Methamphetamine Trafficking at Both National and Personal Levels

In the last twenty years, figures for methamphetamine consumption and addiction have skyrocketed. One young man's story of his life will illustrate how addiction can spread and destroy one's life, and how it can be resolved.

You might say that methamphetamine production and trafficking has been a growth industry for the last couple of decades. In the early 90s, methamphetamine was largely restricted to the West Coast and Central Valley of California. Now, methamphetamine can be found across the United States. Methamphetamine is now second only to alcohol and marijuana as the drug used most frequently in many Western and Midwestern states.

Meth users tend to use the drug in a "binge and crash" pattern, meaning that they will maintain a continual high as long as they can, staying awake for days, and then crash, sleeping for days until they recover. Long-term meth use creates such symptoms as anxiety, confusion, mood disturbances, violent behavior, paranoia, hallucinations, and delusion. Earlier this decade, state and federal laws began to make it harder to purchase the chemicals needed to manufacture the drug, which reduced the number of small domestic labs but opened the door to the importation of more drugs from Mexico.

But these patterns do little to describe the descent into addiction experienced by those who use the drug.

Barry is a handsome young man in Oklahoma who started out as a 4.0 student and athlete. When he started running with an older crowd, he started getting high with them. He found he could make a profit selling drugs and he built himself a network of suppliers and across the state. He said, "I was selling to people that ran car dealerships and restaurants, who worked at fast food places. I sold at fraternity houses and to moms in the suburbs. Meth would let me stay up for days, let me work harder, make a bunch of money, crash out for a few days and then do it again."

"Finally, I started to lose control of the whole network I had built," he explained. "I was paranoid and hallucinating. One day I just lost it when I thought someone had been following me around and I ended up getting arrested for trafficking." Barry found recovery from methamphetamine addiction at Narconon Arrowhead in Oklahoma, one of the country's leading drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, located in Canadian, Oklahoma.

"Narconon Arrowhead has an excellent success rate with those suffering from meth addiction," said Derry Hallmark, Director of Admissions and Certified Chemical Dependency Counselor at Narconon Arrowhead. "Within three to six months, a person going through our program fully addresses the three barriers to addiction recovery - cravings, guilt and depression - that are experienced by every addict. With a long-term drug-free program like this one, a person has a chance to build a new life in place of the one that was destroyed by drugs and rebuild their relationships."

Call Narconon Arrowhead at 1-800-468-6933 for a free addiction assessment and referral to a location anywhere in the country. Or visit their website at www.stopaddiction.com. The Narconon program was founded in 1966 by William Benitez in Arizona State prison, and is based on the humanitarian works of L. Ron Hubbard. In more than 120 centers around the world, Narconon programs restore drug and alcohol abusers and addicts to a clean and sober lifestyle.