Talena Brown, 17, first took meth four years ago. After undergoing inpatient treatment, she has been sober for two years, she says. (Daniel Woolfolk/NYTI)
“I liked getting high,” she said. “I thought it was fun. And that was what it was about.”
Arizona is No. 1 in the nation for high school methamphetamine use, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though in most states, the average number of teenagers using meth is about 4.4 percent, Arizona is 8.6 percent, the CDC said.
“I’ve seen that kids have begun to use harder drugs more frequently, more quickly in the development of their issues and addictions,” said Mary Specio-Boyer, director of community health for Cope Community Services, a nonprofit behavioral health organization in Tucson.
Seizures of methamphetamine in 2009 in Arizona totaled 1,190 pounds, almost double the amount in 2008. The majority of that comes from illegal laboratories in Mexico, said Ramona Sanchez, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Phoenix. Arizona shares about 350 miles of border with Mexico.
Meth brought over the border from Mexico has become increasingly common as the police have shut down illegal laboratories in the United States. There are so many fewer labs in the States that local meth-lab raids by the DEA have fallen as much as 92 percent.
Sanchez said that much of the disappearance of labs in the United States could be attributed to restrictions imposed on the sale of pseudoephedrine, which is found in Sudafed and used as a key ingredient in meth. The 2005 amendment to the federal Controlled Substances Act required pharmacies in Arizona and elsewhere to place the medication behind the counter.
Methamphetamine is especially easy to get in Tucson because the city is right between the border and Phoenix, creating a major distribution center and a convenient pit stop for methamphetamine dealers.
“We’re kind of a stop along the way,” Specio-Boyer, the community health director for the behavioral health center, said. “So we do tend to be more highly impacted by substances such as methamphetamine that are coming up through Mexico.”
The federal government has designated Tucson as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HITDA, Specio-Boyer said.
“A lot of the kids are able to get it because it’s really prevalent in our communities,” she said.
Brown said she was introduced to the drug by visitors to her mother’s home who were meth dealers. She said her mother “blames herself a lot for my addiction, which annoys me, because I knew what I was doing.”
When she first tried the drug, she had never seen a meth pipe. “I had no idea how you did meth,” Brown said. “I just knew I was never gonna do it; it was bad.”
But after a friend lit the pipe and held it for her while she took her first hit, she recalled, she let out a cloud of smoke and thought: “I want more. Do it again.”
In eighth grade, Brown said, she used her math textbook as a surface on which to crush meth crystals into lines.
Sanchez said the price of meth in Tucson today is $80 to $100 a gram, depending on purity and availability.
Jane Irvine, director of community outreach and education for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, said that officials thought “prevention programs were particularly important for youth.” By reaching teenagers before they try methamphetamines, Irvine said, members of the Arizona Methamphetamine Task Force anticipate that teens will be less likely to start using drugs.
But public programs outlining the dangers of meth weren’t enough to persuade Brown to say no to the first hit, Brown said. Methamphetamine results in the release of endorphins in the brain, giving users a feeling of intoxication. Continued use can result in severe dental and brain damage. Withdrawal from the drug also plunges users into depression, making it particularly difficult for people to stop taking it.
Brown’s mother, Shannon, said that she began to realize her daughter was becoming more angry and more violent. Shannon Brown said she also began to notice that the meth she kept at home was disappearing. It was she who finally started the process that led to Talena’s treatment, and her own.
Talena Brown agreed that the drug was easy to get. Each day she was using, she said, she could get an “8-ball,” equal to three-and-a-half grams of meth, for free from people she knew who were dealers. She used the drug in the morning and again at night.
She also said she could still pick up a meth pipe at any time.
“I know personally where I could still go today to get it, even though people have moved,” she said. “There’s new people.”
But after having completed a month of residential inpatient treatment in Scottsdale, Ariz., and continuing outpatient support, the 17-year-old Brown is proud to say she has been sober for almost two years.
- Related Video: Me, My Mom, and Meth
A version of this article appeared in print on page 9 of the Tucson 2010 edition of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.