Icy Road

“That’s stuff is horrible man”

That statement sums up Margie’s description of her trip down the road of methamphetamine addiction, straight into a place she describes as hell.    She’s walking out of it now, but it isn’t easy.  The horror and tragedy that she describes just isn’t supposed to happen to a girl whose life started out in such an all-American way.

She was born in the Midwest to a military family; her father was in the Marines.

Margie started her life in Kansas City Missouri and enjoyed the life of the typical “military brat”.  By the time she was a senior in high school she had been to 16 different schools including one school in Japan.   Despite the moving around, Margie says her childhood was pretty good.

She was introduced to cocaine in high school by some friends but it never became a big problem for her.  She grew up and out of drugs.  That probably would have been the end of drug abuse until she was in a car accident and she was prescribed pain pills for her injuries.   The problem was that Margie was put on too much and for too long.  She became addicted and remained so for five years – the years she should have been getting her college degree.

Margie got herself off the pain meds herself, which required a lot of discipline.  It took a few days of misery, but she made it and vowed to leave drugs alone and move ahead with her life   But when her best friend died shortly afterwards, she drowned her sorrows in crack and this was the beginning of what was almost the end .  The same people that introduced her to crack introduced her to methamphetamine in 2007.

Methamphetamine put Margie in the frame of mind that she could do what she wanted in life, whether it was legal or not.   She didn’t have to sleep anymore and could do what she wanted – a dangerous state of mind .   Margie took an interest in learning how to make counterfeit money and became good at it.   There was no need to work to make money to buy her drugs, when she could just sit in her living room and print it.

Margie became so proficient at “making” money that she passed 30,000 dollars in fake bills before she was caught.  Because she was on methamphetamine the whole time, she had no conscience but plenty of chemically induced energy to stay up weeks at a time and make her money.     During those sleepless weeks Margie would get paranoid and hallucinate.  Sometimes she took so much dope that her body would shut down.  This would sometimes happen right after a shooting up methamphetamine.    Instead of waking up she would pass out.  She woke up to start the whole cycle again.

Eventually the counterfeiting caught up with Margie.  She had been without sleep for too long, and was not alert enough to make good looking money.   An alert clerk at Walmart spotted the fake bills and called the cops.     Margie ran out of the store, only to be apprehended later with drugs and the fake money in her car.   After the expensive attorneys, jail time and rehab time, the cost was much more in real dollars than the fake money that she had printed and spent.

Margie got out of jail and was clean for thirteen months.  She thought she was on the right road and would stay there.   She went to rehab for a while, found her conscience and told the group that she had no intention of doing meth ever again.   She even had a job managing a small business.

She says her down fall was hooking with old friends – going back to old playmates and old playgrounds who lured her again into the methamphetamine abyss.   She took it one time and again lost her conscience.

Margie knew that she could no longer print money for her meth and learned how to steal.   Like with counterfeiting, she went into stealing full throng.   Stealing sprees lasted for days while she was high on methamphetamine.

There are things that she doesn’t remember but that people have told her about.   She robbed someone while others watched, but claims she has not recollection of it.  She robbed a semi-truck that was parked on the road.   She and her friends took clothes out of the truck.  The next day Margie woke up wondering how she had gotten all the clothes that were in her room.  Her friends told her what she had done but she didn’t remember doing it.

Margie stole guns and sold or traded them for meth.

Also on the list of stolen goods were furniture, refrigerators and jewelry from estate sales.  Margie describes the effect of the drug as such that she did not care that she was doing bad things to people she didn’t even know.   In her normal state of mind, she would never do these things.

Another effect of methamphetamine was the hallucinations that she describes. “ One day I saw cops in the woods behind my house.  They were in the trees, under the house, on horse and just everywhere around the property.  I thought I saw them, but the truth was that they weren’t really there.”

There were other times that Margie hallucinated – she doesn’t really like to talk about it.  The paranoia was unbearable and she would freak out and lose her temper about things that weren’t actually happening.    To get her head straight, Margie would do more meth.

In addition to mental changes, there is physical damage that the meth perpetrated on Margie’s body.  She lost six teeth and at one time had lost 60 pounds and was just a skeletal frame with flesh on it.   The little bit of flesh on her body was in bad shape with sores which have now turned into scars.   She also still has track marks on her arms.

Though she feels that her health has recovered, the scars on her body and with her family are slow to heal.  She wants to let the world just how bad meth is and where it can lead and worries about those who are just getting into it.  She’s lucky that she got herself into treatment at Narconon and didn’t die, but thinks others might not be so lucky.

Margie says there is a lot of meth use in the world.     “Once hooked on meth, most people think they don’t want to stop, but they don’t know what is in store.  There are people from all walks of life, recently started on methamphetamine who think that they are doing well, but if they don’t stop, their future is over.   If they don’t die from the meth use, they most assuredly will lose everything.  There is no way that a person can keep their family, job and freedom and still do meth for any period of time.   Methamphetamine takes hold of the mind in a way that the abuser can’t tell what the truth is about anything, including the dangers of the drug.”

Margie says that methamphetamine is usually introduced through friends who are hooked.   A person new to meth tries it one time and they are hooked.  It is like a disease but instead of germs passing from person to person, methamphetamine is passing from person to person.   Meth is sold through dealers and is quite expensive.  The meth comes from Mexico and by the time it hits the buyer on the street the price has gone up a lot.  Therefore, when users have gotten to the point where they are no longer able to work, they resort to stealing or selling the drug themselves.

Margie stated during the interview at Narconon several times that she wants to make sure that it is understood just how bad methamphetamine use is.

She hopes that she can get the message out so some people don’t have to learn the horrible truth on their own.

Read about the effect of Methamphetamine Abuse on the body…