Tennessee: hot spot for meth

"I'd always heard stories of people getting hooked on it and having a tough time getting off when, and if, they decided to quit," said Sam, who asked not to be identified.

After declining offers from his friends to try it for several years, Sam finally gave in to peer pressure and felt an immediate high.

"It's kind of like your blood gets pumping, and it makes you feel alive," Sam said. "Your breathing starts to get a little deeper, and your eyes are wide awake, and it's a rush."

During the four years that Sam experimented with crystal meth, he and his friends "usually smoked it or snorted it - we never never did needles or anything like that."

"We'd all throw in some cash and buy a certain amount for everyone to party on," he said. "It was always fun - of course, back then I was young, and you don't really think about a whole lot of things."

While he and his friends sat around using meth and "hanging out, talking and listening to music," Sam encountered several "drug friends," whom he only knew through the drug, and slowly started realizing the long-term effects of meth use.

"As I kept doing it, I would meet people who had been doing it a lot longer than me, and I would smoke with people I'd never met before," he said. "I started seeing what meth could do to your teeth from talking to these people."

Aside from one of the classic signs of meth addiction, known as "meth mouth," Sam also noticed another effect of the drug - scabs and scars from the incessant picking at the skin during a high.

"I saw a lot of my friends picking at or making scabs just to keep occupied," he said.

Sam began to notice his own body's decline when he lost weight.

"I noticed my weight started going down, and my muscles began to shrink because I wasn't eating," he said.

Due to the tense feeling one gets while high on meth, Sam noticed quite a bit of soreness in his body when coming down from the drug.

"When meth wore off, my muscles hurt, especially my jaw and my throat," he said. "Sometimes my nose would run if I snorted a lot, and I would also get these little blisters on the tip of my tongue from it that would last about a week and would make it really hard to really enjoy eating or drinking anything."

Although nearly 12 million Americans have tried methamphetamine, according to the 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the drug has seen a decrease in use among young people.

However, Robert Pegler, manager of community relations and recovery services for Peninsula Village, a long-term residential treatment facility for adolescents, said that he has seen crystal methamphetamine use increase among teenage girls, many of whom also suffer from eating disorders.

"They begin using crystal methamphetamine to help control their weight, and unfortunately, it works unbelievably well," he said. "They also get that added euphoria, and that's where they get into trouble."

That added euphoria can produce "an absolute flood of intensity," according to Pegler. He said that certain receptor sites in the brain, which increase activity by about 150 percent during sex, would produce a reaction 20 times that powerful when using crystal meth.

As Sam began to learn more about the toxic chemicals used to make meth, including ingredients found in fertilizers, he had an even harder time putting it in his body.

"It got to the point toward the end, if I was smoking it, as I was inhaling all that smoke and holding it in my lungs as long as I could, I started thinking about what all was in the stuff, all this bad stuff that's not meant for human consumption," he said. "I'd almost throw up thinking about it."

The abuse of other toxic chemicals that Pegler said he has seen an increase in is inhalant abuse, which includes the abuse of aerosols and gasoline, among children as young as 13.

"Younger kids tend more to be inhalant abusers because they're readily available," he said. "You don't have to be 21 to get them."

According to the National Institution on Drug Abuse, there has been an increase in use by eighth graders, from 15.2 percent lifetime use in 2002 to 17.1 percent lifetime use in 2005.

Pegler said that younger children also lack the good judgment and forethought to consider the negative effects of inhalant abuse.

"The idea that you may be causing permanent brain damage doesn't even seem real at the time," he said.

Pegler said the second growing drug abuse trend he has seen among adolescents in recent years is prescription drug abuse, which "a lot of kids are getting over the Internet."

According to the NIDA, Vicodin abuse and Oxycontin abuse have increased among high school students.

According to a narcotics detective who has seen an increase in drug abuse among young people "starting as early as 13-14 here recently," pills have indeed become a popular drug of choice for adolescents.

"They're fairly accessible to young people," he said.

Because prescription drugs "don't give off a scent," arresting people who have them in their possession can depend on the sources the police have "that know this person has pills in their possession," the detective said.

Jeannie Trahant, deputy executive director of Narconon Arrowhead, said she has also seen an increase in ecstasy use among young people.

"These drugs are basically put out on the streets, and it's the latest and greatest, and it's like wildfire," she said.

