Cindy West
The Gadsden Times

Living life lost in drug haze

FIRST OF A SERIES
Bad memories are what keep Jonathan from using drugs.

Now 27, clean for a year and recently moved from a halfway house in Attalla, he realizes that he lost six years of his life to drug addiction and running from police.

"When you're there and going through it," he said, "you get hardened from being that way, you know? You don't realize this is not normal. People don't do this, have to arrange times for people to call your house and be so secretive and keep up with lies."
Jonathan swishes when he walks. His saggy jeans drag the ground.

It seems to be an effort for him to move each foot forward with the denim dragging along, as if he were walking through mud.

He has walked through a sort of mire - a haze of cocaine and other drug abuse spiked with moments of terror - and is just in the past year scraping off the muck and starting over.

Jonathan, like most children who become addicted, tried his first beer at a young age, around 12 or 13. Adults who have never done drugs might find it surprising that children in this area say they have tried alcohol and cigarettes as early as fourth grade.
Drug use is widespread in this area, if one can judge by the number of arrests made. In 2001, 729 adults were arrested for selling or possession of controlled substances in Cherokee, DeKalb, Etowah and Marshall counties, according to the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center Web site. Sixty percent of those arrests were made in Marshall County alone.

The largest number of both juvenile and adult drug-possession arrests were for marijuana, but Marshall County had 153 adult arrests in the category of other drugs besides opium, cocaine, marijuana and synthetic drugs. Marshall and Etowah counties each had two juveniles arrested for possession of opium or cocaine in 2001.

Selling drugs isn't confined to adults. One juvenile was arrested for selling in Marshall County last year, and another was arrested on that charge in Etowah County.

Statistics were not available for drug manufacturing arrests, but Marshall County Drug Enforcement Unit Director Rob Savage said his agents have discovered 16 crystal methamphetamine labs in the county so far this year.

An estimated 8.8 million people have tried methamphetamine at some time in their lives, according to the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse quoted on the National Institute on Drug Abuse Web site.

In a 1999 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 14.8 million of the 287 million or so people in the United States said they had used illicit drugs in the previous month. Almost 67 million said they had used tobacco, and 105 million reported they had used alcohol.

Unlike most people who try alcohol or cigarettes at an early age, Jonathan didn't quickly move on to illegal drugs. He was strongly anti-alcohol and anti-drug throughout high school in Decatur.

After graduation he went to college. The weekend after a long-term relationship ended, he got very drunk. His resistance to drugs disappeared quickly. "Within three weeks I had tried crystal, pot, coke and crack," he said.

Then 20 years old, he used drugs on the weekends. Then he decided to sell meth. "It's not hard, once you're in the culture for a while," he said. "People know you. It's just like working a regular job. They know to come to you; they know they can trust you. Once you get accepted, it's easy."

Life in the drug culture is secretive and paranoid, he said. "The hardest part was the constant fear of something happening: the fear of the police coming in; the fear of being watched; the fear of getting robbed; the fear of getting set up by somebody; the fear of being followed," he said. "It's constantly something. The fears are usually justified because you can't do that and get away with it. There's just no way."

GADSDEN TIMES / MARC GOLDEN

Living in Marshall County, Jonathan was working two jobs, and the owner of one of the businesses apparently thought so highly of the young man that he was going to let him buy into the business. That idea ended when Marshall County Drug Enforcement Unit agents arrested Jonathan for selling drugs from the business.

"At the time, it was when crystal was just starting to kick up in Marshall County," he said. "I was one of two people around the area that people knew of to go to (for it)."

The arrest didn't stop him. While waiting for a court date, he "floated" - moved from place to place - still selling drugs. "I had stepped up selling," he said. "I figured it's either all or nothing, so forget trying to do anything right. I went from selling crystal to selling everything." Acid and ecstasy were the big sellers in his hometown of Russellville, while Marshall County was "knee deep in meth."
Not only was he in danger of being arrested again, he was in danger even from his friends. The paranoia that surrounds drug abuse can be a hazard for abusers.

One night he and his friends were using drugs and thought they heard a prowler. Later that night Jonathan went to the car for something, got confused and tried to go into the house next door. His friends heard him, thought they had caught their prowler, and beat him senseless without realizing who he was.

"There (are) a lot of things that make me want to go use drugs, but I don't have to now," he said. "People say they had this excuse to use or that excuse to use. I didn't have to have an excuse. I just wanted to be that way.

"There was no morning after. I used until I collapsed. I woke up with my face in the drugs. I would stay up until I passed out. When my body gave out, that was when it was time to quit."

Jonathan coasted along, disregarding his court date. The courts issued several warrants for failure to appear, but he avoided arrest until 2000, when he was stopped for a traffic violation and then jailed for all those warrants.

"I'd come to the end the last few months before I went to jail," he said. "I was homicidal, suicidal -- I didn't care. There were three years that every day I was messed up. In the end, the cocaine habit was $100 or $200 a day, $500 on Friday and Saturday.
"I never knew about 12-step programs, and I automatically assumed if I went to a treatment center I'd have to pay."

After serving short sentences in various city and county jails, Jonathan went to court on the drug-trafficking case. His attorney pleaded it down to a possession charge, and Jonathan was given a four-year suspended sentence.

A person in the Marshall County court system found him a bed in a rehab center.

"I still had thoughts of using, but something told me it was time to quit," he said. "Being so alone in the end turned me away from it."

It's been a rough road to recovery. "There are constant reminders of what you can't do," he said. "One of the hardest things is know how easy it is to go out (and get drugs). Sometimes that choice will ruin a whole day."