Battling the family drug

By Corey Taule • ctaule@postregister.com

high costs

Short of going to prison or being sentenced to drug court, finding affordable treatment for meth addiction isn’t easy in Idaho.

Except for a handful of faith-based or nonprofit organizations, there aren’t many slots for addicts seeking treatment. You have to be so poor Medicaid steps in, have enough money to foot the bill for private treatment, which can cost $8,000-plus a month, or hope your insurance company covers it. Idaho is one of the few states that doesn’t require them to.

It’s not easy to pinpoint the worst moment of a 10-year methampetamine horror show.

For Paula, an Idaho Falls woman who asked that her real name not be revealed, there are several to choose from. And she doesn’t even take drugs.

First, it was her husband who fell in love with meth. Then her sister discovered the drug.

“It’s like a losing battle with family,” Paula said. “We can’t do anything.”

Certainly, a meth addiction is hard on the user. Those who have never indulged can’t comprehend the physical cravings and mental and emotional dependency users endure.

But as Paula and countless others will tell you, meth is just as hard on an addict’s family.

They watch helplessly as loved ones destroy their mental, physical and emotional health. And often, relatives end up taking care of an addict’s children, especially in Idaho, where women are the fastest-growing population of meth users.

As Paula and her mother, Jamie (also not her real name), can tell you, it’s not an easy road when you’re dealing with paranoid junkies. They’ve chosen to help the sister’s teenage son and 5-year-old daughter and hope the sister is arrested so she is forced to get help.

“What we worry about is the kids,” Paula said. “The kids, the kids, the kids. We can’t do anything. We have to find a way within the system to protect the children.”

Paula’s and Jamie’s 10-year battle with hopelessness and despair began when the sister disappeared on a trip to Utah.

Police found her two days later, wandering in a kind of stupor that hasn’t lifted since.

Perhaps that was Paula’s worst moment.

Or maybe it was when she found her sister wandering barefoot through a junkyard. It could have been the time Paula discovered her sister lying on the floor next to dog crap. Her sister had been raped the night before.

Or maybe the worst part of all this has been the impact on her sister’s children.

Paula said her sister has a 5-year-old daughter still living at home. Her sister’s teenage son got fed up with the constant flow of people through his house, the dirt and grime and drug abuse. He moved in with his grandmother, Jamie.

Paula and Jamie take the 5-year-old whenever they can.

But Paula said her sister often turns away from the family and keeps them from seeing the child. Paula said she’s noticed a change in the little girl. She’s become moody and doesn’t want anybody to see how she’s living.

Jamie is hardly the only grandparent raising a grandchild in eastern Idaho.

Emily Hoyt directs a support group for grandparents in this situation. She said 80 percent of the people in her group find themselves in this unenviable situation because of meth.

And that often leads to a brutal choice.

Does a grandparent continue to try to save his troubled child? Or does he put his time, effort and money into his grandchildren?

Paula said she and her mother have chosen to focus on her sister’s children.

Hoyt said that’s the only thing to do in a situation such as this.

“You’ve got to take care of your grandchildren first,” she said. “These are innocent little individuals.”

Grandparents tell stories in her support group about babies born addicted, abandoned young and forced to deal with promiscuous sex and constant drug use. Hoyt said in the past year, the group has dealt with four different cases of children being sexually molested. One child was 2.

The problem, said John Kulp, who along with his wife, Joyce, runs A Refuge Ministries, a faith-based organization that treats addicts, is that nothing matters to a meth user but getting the drug. So they don’t realize the harm being done to the people around them.

“Not only they didn’t realize it,” he said, “they didn’t care.”

All of which leaves family members in a hopeless situation.

For a decade, Paula and Jamie have searched for answers and come up empty.

Her sister, a college graduate who held a good job, suffers from a mental illness that her family believes was brought on by her constant drug use. Because of the illness, the sister receives a monthly Social Security check, which Paula and Jamie say she uses to purchase drugs.

Paula’s only hope is that her sister will be arrested. Then, perhaps, she’ll get the help she needs. Private drug treatment is too expensive, and Medicaid doesn’t pay for it. No one can force her unless she is arrested.

But getting her sister arrested and into state-run treatment is not as easy as it sounds.

Mandatory prison sentences in Idaho are aimed at drug pushers, not users. And as Idaho Senate Judiciary and Rules Chairman Denton Darrington, a Republican from Declo, said, people arrested for possession need to have myriad other charges on their record before being sentenced to a prison system so overloaded that Idaho prisoners are being warehoused in Minnesota.

That method actually worked for Christina Mallow.

The 27-year-old Idaho Falls woman said her life began to turn around after her grandmother had her arrested. Now in drug court and a volunteer participant in the Kulpses’ program, Mallow said she was angry at first but now realizes that her grandmother did her a favor.

But after 10 years, Paula doesn’t see many other options.

“I don’t see any of this changing unless I can get her picked up,” she said.

Government reporter Corey Taule can be reached at 542-6754.