Cindy West
The Gadsden Times

Addict sold drugs while running business

FOURTH OF A SERIES
Drug dealers aren't always scummy-looking people hanging around the edges of playgrounds trying to get your children hooked on drugs. Sometimes they're harmless-looking people - for instance, business owners - who are trying to get your children hooked on drugs.

"I could look at them and know which ones I could sell to," former drug dealer and former restaurant owner Scotty P. said. "If your kids are smoking cigarettes, they are going to try (drugs) or they have already tried them. That's a warning sign from all get-out right there. I've seen it. I grew up with it."

People who have attended some of the Marshall County Crystal Methamphetamine Task Force town meetings have heard 36-year-old Scotty tell his story. He currently works full time for a contracting company and has two part-time jobs, and none of them have anything to do with selling drugs.
Having just celebrated his third year of sobriety, he willingly tells how he started out "drugging" at the tender age of 11 or 12 and ended up addicted to crystal meth and cocaine.

Learning to use
Growing up in the Detroit suburb of White Lake, Mich., in the early '70s, Scotty smuggled marijuana from the baby sitter. "I was able to get it, able to fit in," he said. "That's what we thrive on, peer pressure and fitting in."

After a couple of years he was doing mescaline, speed and crystal T, a purified form of crystal methamphetamine, as well as drinking. "It was easy to stand outside a party store and get someone to buy it for you," he said. "It was mainly schnapps and stuff, because it was cold."

His parents divorced when he was in seventh grade. That's when Scotty said his school performance went downhill. "I skipped school in eighth grade," he said. Misbehaving gave him an excuse to hide his feelings. "It's a mask, you know," he said. "Drugging is wearing a mask, because you're not who you really are. I realize that today. I didn't know it back then."

The speed became an everyday thing. "It's like that stuff they sell in gas stations now," he said. "All of it is so addictive. You want it. It keeps you going. If you ain't got it, you're down in the dumps."

He and his friends would sell drugs at high school: joints, marijuana cigarettes, for $1 each; hits of speed for $1 each and mescaline for $3 a pop.
Scotty said he was kicked out of school - ironically for not attending - in the 10th grade. After a falling out with his mother when he was 16, he started living on his own, which he has done since. "I know I'd spend $80 a week just on marijuana, not counting my drinking and miscellaneous stuff," he said.

He had brushes with the law, once when trying to steal a sports car for a joy ride and again getting arrested when some friends he was living with got caught growing marijuana on their roof.

He didn't try cocaine until he was 17, when he would have been a high-school senior. By the time he was 21, he was smoking an ounce a day, a $600-a-day habit financed by selling drugs.
Looking for what he called a "geographical change" to fix his coke habit, Scotty moved to Marshall County at the age of 21 in 1987. His grandparents had moved there 10 years earlier, and he had been visiting since then. His grandfather's death and grandmother's illness also gave him an incentive to move closer.

The geographical cure didn't work. "Within three weeks I found what I wanted," he said. "I knew I had a problem before I moved down here. I didn't want to do nothing about it."

Growing a business
He supported himself by finding a job in a pizza parlor, the kind of work he had always done.

Despite continued drug abuse, he worked up to a management position and decided to strike out on his own, opening a restaurant in the Claysville community in December 1989.

"I had a great booming business," Scotty said. "I had made a goal when I was younger to own my own pizza parlor by the time I was 28. Well, I did it when I was 25."

He has an explanation for what went wrong with the business: "Drinking. Drugging. I was selling (drugs) right out the door of the place. Big John (Colbert) was still sheriff then, and he came down and said, 'I know what's going on here, and I'm going to catch you.' So I pulled out, but it didn't stop my own habit."

He was arrested in Huntsville with a pound of marijuana in the trunk of his car, but his attorney worked a deal so he was able to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. He didn't serve any jail time, but got supervised probation. The arrest didn't phase him.
"I settled down," he said. "I met a good woman. It was a drug-based relationship."

Within a month he had blown $15,000 - money he got for selling his business - on drugs. After wrecking his car and breaking his back in the summer of 1991, he got addicted to painkillers, and renewed his acquaintance with crystal methamphetamine. He tried to explain the drug's attraction. "It's a long-lasting wire," he said. "It's a burst of energy. Everything's great, no matter what you do. Driving in your car, listening to tunes on the radio. Sex is good, your social life is good, you don't know if you're acceptable in a crowd or not because you just really don't care. You're motivated to do things that you really don't want to do. You'll basically try anything. When you run out of money, you're going to take something that don't belong to you and pawn it. It's worse than crack. I would have sold the shirt off my back and the shoes off my feet."

Bottoming out
May 6, 1999. Scotty remembers the exact date when he hit rock bottom. He had worked for a contracting company from 1992 to 1998, but he wasn't working there any more.

He and his wife had been out "thievin'" all night, breaking into a mobile home. They were getting evicted from their house on Buck Island and had already sold their furniture to support their crack and crystal meth habits. They were driving a truck that Scotty had borrowed from a friend and still had two weeks later. The friend finally reported it stolen.

"The police saw the truck and followed us home," he said. "I took off through the woods. We didn't think they were after her, so she loaded the truck with most of our worldly possessions - our clothes, basically - and was going to meet me on the other side of the island. They stopped her and picked her up. She spilled her guts, because that's what we do when we get caught; we think everything's gonna be all right if we get it off our chests. If an addict gets caught, he's just going to spill his guts."

