Meth killing more users than ever
Before news of an opioid crisis tore through national media, Tori Holcomb knew the dangers of painkillers. She got addicted after a softball injury and saw others around her struggling too.
Before the resurgence of heroin caused alarm, Holcomb knew it was getting more popular. She fell into using the drug, and the bleak new world that came with it, when doctors stopped writing her prescriptions for an opioid.
It is the afflicted who are first to know about every epidemic.
Now, Holcomb knows something else most people don’t: Methamphetamine, a drug that lawmakers fought with success in the 2000s, is back — and it’s more popular, plentiful and lethal than ever.
While the opioid crisis takes the spotlight, prosecutors and police say they also have been coming to grips with the devastating rebound of meth, which is killing more people in America today than in the mid-2000s when it was the national drug problem that got the most attention.
Deaths related to stimulants — mostly meth — were up nationwide by more than 250 percent from 2005 to 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Georgia, deaths involving meth have increased every year since 2010, rising from 65 in 2010 to 200-plus last year, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
And those numbers don’t include Gwinnett, Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb counties, where the data are tracked differently. But U.S. Attorney Byung Pak said the metropolitan Atlanta area also is seeing an alarming jump in the number of people using meth and a significant increase in deaths.
Experts say lawmakers, police and prosecutors got better and better at curtailing the country’s meth manufacturing in the 2000s, until they drove most production into Mexico. There, cartels make a more potent and cheaper version of the drug. In America, their product is now so widely available that a drug once mostly used by working-class white people is spreading to every demographic.
And while the nation was busy watching one epidemic, another was regenerating.
At North Gwinnett High School more than a decade ago, Holcomb saw friends broken by meth, a drug with awful side effects. Her friends picked at sores on their faces compulsively, and their behavior was erratic. Some had bouts of psychosis. This isn’t all meth can do. It can rot teeth. It makes the user gaunt and look like death. Over time, it can even lower a user’s IQ.
Holcomb considered it a filthy drug. She tried to help her friends and talk them through it, partly because she’d watched her grandfather die of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol abuse.
Holcomb said she understood having a void to fill. She’d always had a nagging feeling of being “less than,” especially in high school, and addiction had blighted her family tree for generations. But she didn’t yet understand addiction. She wondered why her friends couldn’t just stop. restaurants and frequently got fired, she said, because she always seemed to be late. She felt dragged down by the drug. She needed more energy.
So she turned to meth. The first hit had the desired effect: euphoria, energy pulsing through her body. She rose from lounging endlessly in her recliner and felt she could live again.
But after a few days, she was ashamed. She’d done the dirty drug; she felt dirty. She turned on the faucet, took soap in her hands and scrubbed. Her eyes told her there was nothing there, that chemicals bounding in her brain couldn’t be washed away with soap on her hands. But she couldn’t stop scrubbing.
As time passed, more consequences came. She felt rage, had too much energy. She screamed. She started shoplifting. Once, she thought she’d slip in and out of a store undetected, but got caught and later discovered she’d never left. She’d been wandering around the store for hours.
When she found out she was pregnant, she faced a choice. Holcomb said she managed to sober up to have her son in early 2014. But she had never dealt with the selfdoubt that had facilitated her drug use. She faced postpartum depression. She went back to meth to cope. She thought the energy would help her be a better mother. County jail.
She entered the county’s drug court program and moved into a halfway house. Nine months after her overdose, she and a friend from the halfway house relapsed. Three months later, the same friend overdosed and died.
Holcomb knew it could’ve been her. Atlanta U.S. attorney in 2017, expects it to get worse before it gets better. He looks at the American meth problem not as a disease that can be cured, but one that must be managed.
The way to do that, he and other officials say, is to cut the supply by going after distributors and their organizations. People ask him if it’s hopeless, because the supply comes from outside the U.S.
“If there was no enforcement, this problem would be 100-fold,” Pak said.
After Holcomb’s friend’s death, she didn’t use again. She confronted that “less than” feeling. She prayed. She dieted and got healthier. She went to Narcotics Anonymous. She and her boyfriend are raising their son together.
Holcomb refers to her drug period as “death” and her sobriety as “life.” She knows she is among the lucky. She knows many die from meth or stay addicted for decades.
She works for Navigate Recovery. One of her duties is to go to emergency rooms to talk to overdose patients, to tell them of her experience. “There is life after death,” she tells them. The program focuses on opioid overdoses. She knows the temptation to go back to escaping with pills. She knows if the patients feel slowed down by painkillers, they can easily find meth.
She tells them to keep in touch, even if they aren’t ready to stop yet.