I felt finally that I was alive: Recovery from meth addiction

"Everybody that I knew from the mid-1980s started using meth and I got into using," says Kris Salisbury, now 43. "Somebody brought some meth from California and it just started from there."

She used methamphetamine for 12 years, and her three children "went through my addiction with me." On Dec. 3, 1998, after they heard she was manufacturing meth, members of a drug task force raided her home, removed her children, and placed them with her parents.

A worker at the Department of Human Services asked if she needed help. "I was tired of living that way and I was devastated, and I was living with a man who was really, really abusive. So I went into treatment," she said.

The first Moms Off Meth group in Ottumwa, Iowa started in July 1999, and Kris knew she wanted to be part of the group, made up initially of four members and two facilitators.

She achieved sobriety on Aug. 16, 1999, and participated in the group for several years. "The encouragement of other women saying ‘You can do this’ and 'I believe in you,' and when you’re using you feel like nobody believes in you and everybody treats you like you're worthless and useless, and you get into these groups and other women are saying, 'Way to go!', your life changes and you start believing," she said. She received a college degree and certification as an addiction counselor.

"I knew when I got sober that I wanted to help other people because I felt finally like I was alive and I had a purpose in life," she said.

Kris now facilitates Moms Off Meth groups in the Iowa communities of Ottumwa and Fairfield, and trains other women as group facilitators. She also works for First Resources Corp. as an in-home counselor, helping people in rural areas obtain treatment and support services.

Advice: Help others overcome the problem you overcame, like Kris.

Thanks to Brion McAlarney for the source article in the May/June issue of Addiction Professional.

Now he looks for another kind of high: Crystal meth recovery

Joe Duavit says he turned to crystal meth, or speed, in college to help study for exams. But the powerful upper also gave him a high, and an addiction that consumed him. He began to steal from his family to support his habit, going on binges that would last for days. "I ended up in a straitjacket in a psychiatric ward," says Joe, who in 1992 finally conquered his addiction. He then went to work for Habilitat, a drug treatment center in Kaneoho, Hawaii. The urge to take the drug again was the most difficult part of the recovery process, Joe says.

New research may help explain why drug abusers struggle so much with the compulsion to take such a risky drug again and again. A scientific study now suggests that compulsion can be traced back to damage to a part of the brain involved in making good decisions. Yet people such as Joe do recover -- often with the help of therapy. Studies also now suggest that the brain may heal itself after a person stops abusing a drug, a finding that indicates that recovery may get easier as time goes on.

Joe didn't notice any memory problems after he quit meth. But he did have to learn how to take pleasure in things that many people take for granted. He says he had to learn how to get satisfaction from working hard toward a goal, such as getting a college degree. And, over time, Joe did experience a healing, in his case one that freed him from a seven-year addiction to meth. Now as a drug treatment counselor, he looks for another kind of high, one that he gets from helping others break free of drug addiction.

Advice to people struggling with addiction: Look for a better high in helping people, like Joe did.

Read another of our addiction recovery stories, or read Dr. Don Miller’s source story, from the USA Today of April 18, 2002.