Trahant, who began using drugs at age 12, "started out with pills and graduated to mainlining heroin and speed."

"When kids are younger, they're very na've and they really don't know what they're stepping into," she said.

After becoming sober in her early 20s, Trahant said her drug abuse could have been prevented if she had received more information on its consequences when she was younger.

"If I would have been educated on the truth about drugs, I would never have touched them," she said. "I wasn't aware of the damage drugs could do mentally, physically and emotionally. I thought I could just use them and then when I reached a certain age, put them down and walk away."

Erica Catton, establishment officer at Narconon Arrowhead, also started her descent into addiction at a young age - she started out with marijuana and alcohol at 13 and was using heroin by the time she was 20.

In between that time, Catton said she experimented with "everything" until she entered a Narconon program at 21.

"I started out using drugs more or less because I was bored and I really didn't have any purpose in life," she said. "A lot of my friends were drinking and using drugs, and it seemed like it was kind of a relief at the time, but after that I just got hooked."

After completing Narconon's detoxification program, Catton was not only free of drugs, but she was able to gain back some of her self-esteem as well.

"A lot of the times when you're on drugs, your whole moral system goes out the window," she said. "I was able to get some of my personal integrity back."

Chris Craft, a criminal court judge, said because of "today's fast-paced lifestyle," pressures on teenagers have increased.

"Teens are expected to do much more than they used to," he said.

Because more teenagers have cars and jobs at younger ages, "they have more money now, more stress and easier access to buy drugs," Craft said.

Despite a national decrease in crystal methamphetamine use among young people, Tennessee is still a hot spot for the drug. According to Craft, there is more crystal methamphetamine in southern middle Tennessee than in any other state in the United States. Craft said that two years ago more meth labs were shut down in Tennessee than in other state.

While Craft said meth is a "rural drug" because of the dangers of making it in close quarters, Sam said living in a small town influenced a lot of his friends to turn to the drug.

"In these small towns, people don't really have a lot going on," Sam said. "Half of them don't plan on ever moving away, and it's easy to get kind of consumed up in it like that."

Meth has become such a popular drug, according to Craft, because of the instant high it produces.

"With crystal methamphetamine, after smoking it, you immediately feel like you're president of the universe, and then when you stop taking it, you get severely depressed," he said.

That "coming down" experience of using crystal meth was one of the key factors that led Sam to stop using the drug.

"It seemed like when I was coming down, it would really be like a severe hangover - my head would just be splitting wide open from headaches and my throat and my jaw would hurt from being so tense," he said. "When the bad started outweighing the good feelings, that's when I decided to step out because I realized it wasn't worth feeling like crap any longer."

Catton, who once binged on meth for 3-4 days straight, said, "the high you get is pretty euphoric, and you can stay up for days."

Although Craft said simple possession of crystal meth is a misdemeanor, the consequences for meth sale or possession with intent to sell can land someone in jail for 8-30 years, plus a $2,000-$10,000 fine, and being caught with 300 grams of the drug can warrant a 15-60-year jail sentence.

Craft said, however, that putting meth dealers in jail will not completely solve the problem of adolescent drug use.

"We can jail people who bring it in, but we need to find a way to keep young people from having the need for it," he said.

Craft said he believes most people are educated on the negative effects of drug use, but they choose to believe that those statistics don't apply to them.

"It's just eternal optimism," he said. "Everyone thinks that if they smoke, they won't get cancer, and if they eat red meat, they won't have heart problems."

Craft said that instead, the problem with teenagers and drug use comes from a lack of support during the tumultuous period of adolescence.

"Most drug users come from single-parent or no-parent homes," he said. "They have no guidance, and there's nowhere for the stress to go."

According to Catton, with the increase in prescription drugs that are advertised to fix all kinds of emotional problems, many Americans are choosing to use drugs, as opposed to fixing the underlying issues that may be causing their problems.

"We live in such a medicated society, I think, socially, young people think it's okay to take drugs to deal with their problems," she said.

Young people who are thinking of experimenting with drugs should take a hard look at those underlying problems before trying to mask the problem, according to Craft.

"They need to think about their lives and why they need chemicals to make it through life," he said. "These young people think that if they just get high for a minute, then they won't feel the pain, but they really will end up depressed and their problems will still be there, but they'll be even worse."