Life on meth Rachel’s story TURN TO
A Caught in a cycle of guns, gangs, violence and meth addiction, she lost everything she ever cared about. Now she is rebuilding her life. This is Rachel’s story. Vicki Anderson reports.
s she regains consciousness, she feels every grain of sand beneath her shivering body. Rachel*, 19, discovers her vision is hazy. She cannot tell from looking up at the sky if it is dawn or dusk. As the waves crash onto the shore nearby, gently ebbing and flowing with driftwood and other offerings from the sea, she wakes fully to realise her husband is raping her.
Wildly she searches the vast expanse of sand around her and sees an old man walking with a dog.
‘‘Help me,’’ she yells to him with all of her strength. ‘‘Help me.’’ But the old man doesn’t stop. ‘‘I had pain medication for my arm, eh,’’ she says.
‘‘He’d assaulted me quite badly that night and, because I had medication on hand, I popped it. When I woke up in the morning, it was to him raping me on the beach.’’
As the old man walked away, his head down, pretending he couldn’t hear her pleas for help because to do so would likely result in him being beaten too, she thought ‘‘I am gone’’.
Their relationship had been abusive from the start. ‘‘For the first six months I got the best hidings of my life.’’
In the gang he was associated with, he had reached a high rank.
She recounts details of the beatings factually and with little emotion. Her face is pale but her voice is strong and doesn’t falter. Her eyes go blank in the retelling.
At one point I am so shocked by what she is saying I gasp out loud and she is jolted back to the warm, airless room.
Rachel, now in her early 30s, is in hiding under police advice. She moves her hands back and forth on her knee as if she is rolling a cigarette.
‘‘It is what it is,’’ she says, looking me in the eye, tap, tap, tapping her leg where the imaginary tobacco should be.
‘‘The last straw was when he chased me down the road with an axe.’’
Before that, police had been to their home ‘‘seven or eight times’’ on domestic violence callouts.
‘‘There were a few public incidents too.’’
Her husband would assault her for having a shower without permission.
As he routinely beat and tortured her, she held her Bible tight, mentally beseeching God to rescue her.
‘‘Eventually I lost faith in my faith.’’
Rachel grew up in Wellington with her mother, an ‘‘alcoholic’’. At 13, one day she came home to find a note saying her mother had moved to Palmerston North with her new boyfriend.
Rachel began living on the streets.
‘‘I started going to gang pads. Maybe I was trying to find a father figure? With the gangs I felt a false sense of security.’’
A pastor from a church ‘‘committed to classical evangelical Christianity’’ found her when she was 15. He took her into his home, where she lived alongside his children.
‘‘He taught me how to look after myself, clean myself, he was an amazing man.’’
She became a youth group leader. Life was good for two years.
When she was 17, the pastor, who was doing ministry in prisons, took a man into his care.
‘‘Long story short,’’ says Rachel with a steely expression. ‘‘I get married to this man. He is 32 and I am 17. He is a senior gang member now.
‘‘Because you have to be 18 to be legally married and I wasn’t 18, he took me to Palmy and enticed my mum to sign the papers. He gave her a couple of boxes of alcohol and a vehicle that wasn’t worth $2000 ... my mum was quite happy with that.’’
After he threatened to kill her with an axe, her husband was arrested and served time in prison.
Rachel wasn’t the first woman he’d assaulted and raped. She knew she wouldn’t be the last.
‘‘I tell the church that I am going to testify against him. The church tells me to forgive and forget as I chose him as a life partner. I said ‘I value my face, my teeth, I’m not going to be one of those girls who stays in these relationships, stick the church – see you later, I’m gone’.’’
While he is in prison, she serves him with divorce papers.
Eventually, she finds love with a ‘‘good’’ man. They have a daughter together and build a life.
‘‘Then my ex-husband starts contacting me from inside prison,’’ says Rachel. ‘‘I contact the prison and ask how he is doing that and he obviously has a smuggled cellphone...
‘‘At the age of 20 I thought, ‘I’ve got my daughter now, a lion has come out of me, no way ... I am not going to let him win’.’’
She was working in the public sector during the day, and going home to smoke a methamphetamine (meth) pipe at night. Describing herself as a ‘‘highfunctioning meth addict’’ she says she ‘‘kept it under wraps.’’
When she talks about this part of her life, it is clear she cared about her work.
When contacted, none of her employers in the seven or eight years of her addiction problems had any idea she was on meth at work.
Looking back, she knows it was the breakdown of her relationship with her daughter’s father in 2010 that ignited her drug addiction.
‘‘I ended up in a new relationship. This person was accustomed to meth and this was the first time I tried it.’’
A year later, the couple moved to Australia and her addiction quickly escalated.
‘‘In Australia meth, or ice as it’s known over there, was a whole lot cheaper and easier to access. I became ill with the sickness of being addicted for a good eight months.’’
Rachel became associated with a high-rolling meth supplier in Brisbane she nicknamed the Crack Queen.
‘‘She was selling high volumes of ice, there was a lot of money involved.’’
When Rachel and her partner ‘‘had issues’’, she stayed with the Crack Queen.
Rachel jumped on a plane for a weekend visit to family in New Zealand.
‘‘While I was in New Zealand the Crack Queen’s house was raided and she ended up doing a big lag. It really hit me then that I needed to clean up.’’
The longest she stayed ‘‘up’’ without any sleep, high on meth, was eight days.
‘‘When I was high I noticed my vision was going. Financially ... I was missing work so I stopped working.’’
She owned two properties in New Zealand, luxury cars and even a boat, but any money coming through for the mortgage was spent buying ice.
In 2013 ‘‘things were starting to pile up’’.
‘‘I noticed I was becoming suicidal.’’
Rachel wanted to clean up her life for her daughter’s sake.
‘‘I thought ‘I am going to clean up, get stable’. I got clean.’’
Her daughter moved to Australia and lived with her for just over a year. Life was looking up. They moved home to New Zealand.
On her return, a much-needed job opportunity fell through. Rachel began self-medicating with marijuana and wrestled with depression.
‘‘I then found another employment opportunity with Oranga Tamariki, working with youth in care aged 9-17.’’
She managed to hide her addiction while employed as a casual or fixed-term youth worker for the organisation, regularly working an early shift then going home to ‘‘smoke the pipe with the people’’. She was also dealing meth.
‘‘Sometimes I would not have slept for three days and I was working ... Some of the kids had been taken from meth homes and here I was on meth looking after them.’’
She worked hard to hide her addiction from her colleagues. She felt embarrassed and ashamed. But no concerns were raised formally about her drug use or addiction.
Now that she’s cleaning up her life, she is in counselling.
Telling her story is part of her cleansing. One day she might write a book. For now she wants to reach out to other addicts, especially women. She’s been clean for more than six months but each day is a struggle.
‘‘The hunger for it is always going to be there, I think. I get the taste in my mouth ... There is an odd occasion where it pops into my head, ‘I can do with a puff’. If I wanted to I could have it in my hand in half an hour.
‘‘The drug still has control. I’m powerless, helpless ... Unfortunately in the meth game it does end either in death, guns or you are looking at a lag.’’
One day she wants to use her experiences to help others walk a different path. She could have remained silent – her employers were unaware of her addiction – but she is doing the right thing and standing up.
The next time I see Rachel she is standing on the street, cigarette in hand, talking to a friend, smoke wafting up around them. A woman is explaining her troubled relationship with a violent boyfriend.
‘‘Girl, you need to just let him go,’’ Rachel advises her definitively, arms raised Oprah Winfrey-style. ‘‘Let him go and look after you and your babies, that is the real gold.’’