Although the gymnasium in no way reflected a packed house, the close to 25 parents that did attend went home not only more educated about the facts of substance abuse and their youth, but stunned at the facts and statistics.

George's power point presentation was at times graphic - an effective tool to "shake up" students and their families about the harsh realities of drinking and driving and the cycle of substance abuse.

"I'm here because I care," said the former paramedic.

"I'm here because I don't want you to end up underneath the blue, green, or yellow body blanket. That's what they'll throw over you."

Using both parents and youth in a demonstration of the "high cycle", George's information was delivered in a simple, easy to understand manner.

"Talk to your kids about drugs and alcohol," he said.

"Parents are always asking themselves what they are doing wrong.

British Columbia opens its first long-term residential treatment program for youth this month, which means young people addicted to drugs can finally get help here instead of being flown to Central or Eastern Canada.

Forty-nine young people from B.C. have been sent to Quebec, Ontario or New Brunswick over the last three years to seek residential treatment, as part of a pilot project run by the Vancouver Coastal and Fraser health boards.

That is expected to stop when the Crossing at Keremeos, south of Penticton, opens in late January for drug addicts aged 14 to 24.

Roberta Watt was raised in Vancouver but when her drug habit got out of control in 2006, she flew to Montreal to attend an 11-month treatment program run by Portage, the same non-profit rehabilitation agency that will operate Keremeos.

Today, Roberta, 20, is a self-confident young women who is clean and healthy, working and studying, and just jazzed by life.

Little more than two years ago, you might have seen her on East Hastings and dismissed her as dysfunctional and despondent.

This wasn't a high school "scare kids off drugs" lecture, it was straight facts.

I knew that crystal meth, more commonly referred to simply as "meth,-glass" or "ice," was a scary drug. But I thought it was just another drug of the decade like Heroin was in the '70s, Cocaine in the '80s and Ecstasy in the '90s. Unlike most drugs, which depend on gradual addiction, meth relies on rapid addiction. It is the drug dealer's dream: cheap and easy to make and brutally addictive. Many other drugs are now being laced with meth to cut costs and increase addiction.

It's a drug that rapidly sneaks into communities behind the backs of authorities who are too busy worrying about the common drugs on the street. Until recently, meth wasn't even considered a class A drug in many parts of the world. The growing epidemic and deeper understanding of its properties has changed that. It is now not only a class A drug, it is THE class A drug. Its addictive qualities are on a scale that we have never seen in previous drugs. Youth worker Les Twentyman stated, "Heroin is nothing compared to this stuff."

It has overtaken cocaine, heroine and ecstasy to become the most widely used hard drug in the U.S., and it is now conquering Canada, moving west to east. Frighteningly, it is already finding a welcoming reception in New Brunswick.

Is methamphetamine addiction untreatable, as many commonly believe? Mythbusters don’t think so. While treatment development is still in early stages, some standard therapies are beginning to provide very real and measurable results.

When methamphetamine use burst onto the scene in the mid 90s, treatment providers hadn’t seen anything like it. The psychotic behaviours associated with its use, though similar to those of cocaine, were far more intense, and so was resistance to traditional treatment.

Unlike cocaine, which interferes with the body’s ability to recycle dopamine, methamphetamine actually causes its excessive release directly within nerve cells. The euphoria and increased energy from these dopamine spikes are incredibly addictive. But resistance also rapidly develops, increasing dependency.

It’s the over-stimulation of dopamine that causes the psychotic episodes, but perhaps the most significant effect is the body compensating by releasing less dopamine naturally. The result is intense anhedonia – the inability to experience pleasure – which can last for months and be much more difficult to endure than the withdrawal effects of other drugs.

In 2001, the Cochrane Review said, “No available [medical] treatment has been demonstrated to be effective [for] amphetamine withdrawal.”

However, Fraser Todd, Deputy Director (Teaching) of the National Addiction Centre, says we shouldn’t understand these and similar findings to mean no medical treatment works – just that the evidence is inconclusive at this stage.

Thompson told Discover Magazine that the MRI scans of addicts showed evidence of considerable brain inflammation and that two key brain areas associated with memory—the same ones damaged in early Alzheimer's—shrunk some 10 percent.

"One thing the drug users reported was loss of memory," he says. "They have poorer memory than people of the same age and the loss of tissue in the memory areas of the brain linked with this functional decline. So, people who lost most tissue in the memory areas actually had worse performance on tasks that involved memory."

That's not all. Thompson's colleague, Edythe London, a neuroscientist also at the University of California at Los Angeles, used PET scans—or positron emission tomography—to image how glucose is processed in the brains of 17 methamphetamine abusers who had stopped using the drug nearly a week before they participated in her study. She then compared those brain images with the brain images of 18 non-abusers, who completed the same attention task as their brains were measured.

Left unchecked, drugs can be ruinous. Barrie police linked drug use to last Friday's crackdown on street-level prostitution. Those caught in the sweep included pregnant women and grandmothers.

Police say unprotected sex was offered for an additional fee, raising the scary prospect of the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, including AIDS.

A man is at a downtown loft party. He knows he shouldn't be there, but a friend convinced him it would be a good time, one not to miss.

The music, the short skirts and familiar faces set off an urge he has been fighting for six months. It's been that long since he last cut cocaine. And he swore to stay clean.

But tonight, the pull is too strong. In a bathroom, after a quick exchange, he gets his fix.

The former drug addict was in Golden recently to talk about his addiction and share with that community how crystal meth nearly ruined his life.

At Golden Secondary School on Oct. 19, two presentations were made - to high school students and the community at large - regarding the 22 year old's journey.