The many faces of addiction

Nevada Daily Mail

The pictures range from the fresh face of high school prom queen to the haggard, emaciated visage of a tired old crone. What's unusual about them is they are all the same woman, a methamphetamine addict, taken over a 10-year period.

The pictures are just one tool in the arsenal of weapons educators, law enforcement and health officials use to educate people about the dangers of meth.

"Meth does terrible things to you," Missouri Highway Patrol Sergeant T.J. Stevens said. "You become obsessed. You don't bathe, you don't eat. You forget all the important things and obsess about the smallest. You might vacuum the same 5-foot -by-5-foot piece of carpet for hours or rearrange your sock drawer and put the socks in and take the socks out and refold them and put them back in for hours. You forget that you have a child that hasn't had anything to eat for a day and a half but you have the best sock drawer around."

Stevens said it was easy to overlook the signs of meth use if you are unaware of what they are signaling. He told the story of a stop he made before he underwent training.

"I stopped a car for speeding and while I was writing the ticket I noticed in the back seat there was plastic tubing, some Coleman fuel and a Pyrex plate with some white, caked on material on it," Stevens said. "I asked the driver about it and he said the tubing was for his aquarium, he had gone camping the weekend before and used the fuel and his wife was a terrible cook and had ruined the plate. I gave him a ticket and sent him on his way."

During his training he learned the significance of the evidence he had seen but ignored.

"I was in training and the instructor listed some things and asked if anyone had seen anything like that and I raised my hand and told him I had and he asked what I did. I told him I gave the guy a $60 ticket and sent him on his way. The instructor said 'You just let a meth lab go.'"

Stevens said the meth producers had a large incentive to keep on making meth instead of working a job.

"You take someone who works his tail off all week and to make $400 and someone else can sell four grams of meth and make the same $400 for just a few minutes work," Stevens said. "Where's the incentive to work?"

Keeping the precursors out of the hands of the producers is a hard job because someone is always looking for new ways to get around the restrictions.

"They put all these bans on products and there's always someone out there looking for new ways to extract the precursors," Stevens said. "They changed the formula for some medicines and put them in gelcaps to make it so they couldn't extract the pseudoephedrine and some college kids figured out how to do it, so the bans don't really work."

What does work and what Stevens and others suggest is for parents, teachers and others to be observant and when something suspicious occurs to give the meth hotline, (888) 823-METH (6384), a call.