‘Supermoms’ fall into meth trap

By SHAWNA GAMACHE
Idaho Statesman Sunday, August 12, 2007

BOISE, Idaho — When she started using methamphetamine, Julie Saxton was a typical 36-year-old Boise mother. She lived on the Bench with her husband and daughters Maribeth, 8, and Jennifer, 15. She worked as housing programs coordinator for the city. She battled to keep the house clean, stay thin and get her errands done. In 1997, her husband brought home meth to help her lose weight.

“He was always calling me fat and belittling me,” Saxton said. “Of course, the first time I used it I liked the energy, and then the weight started coming off.”

Unwittingly, Saxton, joined a growing number of Treasure Valley women many of them “supermoms” who turn to meth for help, only to end up in the state’s criminal-justice system.

Treasure Valley drug experts say more local women are using meth, and overworked and stressed-out mothers are increasingly turning to the drug to lose weight and gain energy. They are crowding the Ada County Drug Court and women’s prisons. Their children are flooding the foster care system.

“Meth is definitely a women’s drug,” said Marreen Baker Burton, program coordinator of the drug court. “The numbing of the pain, the energy and the weight loss is huge.”

For Saxton, now 46, meth was like a miracle drug. It gave her the energy she needed to keep her house spotless, help her girls with their homework and produce more at the office.

At first, it worked. As she lost weight, Saxton got more comfortable spending time with friends and hosting parties, and her husband started spending more time with her. Her counters gleamed. Because she didn’t sleep much, she had time to bake, cook and decorate her home.

She made a rule never to use meth after noon. Though most people close to her knew her husband was a meth addict, Saxton hid her own use from her girls, her bosses, her landlord and her mother.

But after about a year, she started needing meth just to function. Her husband had late-night parties and cheated on her with other addicts.

In September 2002, a caller tipped police that Saxton and her husband had meth, and the two were arrested. By then, 20-year-old Jennifer was using with her parents. Saxton told police the meth found at her home was her husband’s. She pleaded not guilty. Her landlord bailed her out of jail. Her employer, a furniture store owner, kept her at work.

Saxton was eventually found guilty and served 90 days in a work-release center. She stopped using the drug for a while, then resumed it. She was chugging gallons of water so meth couldn’t be detected in tests required for her probation, making her urine too diluted to test. That’s a common ruse, and authorities were onto it.

Facing prison for violating her probation, Saxton agreed to go to drug court to kick the habit she had been lying about for so long.

“My 14-year-old was just in shock,” Saxton said. “My nickname was Betty Crocker. Nobody would have believed it in a million years.”

Saxton’s story is not uncommon in the Treasure Valley, say coordinators and counselors at Ada County Drug Court, a program that gives addicts intensive treatment and monitoring and clears felony convictions related to drug addiction.

Between 1998 and 2003 the Ada County Drug Court program was less than 45 percent women, said Burton, the program coordinator. Now it’s 57 percent women, and the first phase of the four-phase program is more than two-thirds female. Nearly 85 percent of the women in drug court are addicted to meth, Burton said, and more than two-thirds of them are mothers.

Those numbers are echoed at Idaho’s Department of Correction, where the women’s prison population has grown at more than twice the rate of the men over the past five years.

From 2000 to 2005, the female population jumped nearly 70 percent. According to department research, nearly 90 percent of women inmates assessed with a substance abuse problem listed meth as their drug of choice. A 2005 Idaho State Police survey found that 76 percent of all female inmates had used meth.

Boise drug counselor Sam Hadley said the women meth addicts he sees in the Treasure Valley often fit a mold he calls “supermom.”

“I’ve worked with many women who had large families, and they used methamphetamine to help get the work done, and it worked for a while,” Hadley said. “These women raise their kids well at the beginning because they have a lot of energy, and they look good for their husbands and their boyfriends. But then the addiction kicks in, and they can’t feel anything without meth.”

Because it affects the brain’s release of dopamine, meth robs people of the ability to feel pleasure without the drug, Hadley said. Women lose their emotional connection to their children and no longer feel joy or satisfaction in caring for them.

Former addict Janel Norris said meth let her keep up the public image she always wanted for herself. A mother of three boys, Norris said meth helped her become a thin soccer mom and forget the pain of being raped and molested as a child.

“My house was spotless. I’d stay up all night and clean my house and bake cookies,” said Norris, now 37. “It erased all emotion, and I could be anything I wanted.”

