Editor's note: This is the second of a four-part series leading up to a town forum on methamphetamine use in Squamish on April 11 at Brennan Park Recreation Centre.
Even at 86 pounds, vomiting and defecating blood, Neil still couldn't stop doing drugs. By the time he was 25, it had become his life, but when doctors told him he'd be dead in four months, he decided to clean up.
Now, at age 28, Neil still hasn't recovered his memory, which was fried by the use of crystal meth. But he's made a life for himself working, receiving counselling and making presentations to Howe Sound school kids.
"I tell them everything," he said. "I've got nothing to hide. That's one thing I learned."
Neil withholds his last name to protect his family's privacy, but he says his own life is an open book, and that's how he stays clean. He tells the kids about his first time using alcohol and marijuana at the age of 14, and how seven months later he was into cocaine and crystal meth. He can't explain why, despite a lifetime of witnessing ads depicting eggs frying with the voiceover "your brain on drugs", he jumped into using.
"It was just the thing to do," he says.
He tells the kids about the hundreds of dollars he stole from his father and his employer to finance his $400 a day habit. He tells them that his own friends abandoned him, and even the dealers, in crises of conscience, wouldn't sell to him anymore. He had huge plans for his life, and he'd make progress only to crash again.
By the time he decided to clean up, Neil had spent 12 years high. He signed up for the three-month detox and treatment program at Miracle Valley in Mission and during the three weeks he waited to get in, he used more than ever before. Neil had never gone more than two days without drugs, and once in treatment, he endured two weeks of grueling detox.
"It was the whole works: nightmares, pulling my hair out, running into walls," he says.
Neil shared a room with three other crystal meth addicts: a rapist, two murderers, and a physician. He was in group therapy with an 80-year-old crystal meth addict. And statistics show that everyone he met had a one per cent chance of staying clean.
Twelve years ago hard, dangerous drugs such as crystal meth and cocaine were as easy to get in Squamish as alcohol in a bar, and the problem's only growing. Neil says the only way to stop the spread of drugs is to educate kids and he got involved in the solution approximately four months ago when dangerous feelings of self-doubt began surfacing, threatening relapse.
"I felt really bad about taking so much and not giving back," he says.
That's when counsellor Denise Evans at Sea to Sky Community Services suggested he join school-based prevention co-ordinator Leanna Buffie's efforts.
Evans says that Buffie are helping to coordinate a town forum on the subject of crystal meth scheduled for Monday, April 11 at Brennan Park Recreation Centre. But delivering a message of facts and stats to kids only bores them, says Evans. Neil's story gets through to them.
During one such talk, he pointed to a boy at a desk and said: "I used to sit in that chair." The boy's face fell. Neil received a letter from the grade 8 student shortly after. It reads in part: "I thought about a guy I know. He's in grade 8 and has experimented with drugs and alcohol. I hope he doesn't end up like that. Well, I learned that I will not, and I mean not, try drugs."
The note was signed: "The guy who sits where you used to."
Another student wrote: "My sister has tried drugs. I think I should talk to her now that I have heard you speak of your life."
Neil is a welcome addition to the drug and alcohol abuse prevention team, according to Evans who says that Squamish is woefully short on programs and services.
"What we have here is the DARE program and Leanna the school-based prevention worker who is serving all of the school in the corridor. There's me in Squamish. There's a First Nations counselor and outreach worker," said Evans. "There's a youth outreach worker in Whistler. We don't have a youth outreach worker and we know from all of the data that we have to go to the kids, which is one of the reason why we're going to the schools."
Vancouver Coastal Health's Sea to Sky Manager of Mental Health and Addictions, Claudia Frowein, says she's awaiting a reply to funding requests for new programs and services, including a support recovery house.
Neil still wakes up from nightmares with the taste of meth in his mouth, but he stays clean thanks in part to his school visits.
