Thirst for meth puts women behind bars

People who seek treatment through the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services report the following about methamphetamine use:

Percentage who said meth was their drug of choice:
   1996 _ 11
   1997 _ 13
   1998 _ 17
   1999 _ 17
   2000 _ 21
   2001 _ 25

Percentage of women who said meth was their drug of choice in 1994: 3.5.

Percentage of women who said meth was their drug of choice in 2001: 18.5.

Percentage of men who said meth was their drug of choice in 1994: 2.4

Percentage of men who said meth was their drug of choice in 2001: 14.2.

Percentage of Oklahoma high school students who say they use meth: 11.5.

Percentage of U.S. high school students who say they use meth: 9.1.

McLOUD, Okla. (AP) _ Vicki Gantt doesn't tell her 8-year-old why she's in prison. She only tells him that she made a bad choice.

Before prison, she had tried to get clean for her two sons. She made dinner, cleaned house and helped her boys with homework.

And for a while, she pushed aside the urge to buy a few grams of methamphetamine, inject it and let the high consume her.

Her boys went to live with relatives and she went to the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center to live in a dormitory cell with 40 other women, most of them there because they couldn't stop using drugs.

"I wasn't there," the 43-year-old says through tears. "I chose the drugs over my kids and I just hope they can forgive me."

Oklahoma imprisons more of its women than any other state, and women go to jail on drug offenses more than any other crime.

Nearly 48 percent of all women sent to prison last year went for drug possession or distribution, compared with about 31 percent of the men. About 44 percent of those women were first-time offenders, a Department of Corrections survey found.

Oklahoma's female imprisonment rate _ 130 women per 100,000 people _ is more than twice the national average, according to a 2001 study.

About 80 percent of all women in the jail are mothers and almost half of them have children younger than 12.

Putting women in jail ripples through families like a tidal wave.

When parents go to prison, children are shuffled through a network of relatives or taken into state custody and put in foster care.

Still, Gantt beams when she talks about her 8-year-old son's swim team triumphs and how her 19-year-old son has enrolled in college.

What she doesn't talk about are the swim meets she's missed or the birthday parties and graduations she'll experience only through sporadic letters from family, read and reread on her bunk in her dormitory cell.

The drug that sent her to prison is highly addictive.

It is made from ingredients as common as drain cleaner, cold pills, batteries and salt. It can be manufactured quickly in a space as ordinary as a kitchen and as small as a suitcase.

"If you can bake a cake, you can pretty much cook a batch of meth," says Londa Johnson, drug court supervisor in Pontotoc County where the Ada woman was sentenced.

Meth interacts with the part of the brain that releases dopamine, the chemical that tells the body it is experiencing pleasure.

Gantt could stay high on a small dose for nearly 12 hours. And unlike other drugs she had tried, coming down was easy, she says.

There were no tremors or twitches, just tired and sore muscles that could have easily been attributed to staying up for several hours or days at a time.

Meth's high made her feel like she could do anything.

"When I was on meth I could draw when I couldn't draw," she says, "I could write when I couldn't write."

Meth can hook with just one taste of its high, Johnson says.

It snares the poor and the rich, people with GEDs and those with college degrees.

Penny Willoughby was working as a computer programer making $55,000 a year when she smoked meth at a party using a pipe made from a pen and a light bulb.

"It just gave me a good head rush," says Willoughby, just four months into a two-year prison term. "I remember we listened to CDs all night. On meth, you just lose time."

Using meth on the weekends grew into using every morning before going to work. She smoked in the bathroom as family members waited on her doorstep.

After a few hits of meth, Willoughby could sit in front of her computer working on programs for sometimes seven days at a time.

"I needed it to stay awake," she says. "I was working so much and I could do so much when I was on meth."

By the time she stopped, though, she was living in a tent, on food stamps and making tacos at Taco Bell.

Gantt's arrest came at a time when she was teaching a class full of preschoolers at a Head Start in Holdenville.

Her mother found a baggy holding a small amount of meth in Gantt's purse and called police. Gantt's older sister, Sheri Hurley, says the family didn't know what else to do.

"That was the last ditch effort at saving her life," Hurley says. "We thought she was going to be dead. At that point, we had tried everything."

Gantt was sentenced to drug court, where she attended meetings and submitted to random drug testing. But constant supervision and the threat of going to prison wasn't enough to keep her off meth.

Getting the drug out of these women's lives is difficult, even behind bars.

Their eyes light up when they talk about meth. The metallic taste is still fresh on their tongues.

Willoughby says she's reformed. Prison has given her time to think and time to change. She carries a Bible with her and attends weekly religious meetings.

"I can honestly say I'm not going to go back to it," Willoughby says. "I've been given a chance to start my life over and I need to do that."

Gantt isn't so optimistic. She's used the drug while in jail and still calls it "instant pain reliever."

As a convicted felon, Gantt says she'll never teach again when she leaves prison, something that won't happen until she's up for parole in three years.

"I'm afraid," she says. "How am I going to feed myself? I might have to start selling drugs just to feed myself."

And after years behind bars, the craving remains.

"I sit in a dorm with 43 other drug addicts and most of them are talking about how they are going get out and get a rock," Gantt says. "That's not treatment."