Anonymous writes "St Catherine Standard - July 16, 2005
For six days, sleep was completely alien to her. It was something other people did. Straight people. People who weren't like her.
Once, not that long ago, drugs were fun. Especially the rave drug ecstasy. The St. Catharines woman loved it. It gave her the energy to party all night without stopping for a moment's rest.
Drugs defined her lifestyle, but she never felt threatened by them. Crystal meth changed all that.
After taking the drug once, by accident, the 19-year-old was utterly consumed. A few days after she first snorted the rough, crystal-like powder, she bought three vials of it. The powerful stimulant kept her awake for three days.
She tried to get clean and spent 10 days drug-free. But then, unable to bear the withdrawal symptoms and craving any longer, she went on a six-day meth binge.
"At one point I was doing it every hour," she said.
Her body tried to fight back. Her skin itched and burned as her body tried to force the chemical crystals out through her skin.
When the drugs ran out, she says she had enough. Enough of the drugs and not seeping for days.
She'd had enough of the woman with the ancient and bloodshot eyes staring back at her in the mirror.
"My friends, people I really trusted, started to look at me differently," she says. "I was the drug girl. They called me an e-tard because I took (ecstasy) so much.
"I didn't want to go through the rest of my life like that."
While she languished in one drug-induced delusion after another, her life began to crumble.
Her landlord, sick of her friends using the walls of her apartment for batting practice, evicted her.
Her boss at a fast-food restaurant, who had always been supportive and tolerant, had no choice but to fire her.
"He really didn't deserve the crap I put him through," she says. "I ruined everything because of using drugs. All my money went to it. Instead of buying clothes and things I really needed, I bought drugs. Instead of buying food, I bought drugs."
She was 19 with a Grade 11 education, no job, nowhere to live and a long list of estranged friends.
"My younger sister even started doing drugs because I was," she says. "Thank God she stopped."
Those six hyperkinetic nights on crystal meth shocked her into trying to quit for good.
"I looked back on everything and I was forced to say that I would not be where I am right now if I had not been on drugs," she says.
"
