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Parksville Qualicum News

By COLLEEN DANE
Jun 21 2005

Last week, I wrote about how it has been almost nine months since local emergency service workers started noticing the scourge crystal methamphetamine is becoming in our community.
As a reporter, it's been a few months since I started hearing the drug's name pop up more often. I found myself talking with regular sources about the issue and waiting for a time that it could properly be addressed for the whole community.
In those months I have heard horror stories about meth and what it does to its users.

The idea, though, of a voluntarily-consumed substance messing with brain activity so badly that addicts think bugs crawl under their skin and claw their own flesh to get let them out is something that, honestly, I have very little understanding of.

I don't have any experience with anything of that force. But this column isn't about vindicating myself, it's about the challenge the community at large is going to face in the coming months of understanding something they can't comprehend.
As something being toted as an epidemic in the country, people who cannot fathom being involved in the drug, have to be able to connect in some way for the problem to be addressed.

For me it was the weight issue. I can't relate to the level of disenchantment or peer disorientation that would lead me to something like crystal meth. I was just never that person, probably never will be.
I do however, remember my self-image at around age 14, and do understand someone desperate enough to try a miracle plan.
In retrospect, I wasn't obese but I was chubby.
I was, in the middle of Grade 9 going through my second awkward puberty phase that most girls only suffer through once.
I hated it, and I was self-conscious. In pictures from that time, I'm visibly hunched, trying to minimize my growing frame. Nothing much I could do though, except spend the odd $10 on some diet pill that made me feel light-headed.
While I grew out of that body and those feelings, I can still remember my vulnerability around the weight back then.

And I can't say how I may have responded if someone had offered me a miracle drug that everyone was doing, and could make me lose weight.

In the stories I've read and heard over the last few months, girls at that age are using crystal meth for the first time to become skinnier.
Now, as a more rational adult, I know they lose weight because the drug melts fat - and muscle - with no reserve. Meth addicts don't usually eat very much, sometimes because they don't think to, sometimes because hallucinations make them think their food is something it isn't.
Either way, the weight thing really brought home the social significance side of crystal meth for me.

Maybe for readers it will be the idea of a never feeling like they fit in, or being a successful person struggling under the pressure of continuing success, that depicts a situation where they can comprehend the draw of such an extreme drug.
Understanding, they say, is the first step to a solution.

And if this problem is as big in the area, and the country, as experts are saying, every one of us will have to find that understanding to make a difference.