I keep a small photograph, along with a stash of other mementoes from my time in Los Angeles, in a '50s style wicker picnic basket, underneath a pile of suitcases in a cupboard.  Until last year, I had never shown it to anyone.

By Clea Myers.

The photograph serves as a stark reminder of that time in my life, ten years ago. I keep it because it fits into the jigsaw of my personal history even though I have often wished the person were a stranger.

In the photo I am a fully-fledged 'tweaker' - a crystal meth addict in American street slang - caught up in a self-perpetuated web of dislocation and self-fragmentation. On the back I had written, surprisingly neatly: 'Still in living hell a.k.a quality paranoia'.

Looking at it now the image is vaguely foreign like a mad aunt secreted away in a locked attic. But the haunted girl is me. I have the visible scars inside and outside my body, as well as the silent ones engraved on my soul. My eyes are dead: black pins awash in milky hollows framed by anaemic, blotchy flesh and underlined by dark grey shadows. Before I had been called pretty, but you cannot see that now. Around my neck on a chain meshed with a leather thread are various talismans: a crucifix, an oversized key, a shiny gold heart and Ganesh, to ward off the evil I felt so keenly around me.

I appear suspended; there is no backdrop to indicate where I am. This reminds me of the gluey yellow fly-paper strips my mother used to hang in her country kitchen in France - some flies still alive but trapped in motion. I am alive but imprisoned, stuck in a prison of my own making. In three years I had gone from Brown University, an Ivy League college on the east coast of America, to a Los Angeles women's jail. 

Why did I choose to live like this? Was I not a young woman full of potential? What had happened to my dreams and aspirations?

By the time this photograph was taken, there was no such thing as choice - I was fully ensnared in the addictive cycle. I used crystal meth to live, lived to use crystal meth and simply could not envisage my life without it. Either I was up for four days straight, or sleeping 'dead-dodo sleep', as I called it.         

For the uninitiated, crystal meth - or crank, Tina-girl, yaba, go fast, ice - is made by cooking up a wide range of substances, including farm fertiliser, lye, ammonia, ephedrine. Anyone with some knowledge of chemistry can cook it if they have the recipe, although it is a risky endeavour because of the high levels of heat needed. The recipe tends to be guarded closely, like a rare alchemical transmutation although, to my horror, dubious versions of it are now posted on the Internet. It was first synthesised in the 1880s and was used by Germany and Japan in the Second World War to improve soldiers' performances.

This utterly man-made drug erases and destroys any sense of conscience, rationality, discretion and humanity. I witnessed it within myself and in my circle of tweaker deviants. And like denim, doughnuts and crack before it, crystal meth is on its way over here from the US, where it has become endemic since 2000. So much so that the UN issued a global warning in March 2006 and the British government have placed import restrictions on the chemicals needed to make crystal meth, and reclassified it as a Class A narcotic.

I first tried crystal meth with my neighbour, Gordon, a sexy artist who had caught my eye soon after my arrival in LA. I was young, rebellious and the adult child of an alcoholic. My perception of normal was questionable and I thrived on thrill-seeking. I had a great desire to live life to its fullest and embraced experimentation. The problem that I kept coming back to was my inability to maintain control or rationale when I took any form of chemical. It was as if I became a different version of myself - the flip side of my positive, well-meaning nature.

Like most addicts I did not become addicted right away to crystal meth, although I sensed I might be a prime candidate. Its initial euphoria gave me the self-belief that I lacked, while my weight dropped substantially. A hit lasted about five hours so it was ostensibly possible to take within my work environment, without causing suspicion -  unlike cocaine that would require regular trips to and from the bathroom. I should add that any work I had quickly dried up because, after a couple months of use, the drug's negative effects had overtaken my accountability. Paranoia set in and listening to plots against me, through apartment walls, was not an uncommon activity.

Complete and utter madness? Absolutely! But this is the reality of the disease of addiction.

After my first arrest and night in the cells, I vowed I would never touch crystal meth again and eagerly enrolled in an expensive treatment centre. Four months later I relapsed and never looked back - until I had the option to leave LA for good and return home to the UK for further medical treatment, or a year inside and the prospect of a dead-end career as a petty criminal.

I returned to the UK not as the storming success I had initially envisaged, but as a washed-up addict with paranoid delusions, weighing only ninety-five pounds.

Since I started to practise Buddhism in 2001, I have become more willing to accept my addictive disease as part of my daily reality. As Daisaku Ikeda says: 

        Life is a struggle with ourselves. It is a tug-of-war

        between moving forward and regressing,

        between unhappiness and happiness. . .

        Taking the first step leads to the next one.”

What's Your Poison? is for all of us involved in recovery from addictive illness, and anyone else interested in this often confusing and loaded subject. Here I offer a snapshot of my understanding of what addiction means for me, and I intend it to be a starting point for further articles and interviews covering all aspects of addiction - from personal stories to current medical research/discoveries, to different points of view, as well as humorous anecdotes and cartoons. 

I actively raise awareness about the dangers of crystal meth in the UK. If you want to talk to someone about drugs or alcohol call 0800 77 66 00 or visit www.talktofrank.com.

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