Norris thought meth made her a better mother to sons Adrian, now 17, Adam, now 14, and Kord, now 4. Looking back, she says that maybe it did in the beginning, when she was focused and productive. But now she realizes that after the first year, she was mentally absent when she was with her boys. She often left them with her mother overnight while she was out partying. She’s ashamed of some things, like teaching Adam to hide in the bushes and bark if anyone was coming so she wouldn’t get caught buying meth.

“He was my road dog, and I ruined him that way,” Norris said. “I missed so much with my big boys that I’m not missing with Kord.”

Women who think meth helps them be better mothers don’t realize until they’re sober the damage they’ve done to their kids, local experts say. At first, they do have more energy and are more present in their kids’ lives, Hadley said. But once the addiction kicks in, they are absent and can be neglectful.

“I hate meth because it has destroyed my family and my children,” said 32-year-old Jessica Fitzke, a mother of three who used meth for more than 10 years.

Like many Treasure Valley women who use meth, Fitzke was caught when her newborn twins tested positive for the drug. Kameron and Cody, now 1, were born a month and a half early and went into foster care with Fitzke’s mother. Fitzke got the twins and 3-year-old Henna back when she graduated from drug court Wednesday.

She said it’s hard not to spoil her kids now, thinking of what she put them through, like making Henna nap with her for 10 hours in the middle of the day when she crashed after a being high for days.

“Until they’ve been clean from meth about a year, two years, they’d still argue with me about being a good mother,” said Janet Guerin, head of women’s programs at the Idaho Department of Correction.

From 2002 to 2006, the number of children in foster care has increased by more than one-third in Ada, Elmore, Boise and Valley counties and by 70 percent in Canyon, Gem, Owyhee, Payette, Adams and Washington counties. State government spending on foster care more than doubled over the same period.

Mothers using meth is the cause, said Susan Hazleton, the retiring director of the Family Advocate Program, which provides court-appointed advocates for children in foster care. Its caseload has gone up 78 percent since 2000.

Charity Hagen said one of the hardest parts of recovering from her addiction has been realizing the time she lost with her son, Calvin. Hagen, now 37, found out on her honeymoon that her husband, her college sweetheart, was a heroin addict. She started using meth with her husband when Cal was 3. She ended up leaving her husband soon after, but stayed with meth.

At first, she was getting praise and promotions in her work as an escrow officer. But within a few years, she lost her job and spent her time getting high with friends and stealing merchandise to pay for drugs, food and the rent.

“I thought it would be a bonding thing between my husband and me, absolutely not realizing the death grip it would have on me,” Hagen said. “I didn’t use it in front of my son, but so what? I locked myself up in my room with my friends for hours on end.”

Cal, 12, said he knew what was going on with his mother and once walked in on her using meth. His house was clean enough, and he was never hurt.

“It looked normal, but it wasn’t normal,” Cal Hagen said. “I used to ask her for some juice, and she’d say OK, and three hours later I still wouldn’t have my juice.”

Hagen has been clean for 15 months. Cal said he trusts his mother again and is happy to have her back.

Most mothers get treatment only when they face a felony charge or when their children have been taken away by child protective services.

Local drug counselors and experts say many women addicted to meth don’t think the addiction can be overcome. Hadley said part of the problem is that anti-meth efforts are focused so heavily on scaring people away from using meth — not on getting help for those already addicted.

“We’re not saying also that people recover from methamphetamine use,” Hadley said. “There’s all this focus on brain damage.”

And the treatment money and programs aren’t targeted at women, experts say.

Idaho is one of the few states without a residential drug treatment program where mothers and their children can stay together, said Bethany Gadzinski, head of the substance abuse program at the Department of Health and Welfare.

Gadzinski said the department is trying to get federal money to expand to the Treasure Valley a pilot program started in Pocatello in January.

Idaho lawmakers voted to expand the drug court last year, and are devoting more money to treatment in Idaho prisons.

Saxton, Norris, Hagen and Fitzke all graduated from Ada County Drug Court and have been clean for at least a year without relapse. They are all employed and have their children in stable homes.

Hagen made the dean’s list last semester at Boise State University. But she will be on probation for seven years for stealing to get drugs.

She said she lost eight years of her life but is relieved the nightmare is over.

“I’ll take the repercussions,” Hagen said. “I’m a little embarrassed that I let meth get ahold of me. I’m an intelligent woman.”