Santa Maria Times: Matters of Life or Meth Part 1: Going to Hell and Back

This is Part One of the award winning series from the Santa Maria Times on the tragedies of Methamphetamine:

Jaime Applegate’s slide from working mother to desperate junkie was so fast she hardly knew it was happening.

“I had a family,” she recalled. “For six years I was a pretty decent mom. It just kind of went downhill so fast.”

Looking back, the 28-year-old Applegate hardly recognizes the person she became while in the grips of methamphetamine. Her journey is not unusual.

Countless people in the Santa Maria Valley are using meth or struggling to get off it. The drug is cheap, easy to get and widespread, and its effects often are devastating.

Meth cuts across economic levels and ethnic groups, hitting people from dysfunctional families and those with sitcom-perfect childhoods. No one is immune.

The high-powered stimulant can be smoked, snorted, injected, stirred into coffee or baked into food and eaten. It’s a high that is less expensive and longer lasting than cocaine; a typical methamphetamine high can last for hours or even all night.

Applegate had a fairly normal life before she got hooked on meth. She dreamed of going to college and having a career, had friends and a happy marriage. She just liked to have a good time – and sometimes that meant using drugs.

Applegate thought she could handle methamphetamine. At first it seemed like a fun, social thing to do.

“When I first started doing it, I took care of my child, and had a pretty happy relationship with my husband, and was able to maintain a job. The feeling wasn’t there like I had to have it, when I first started doing it.”

But the drug ripped her life apart. The former honors student stole, lied and did things she prefers not to discuss to feed her habit.

She lost her son, ending up homeless and on the streets, emotionally broken and feeling utterly alone, before she was finally ready to quit. Despite the high personal price Applegate paid for her addiction, it took her a long time to want to quit.

By the time the police raided a friend’s home where she was crashed for the night, she was almost grateful to surrender and beg for help.

Applegate sobered up in county jail and began to mend her life.

Now she spends three days a week at Recovery Point, a drug treatment facility in Santa Maria operated by the nonprofit Good Samaritan Inc. Sanctioned by the court, the Proposition 36 program allows those convicted of a first or second meth possession to swap jail time for treatment.

Sober and clean today, Applegate’s biggest regret is what her drug use did to the people she loves.

“The relationships I’ve lost and destroyed because of it. From my brothers and sisters and my mom to my husband and subsequent romantic relationships. My son – that’s probably the biggest (relationship) I’ve screwed up because of drugs.”

Applegate began drinking and smoking pot at age 12. She picked up a meth habit with her husband, after marrying and having a child at the age of 16.

The Lompoc native has fond memories of good years of family life in North Dakota with her husband and son. There she didn’t do meth, though she drank and smoked pot.

“I was so happy to be a mom when I had him. It wasn’t like where I’m 16, I’m having a baby now, and this sucks, I want to pawn him off. I wasn’t one of those kind of moms. I was happy to have him.”

Applegate snorted crank meth – a less pure version of meth cut with other substances such as talcum powder, laxatives, and baking soda – on and off for a couple of years. She used it for fun after her marriage ended and she moved back to Santa Barbara County. Getting the drug was easy; it seemed everyone she knew used.

“How do you describe it? It’s fast, and it’s happy, and it’s up. You don’t want to sleep, and everything seems exciting, everything seems good. It seems like you can do so many things at once, which nothing gets done, but you can talk a lot. You feel fast and happy, I guess, in the beginning anyway.”

Applegate says her habit wasn’t a big deal until she began smoking crystal meth later.

Users say that crank or “dirty” meth is a different beast than crystal meth, which is more pure and delivers a more potent high. Smoking, too, packs a more intense high than snorting.

But snorting about $200 a week of crank meth seemed to help her performance at a Goleta call center.

“It actually seemed to improve the amount of money I made. Talking fast, being on it … you’re kind of just focused on (the work), except for trips to the bathroom to snort more drugs,” she said.

