Victoria parents lament lapses in programs for teens addicted to methamphetamines

VICTORIA - Joanne Reuben hoped to wean her daughter off drugs by embarking on a meandering road trip to the family's Alberta ranch.

She remembers picking up the teenager at Beacon Hill Park, where she had slept outdoors. The girl was stoned, barefoot, and goofily enraptured by a bouquet of handpicked flowers.

Ms. Reuben tried coaxing her youngest daughter, Gabriela, to join her on the journey. To her surprise, the girl agreed.

Only later, after noticing another missing light bulb in yet another motel room did Ms. Reuben realize why the girl had so readily hopped in. She had a stash. Gabby was breaking the bulbs to use a fragment as a bowl in which to smoke crystal methamphetamine.

Ms. Reuben joined other parents in the carpeted ballroom of a downtown hotel yesterday for the launch of a website by the non-profit Crystal Meth Victoria Society. The chief of police attended, as did the mayor, the chairman of the school board and at least two MLAs.

Missing were the addicts, although they were not far away in their misery. One kilometre to the north, the notorious 900-block of Pandora Avenue has become a living diorama of the ravages of drug addiction.

Parents formed the organization recently out of frustration at a lack of detox beds and a paucity of programs for treatment after detoxification. The parents also bemoan a lack of co-ordination among agencies designated to assist youth.

Three parents addressed the press conference held to launch the website. They spoke of their anguish dealing with a child addicted to crystal meth. Ms. Reuben is only too familiar with the tribulations about which they spoke. In a few months of crystal meth abuse, she said, her daughter became an unpredictable and sometimes violent presence.

Crystal meth has a colourful list of street nicknames, including ice, jib, shard, crank, sketch and Tina. The drug has a reputation for creating an inaugural high so intense the user tries without success to recapture the feeling of euphoria, an obsession which is sometimes called "Chasing the Dragon."

The stimulant is cheap and highly addictive. Among teenage girls, it is sometimes promoted as a means of controlling weight, because users lose their appetite. In many cases, it also produces bursts of extreme energy, an additional burden for those wanting to intervene. "These kids are being so awful they're demonized by everybody," Ms. Reuben said. "They are little demons in a sense."

She said she had to remind herself to blame the drug and not the user. "She's possessed by a drug that's creating psychosis. This violence is not her. This is the drug working within my child."

Born in 1987, Gabriela, the youngest of her two daughters, showed an early aptitude for painting. "She was bright and bubbly and outgoing and effervescent and a little bit artsy. Unique." Gabriela's maternal grandfather is an Alberta Provincial Court judge. The girl attended private school briefly, but struggled academically and suffered from poor self-esteem. At age 14, her mother said, she fell in with a rough crowd.

The descent came with a breathtaking rapidity all too familiar to some parents. The girl began staying out all night, then dropped out of Grade 9. When she disappeared for days at a time, Ms. Reuben would seek clues to her whereabouts, sometimes recording outgoing numbers in her daughter's cellphone. Not surprisingly, she did not like her daughter's new friends.

"She was in a den of wolves," Ms. Reuben said. "What I saw about this subculture is downright evil. It has no soul. It's exploitative. It becomes this world of feeding a drug habit. They can't function in a normal society, they're so whacked." Her own possessions began disappearing -- a scanner gone and then a CD player missing. Ms. Reuben said she could not abandon her daughter to the street, nor could she accept being an enabler by providing a home in which any item might be sold to buy more drugs.

Ms. Reuben so feared for her daughter's well-being she felt forced to intervene. "She was near death," her mother said. "She had overdosed. She'd been in hospital. She was skinny as a rail. She had sores all over her body." But what to do? "Do you bust her? Do you put her in the criminal justice system? To me that felt too risky."

Finally, she decided to escort her daughter on a two-week trip to purge her system of the drug. The incident with the light bulbs proved how strong the drug could be. She got off the drug for a while on the trip, but relapsed after returning to Victoria. However, Ms. Reuben said her daughter seemed to get a renewed sense of purpose from their time away together, as well as the knowledge that her family would not abandon her to the street. She later enrolled at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School at a former logging camp on Galiano Island. Her eight-minute documentary, Sketch, exposed the dangers of crystal.

A stay with a family at nearby Shawnigan Lake, which removed her from the downtown drug scene, was helpful. Finally, she was accepted into a nine-bed treatment centre at Prince George. Gabby, now 17, has been clean for several months and is completing Grade 12. She has joined her mother in making public presentations about the dangers of crystal. "The drug is like a hot fire," Ms. Reuben said. "Every time she put her finger in she hurt herself. Badly."

Special to The Globe and Mail