Sep 19, 2003  |  By: JOE CREA  | COMMENTS     

Crystal methamphetamine helped Jack, a 36-year-old D.C. man who asked to remain anonymous, cope with his HIV-positive status. The drug was a pure escape from reality. It increased a level of selfishness that he had never known and left him a man with a “huge ego and no-self confidence.”

His personality, once under control, was no longer, thanks to what he refers to as the “devil’s drug.” On Sept. 11, 2001, he remained holed up in a Boston hotel room with crystal meth, a “club drug” also known by nicknames like Tina, T, crank and speed. He smoked all day, paranoid that the police would soon break down his door.

Jack didn’t stop thinking of himself until he read in the Wall Street Journal a few days later that a Brooks Brothers clothing store near his old office on Wall Street had been turned into a morgue for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Jack, who describes himself as a “space cadet” who frequently forgets and loses things, patronized the store. The news about the clothing store saddened him, and he vowed to clean up his act.

He tried to sober up after Sept. 11, but soon relapsed. He lost his job, his home and was $50,000 in debt. Destitute, he received some financial help from an acquaintance and checked himself in to Cumberland Heights, an in-patient rehab center in Tennessee. When he first met with one of the counselors at the recovery center, the most difficult question he had to answer was, “What is your address?”

“I had lost my apartment two weeks ago, and I was homeless without a job,” Jack said. “It was terribly humbling and humiliating.”

Jack had gone from working as a Wall Street executive to pouring coffee at Starbucks in three years — all because of his crystal meth addiction.

“Crystal wants to get us alone where it does the most damage,” Jack said. “It robbed my soul of what I thought was so important. It’s the devil’s drug.”

Alex loses his friends
Alex, a 25 year-old gay man who also asked to remain anonymous, said he views his addiction to crystal as a “choice,” but he began using abusively because “everyone around me was doing it, and I wanted to feel that I belonged.” It was never a physical craving, he said, but more like a social obligation.

“I honestly believe that I did [crystal] because everyone around me was doing it,” Alex said. “If everyone else was doing it, why shouldn’t I? People would look at me differently if I wasn’t going to do crystal.”

Alex said he had never experimented with any drugs other than marijuana and ecstasy before he began using crystal meth two years ago. He said that early on he would use nine dosages, or “blows,” out of a quarter bag in one evening, but that eventually he would take double that, or a half-bag, over one extended period of use.

“I also did it for the fun of it,” Alex said. “The music in clubs became more intense, it made me all horny. It gave me this high that I didn’t have to think about anything else.”

But when he went sober, Alex lost all of his “friends,” because they continued to use crystal. He tried to hang out with his old acquaintances, but said no one wanted to hang out with the “sober kid.”

“There was a core group that I was kind of close to, and they would say, ‘Oh, we are here for you,’ but in reality, they were placating me,” Alex said. “They were happy for me, but they were still getting fucked up. So, with me being sober, and everyone else remaining fucked up around me, I recognized the situation and wanted to get out.”

Descending into paranoia
At the height of his addiction, Clinton, a 31-year-old gay man, was extraordinarily paranoid. He was taking crystal at work to “keep himself going,” thinking that if he could get through the workday, he would be able to get home and sleep for 15 hours.

One evening, after going without sleep for days, his paranoia intensified after he returned home from work. He was convinced for eight straight hours that the police were going to raid his home. He ran around his house and flushed all his drugs down the toilet.

When he realized that that the police weren’t coming, he decided that lesbians in the neighborhood were playing a “huge joke” on him. With his mental capacity severely impaired, he ...