After the job fell through, Applegate got a new boyfriend whose friends partied hard. She moved in with him in Lompoc and left her son at her former mother-in-law’s most of the time.

“I would get jobs, but I would quit them within a week,” she said. “I didn’t have enough time to get high in the day, so I would quit jobs.”

Applegate’s ex-husband came to take their son for the summer, planning to bring him back for school. But by the time he returned, Applegate still had no job, no stable place to live. So the ex kept the son for the school year. The child was 6 at the time.

“I felt guilty,” she said. “It was awful. It was really awful. And I felt, for lack of better words, like the biggest piece of … on the planet. Cuz I’d raised him. You know? Pretty much by myself.”

But the ex-husband had a new wife and seemed a reformed family man, so she felt it was for the best.

“When I was up, and when I was using, and when I was partying, I didn’t have to think about not having him. But in the downtime, yeah,” she said. “Emotionally, I would be just wrecked over it. But not every day.”

After her son left things got worse. Someone introduced her to crystal meth for the first time. Crystal meth goes through an additional step of purification that makes it more powerful – and more addictive.

“It was excellent, It was just a world apart from the drugs I’d been snorting. I got a ringing in my ears and my head felt all fuzzy. It was like an actual high.”

“From then on, I smoked it every day. I smoked crystal meth every day.”

To pay for the drugs, Applegate stole from the retail business she and her boyfriend had started. He didn’t know she was using.

“I slept at night, because I didn’t want him to know. I took pills to go to bed at night. I took Valium, Xanax, Soma, other people’s prescription drugs. I bought prescription drugs on the street.

“I still thought I had it together,” she said.

On a late-night trip from her drug dealer’s house, Applegate was busted for possession and arrested. She got drug diversion, a treatment alternative for first time drug offenders, but couldn’t follow through with the program, and tested dirty.

“I wasn’t ready to stop. And my life went to hell.”

She broke up with the boyfriend and the business closed. She skipped town to avoid prosecution.

“I packed up my truck and I ran. I moved back to North Dakota to be near my son,” she said. “It was a decision I made when I was high. I drove 2,000 miles in a truck that shouldn’t have went that far, and I ran.”

Applegate ran out of drugs on the road and felt the weight of losing her son and her messed-up life.

She got a job and stayed off meth for nine months – though she used cocaine on occasion and drank daily – but returned to Lompoc when friends came to visit bearing meth. Plans fell through and she had nothing and nowhere to go.

“I was homeless. I started couch-hopping, and staying with various people,” she said. “Some nights I slept on the street. I would use the bar bathroom to bathe myself.”

“I had to scramble and scrape and lie, and do so many different things that I’m not proud of to get drugs.”

Finally, Applegate crashed at a friend’s house and it was raided.

“I woke up and there were policeman there and they asked me who I was and I was just so defeated and so miserable and so beaten, I told them who I was.”

She cleaned up in county jail and started recovering. She found faith and moved in with her grandmother. Today she says she’d never go back to meth.

“You start doing it because it’s fun. But once you get into the addiction part of it, you use it to cover up things that are bad in your life. It’s a mask. It’s a cover.”

“Even now, it’s like, oh my god, I feel … I gave my son away,” Applegate said.

Today, Applegate’s son is 12, and has been living with his father for six years. But the father just went to prison, so Applegate is bringing him to live with her.

“It’s awesome. It’s kind of scary. I haven’t had him full time in six years. It’s one of the goals I set for myself when I first started this whole thing last December. I wanted to get my son back. And to try to get a job and be able to function in society.”

For Applegate, life has begun again.

“I’ve got just a lot of reasons to stay clean. Everything from the quality of life to the respect I get and the trust people give me. Life just keeps getting better. I wouldn’t trade my worst day clean for my best day using.”

“I feel more grateful than lucky. It’s a God thing. God had a plan. It’s amazing. I don’t know what more to say about it. It’s totally a chance at a brand-new life. The world’s wide open at this point and I never used to think so. It always seemed so impossible.”

Methamphetamine is too readily available.

Some of those problems are chronicled here.