Scotty went on the run to avoid being arrested for burglary and receiving stolen property: first to a hospital in Gadsden, where he threatened suicide and was admitted for 10 days, then to the Love Center, a homeless shelter, where he walked in and walked right back out. Next he stayed with a cousin in Gadsden until he hit the guy over the head with a frying pan, trying to steal his income tax check. The cousin threatened to call Scotty's mom and tell her that he wasn't staying at the Love Center. Scotty called his mother anyway and got her to finance a trip to his father's in Michigan. When he got to Detroit, he called his father, forgetting that his dad was now married to a police officer.

He came back to Alabama and went back to The Love Center. He walked to outpatient meetings. He attended 12-step meetings. "I walked in the rain, that's how much I wanted it," he said. "They asked me if I wanted to go to rehab. I said yes."

A church sponsored him, paying for a bus ticket to Montgomery for a 28-day recovery program. Another church paid for his bus ticket back to Gadsden. "I had to get sponsored to get back because I had no money, no job, I had nothing," he said. "I'd hit my bottom. I was broke. Didn't have a wife no more, didn't have nothing."

Facing reality
After rehab, Scotty returned to the Love Center and lived there while his attorney made arrangements for him to turn himself in. "I couldn't take it no more," he said. "I was tired of running."
When he got to jail, he was sent to Cedar Lodge in Guntersville, the drug rehab program run by Mountain Lakes Behavioral Healthcare. He made it through 13 days of the 14-day program, then got into trouble, so he spent four more months in the Marshall County Jail. When he got out, he used his own money to go though another rehab program in Sylacauga.

"I was looking for the answer to 'How do you say no when someone offers you drugs?'" he said. "The answer is that I have a choice today. The third step (of the 12-step recovery program) is that a decision is just a decision until you take action on it."

The peace he has found helps him stay clean from day to day. "I don't need to fight nobody," he said. "I don't have to cause harm to my neighbor. I work under God's will, not mine. If I don't do wrong, I'll be all right another day."

Scotty's 23-year-old stepson is not all right. He currently sits in the Jackson County Jail. The boy was 12 when Scotty married his mother and was already doing drugs.

The young man hasn't lived outside prison since he was 18. When he got out last time, his stepfather got him a job. "That crystal tore his world up again," Scotty said. "Now he's caught two more felonies in Jackson County."

There was a time when his stepson wrote in a letter from Limestone Correctional Facility that he was saving Scotty a bed next to his.

"When I was in rehab, I had to write him a letter and say, 'I wish I had heeded your warning,'" he said. "Here I was, sitting in the county jail."

Changing habits
"When I left the Sylacauga treatment center, I went to a halfway house in Gadsden," Scotty said. "I was supposed to stay 90 days; I stayed 14 months on staff and was able to help clients coming in. I didn't have no place to go. I worked at Riverview Hospital as a cook, and was able to watch clients on weekends, which in turn helped me, because I knew what it was like."

He had worked in construction for five years, but was scared to go back to it, afraid that he would relapse. When he finally went back to that career, he found an anti-drug boss. "My boss don't smoke," he said. "I wouldn't work with someone who did. I can't.

"I don't go to bars today. I've gone to two clubs since I've been clean, and neither time I didn't enjoy myself, because I saw people having a good time getting loaded. I was the designated driver, so it was OK, but it's not something I can do."

Long-term consequences
Without getting a brain scan of someone before he uses drugs and comparing it to a scan after he's been addicted for a while, it's hard to know how drug abuse changes a particular individual's brain.
Scientists do have some data from tests on animals that show some long-term medical consequences an addict faces, though.

Researchers report that up to half the cells in the brain that produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter, can be damaged after prolonged exposure to relatively low levels of methamphetamine, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse Web site. Neurotransmitters are involved in communication among neurons in the brain.

Researchers also have found that nerve cells containing serotonin might be damaged even more.
Chronic methamphetamine abuse can cause inflammation of the heart lining and episodes of violent behavior, paranoia and anxiety. "Psychotic symptoms can sometimes persist for months or years after use has ceased," according to the Web site.

Dispensing advice
Believing he can only keep the peace he's found by helping others find it, Scotty told employees of the Marshall County Court Referral Office to give his phone number to any addict who's trying to get clean.

"If they want to call me, they'll call me," he said. "I can't twist nobody's arm to recovery. It's like my stepson - I offered to be his sponsor. He stuck with me for about a week. The second good paycheck he got after he got out of prison ... he was gone, that quick."

Scotty knows what would have happened to him if he had not quit using. "I would be in prison, or I would be dead," he said. "I really believe I would be in prison. I don't doubt that a bit.

"I had never really had to steal for what I wanted like when I was fully blown. I went out and did things I had never done in my whole life. I was 33 years old, breaking into houses for the first time ... since I was 15. I never thought I would stoop that low," he said.

The former drug dealer, now an abstinence advocate, offers some advice to people who are considering trying any kind of drugs: "You don't have to be in the in crowd," he said. "You don't have to try things because other people are trying them. The pressure is on you to try to fit in, but it's not worth it today. It's not worth your life just trying to fit in. Be yourself. Drugs are nothing but deceit. You're wearing a mask of deceit. You're not who you really are.

"Just be who you want to be - yourself."