balmain PHOTOGRAPHY

Editorial

story by Molly O'Conner
photographs by Maxwell Balmain

Continued from Part ONE «

Part TWO

During her first two weeks of drug rehabilitation, Kim awoke each morning and groped at her night stand in search of her mirror. A line of cocaine had started her day since junior high.

Faller grew up in a large, suburban home on the Redmond plateau, "the kind of place you wouldn't expect someone to be doing drugs.''

Her older friends introduced her to marijuana the summer before Kim went into fifth grade. In sixth grade, she won an essay contest sponsored by the anti-drug program DARE. "Before I was given the DARE award I smoked some pot,'' said Kim.

It wasn't a special occasion. By then, she smoked pot at the beginning and at the end of each school day.

By junior high, Kim had moved onto acid, mushrooms, cocaine and methamphetamine. Her drug supply came from her older friends. Kim used her weekly $10 allowance to buy drugs, some of which she resold for a profit to younger kids. "When I WAS in class, I was always high."

At Eastlake High, Kim said, she snorted lines of cocaine. While on an acid trip during her English final, Kim left the room when she thought the words were jumping off the page. Her parents, she said, didn't know what was happening.

"I put up the front that I was the excellent daughter,'' said Kim, who was involved with softball, volleyball, cheerleading and track and held a class office. Kim also carried a 3.8 to 4.O grade point average.

But on March 7, it was Kim's dad who pulled her from school and took her to a drug treatment center. She weighed 90 pounds. The doctors, she said, were amazed that she was still alive.

When she left the center, Kim started at a new school and made new friends to leave past temptations behind. She's been sober for 14 months. After she graduates in June, Kim plans to become a drug and alcohol counselor.

In the meantime, she talks to parents and kids at local schools about her past drug use. She believes she would have stayed away from drugs if someone her own age had told her doing drugs could lead to jail, a psychiatric ward or death.

"After I came out of treatment, it was like being a 2-year-old. I had to learn how to do everything normal and sober because drugs had been part of my daily routine.''

Six Xanax mixed with vodka almost killed Ben when he was 15.

He remembers thinking the pills his friend gave him were codeine. But after that, he doesn't remember much. Two weeks after Ben left the hospital, he started doing acid at school. One day he made the mistake of calling his parents while high. He started outpatient treatment soon after and has been sober since December.

Ben said alcohol and cigarettes just "popped up'' when he was in elementary school. "I didn't even see weed until eighth grade.''

Ben first tried pot at a party.

Smoking pot and drinking "turned into a weekend thing and before I knew it turned into an all-week thing.'' In middle school, Ben said he would smoke pot before school and at lunch. After school he would drink and, sometimes, do a hit of acid. But he and his friends spent most of their time smoking their way though the shoebox full of pot they found in the woods. By the time Ben hit Issaquah High School he was "getting messed up with anyone'' he could.

"I always had a good excuse. I went to stuff that was parent-proof. Stuff that parents approved of,'' like the movies. But an outing to the movies always included a couple cans of beer. Or Ben and his friends would drink with parents who didn't mind.

"I tried to stay away from parties because I didn't want to get caught.''

He said that if kids "play a sport here or there, wear nice clothes and stay in class then it's cool.' Ben believes that his drug use was a phase. But quitting wasn't easy. He missed the high and he missed his friends. He said he can still go to a friend's house and have one beer.

As for other drugs, "There isn't a next time. Another drug and I'm out of the house."

Kate fell hard and fast.

First with alcohol. Then with pot.

A year ago, Kate couldn't even imagine seeing marijuana. It was "not a part of my world,'' said the high school junior who has a family history of alcoholism. Last summer, Kate started going to parties and drinking on weekends. But big crowd scenes weren't for her so she would fall into the smaller groups gathered at a party. Those usually were the kids doing pot. That's how Kate got her first puff.

"It became so easy so fast."

Her pot use escalated from a couple of times a month to every day of the week. She once skipped school for three weeks just to smoke. "It was like eating. We didn't go a day without it,'' said Kate. She and her boyfriend would smoke before breakfast, at lunch and after school. She continued her routine until she was sitting in a McDonald's on a rainy Sunday night. It was the beginning of March. "Oh, this is not how I want (my life) to be,'' thought Kate.

She called her mom, who lived in Spokane, that night and asked to try treatment. Kate said most of her support came from her boyfriend, who later quit with her, and her mom.

"I started to stay sober and realized that I liked it. There's so much to do and so much I missed while smoking pot.''

Kate relapsed once at the end of March. "I wanted to try it one more time - to see if I wanted the sober life or the life I had before.''

The hardest part about quitting was realizing what she had missed and what little she could recall from the past few months, including her niece's birth. "Once you quit, everything comes down on you, all you wasted or did during the time you used.''

If her boyfriend hadn't quit, she would have had to find a new group of friends. "When you start to do drugs you lose sober friends, but when you quit you lose your drug friends.''

Now Kate, who once got good grades, wants to do well in school and graduate.

She considers herself lucky because she quit after only eight months and because "a lot of my friends haven't quit and some started in middle school."

"If you're curious, you try it. And once you try it and you like it, you don't care. Pot makes you not care.''

Travis struggles every day, waffling between sobriety and addiction.

Now he'll struggle on his own.

Travis knew the bottom line: Do drugs again and you leave the house. It was a deal his mother insisted on after he completed a drug treatment program last year. Part of the deal was taking periodic drug tests.

Last Monday Travis failed the test. His mother thought he had been clean for almost a year. He confessed he had been drinking and doing Ecstacy and pot since the end of February.

Travis moved out the same day.

"The part that me made me loose my stomach was leaving and saying good-bye to my mom. I feel guilty because I lied to her." This is at least his third relapse in two years.

After an arrest for selling drugs, Travis has gone through numerous drug treatments. He would always quit for months at a time. But he always fought treatment. During one relapse, his daily drug diet included LSD and 12 codeine pills, a diet that gnawed away at his stomach lining and dropped 20 pounds from his already lean frame in two weeks. A new girlfriend made him stop. He said he didn't want to have another relationship built on getting drunk and high. Two months after they broke up, Travis used again.

As a seventh-grader, Travis began pounding beers on the weekend with his brother, who was then in the 10th grade. He moved to pot by eighth grade. That year, Travis's brother went into drug treatment and Travis "took over his area." He started eating hallucinogenic mushrooms and smoking more pot.

To support his habit, he started selling.

His mom talked to him about drugs. He assured her that he had seen what had happened to his brother and "no way" would he do drugs. The next day travis got caught selling LSD at school, was expelled and hauled off to the police station. After that Travis' life became a series of drug treatments, relapses and deceptions.

Before his weekly drug tests and meetings with counselors, Travis would try to mask the drugs in his system. He would stuff his book bag full of encyclopedias and run around the block or stand outside a steaming shower to try to work up a heavy sweat. He consumed combinations of vitamins, vinegar, cranberry juice, water and a special tea he believed would stump the drug screen. He also dumped his grunge-rocker look. He even became more involved in family activities.

"You have to find a way to disguise yourself," he said. Travis thought his act was convincing.

But when his dad called his school guidance counselor last Monday and described Travis' lethargy and disheveled appearance, the counselor cautioned those were the signs of drug abuse.

Travis now lives with two friends - one doesn't go to school, the other barely goes to school. "I have no future game plan right yet. I've got to go to school. I'll work for rent, work for insurance, work for food. My spare time, if I have any, is going straight into my music."

But he 's not certain this means an end to his addiction.

"It's a total war, and it's all against yourself."

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