail and moved back to her house, she slept on the couch to avoid the peach bedroom where she’d shot so much meth. When she moved to a new house, she left most of the boxes in the garage. Opening them usually meant stumbling across paraphernalia.
But she can’t bring herself to shun her own family, who have been her support and her downfall.
Family Ties
“I just got my daughter out of the emergency room,” Rachelle said into the phone. “I’m going to have her and I’m going to take care of her. She’s my daughter — I can’t just throw her back out on the street,” she told her probation officer’s answering machine.
Within a month of Rachelle starting drug court, the girl had returned from Arizona, where she’d fled in a stolen car to visit her dad. Rachelle learned the girl had been shooting meth, but she came back wanting to get clean.
“Mom, I’m ready to quit,” she said. “I wanna get off meth.”
She’d stop for a few days, even a few months, but would always start again. She can’t live with Rachelle, so she stays with her aunt or grandmother when she isn’t off somewhere getting high.
She landed in the hospital in fall 2005 with intestinal problems because she hadn’t been eating enough. When Rachelle told her probation officer of her plan, Lanny didn’t object. Especially because Rachelle said she’d kick the girl out if she caught her using drugs.
Rachelle told her daughter she couldn’t stay for long. Once the girl was feeling better, she took off to get high. She returned days later.
“You can’t be here,” Rachelle said.
She let the girl gather her belongings and take a quick bath.
There was water on the bathroom floor. Rachelle grabbed a towel to mop it up and heard “clang clang clang.” She recognized the sound immediately — she had dropped enough glass pipes. She turned and looked down. There it was.
Rachelle dropped the towel and ran out of the bathroom. Even after being clean for two years, just seeing the pipe triggered cravings. She wanted to be as far from it as possible. At the back door, she turned around.
“I want your stuff out of my house, all of it,” she yelled toward the bathroom. “And I want you gone by the time I get off work.”
She was shaking and crying when she punched the clock at Honk’s dollar store. She couldn’t believe her daughter would bring that stuff in her house. She called Lanny and told his machine what had happened. Arrest her for possession, she urged him.
By the time he got the message, Rachelle’s daughter was gone.
On the Sidelines
Another raid. Nov. 10, 2005. This time, at Rachelle’s sister’s apartment off Broadway on the west side of Idaho Falls.
Rachelle drove to the building and leaned against her car’s rear bumper in the sunshine with a reporter. Dark uniforms. Plainclothes probation officers. In and out of the apartment.
At the farthest end of the parking lot, a sporty blue car. Rachelle knew her daughter was inside it, laying low, watching. Rachelle called her mom to tell her what was happening.
Rachelle had wanted this. She knew it was the only way her sister might get clean. But she felt guilty for wishing such things on her family, she said, stubbing out her cigarette.
Ten minutes went by. Then 15. Rachelle walked up and introduced herself to the probation officer. He told her he’d found baggies and a hollowed-out pen. Five more minutes passed before an Idaho Falls Police Department truck pulled in. Rachelle knew a urine test was next. A few minutes later, the probation officer emerged.
“She’s going to jail,” he called out.
Rachelle wasn’t surprised, but she cried anyway. She knew her sister faced six months to five years in jail. Rachelle’s nieces would now have to live with their father, a convicted wife beater.
Police escorted Rachelle’s sister out of the apartment in handcuffs. Rachelle walked over and gave her a hug. When the last of the cops pulled away, the blue car glided up next to Rachelle. She leaned down and looked through the driver’s window at her daughter sitting in the passenger seat.
“Do you see what this stuff does to you?!” she said.
“I’m clean!” her daughter said. “I even slept last night!”
Rachelle had heard it all before. Hell, she’d said it.
At any given time, at least one of them — Rachelle’s mom, sister or daughter — swears they’ve stopped for good. She wants to believe them, especially when they tell her they’ve been clean for a few days, a week, a month. But she knows they’re either lying or bound to relapse.
Next, Rachelle’s mom pulled up in her teal Pontiac Grand Am. Rachelle opened the passenger door, sat down and broke the news.
“Oh God! Oh my poor babies!” her mom sobbed, resting her forehead on the steering wheel. “Judge Moss said last time if he ever saw her in front of him again he’d make her do her time.”
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Stock Photo
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It was so predictable. So inevitable. Rachelle looked at her mom and her daughter, who was now standing next to the driver’s door.
“You guys,” she implored, “Quit doing drugs. ... It’s that easy!”
Clean Living
Easy to say, hard to do.
Rachelle couldn’t quit until she was forced.
So for now she focuses on saving herself and being a good parent for her 8-year-old son.
Yet she still blows it.
Juggling drug court commitments, GED classes, child care and work wears her out. She was sanctioned right before Christmas for getting fired from her part-time job at Honk’s and taking too long to look for another one.
She spent a week in jail. Again, she skirted foster care. She’s not sure how the setback will affect her graduation from drug court, which had been planned for March.
Even when everything else is going well, there’s a constant problem: housework. Staring at a sink full of dishes or a pile of dirty laundry makes her long for those days of endless meth energy.
“Rachelle, you need to get this cleaned up,” her probation officer said the first Sunday in December during a house check.
There were dirty dishes piled in her sink and hidden in the oven. Toys and clothes carpeted her son’s room. The spare bedroom still reeked because the dog soiled it last time Rachelle was jailed.
Sometimes her mom helps her clean up, but she hadn’t been by in a while. Housecleaning triggers memories of meth runners when she’d clean compulsively. Drug court class had taught her to avoid such triggers.
“So do you never clean your house because you’re having triggers?” Lanny pressed. “You’ve got how much clean time under your belt?”
“I’m just lazy,” Rachelle confessed.
“Well, what can you do to get your house clean and still deal with triggers? How can you rely on your support systems to help you tackle this problem?”
Rachelle said she’d try to do a little at a time, or perhaps ask a friend to keep her company.
The next day, she psyched herself up and spit-shined the house. She even put up some Christmas decorations and tackled a few boxes from her old house, which is just across the street.
Nearly every foray into those boxes unearths some bit of meth paraphernalia. She dreads going out there. When she ventures into the garage to fetch her stereo, she comes across a torch tip, a straw and a baggie.
“Why can’t we just move on?” she thinks. “Why can’t I just get it out of my life?”
Even the innocent things she’s brought in from the garage have to go — pictures, furniture, figurines of coyotes and American Indians atop the TV stand.
“All these knick-knacks and stuff, I love ’em, but I want new knick-knacks,” she says. “I’m a different person now, and these just aren’t me anymore.”
For the first time in her life, Rachelle feels comfortable around people outside the “party world.” She’s good enough.
“Everybody that stays off meth and gets treatment and puts their whole heart into it like drug court — they are my heroes because to stay off meth is the hardest thing you’ll ever do,” she said.
“As bad as you hate it, it’s always right there in the back of your head, tuggin’, how good you felt. You gotta just keep telling yourself, ‘Yeah it felt good in the beginning, but it’s gonna get out of control and you’re gonna go down and you’re gonna die.’ ”
She’s committed. But she’s just getting started.
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.
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