Embracing a life without meth

PORT ANGELES — Sometimes you've got to put in more than years to become a grown-up. Kashine Meyer has done the time and then some.

Meyer, 28, started taking methamphetamine casually six years ago. The powerful stimulant gave her energy, she said: "It helped me clean the house."

"You have the energy to go places, the energy to do things. You feel like you're invincible."

But when her stepfather died three years ago, grief led her to take the drug more often, until she was addicted.

"Losing him, I thought I'd lost the whole world," she said. "He raised me from when I was 8."

Meyer had meth in her possession when Sequim police pulled over the car in which she was riding. Her friend had an outstanding warrant, so officers searched the car and found the drugs.

"I'm glad I got in trouble," Meyer says now.

The trouble — a felony — took her into Judge George Wood's Clallam County Superior Court.

During the next several months, she was offered seven plea bargains involving one or another form of rehabilitation.

Meyer rejected them all, but finally accepted a referral to Friendship Diversion Services.

"I thought it was going to be a piece of cake," she said.

At Friendship, however, Ronnie Wuest, Port Angeles branch manager, served up something less palatable: treatment at the Oak Street Center in Port Angeles, attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings and making regular check-ins with Wuest.

Meyer still wasn't ready for adulthood.

"I kept trying to push my boundaries," she said, and slept through her appointments.

She blames some of her lethargy on the effects of meth.

"The first five, six months, you've got to catch up on your sleep because you were up all the time," she said.

Eventually, though, Meyer began rebuilding her life.

She was assigned to Friendship's "Thinking for a Change" course that taught her how to cope with adversity without resorting to drugs.

Meyer also made new friends "that I won't get in trouble with."

As she progressed with the program, she felt herself maturing, she said.

"I think I'm grown up more, to actually be my age," she said.

"When I was using, I was just like a little kid."

Meyer now owns a car — something she couldn't afford when she was taking meth.

"All my money went to drugs," she said. "I can do things for myself now."

She's also begun a hobby.

"I started scrapbooking. I took all my time and effort from using [meth] to doing something good."

Meyer will finish her Friendship program in June and her Oak Street Center treatment in July. But she'll continue her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, a "Stay Clean and Free" program, and a women's group at a local church.

Her final court date is June 23, when her charge will be dismissed if she has successfully completed the program.

Friendship's Wuest said Meyer is one of the program's success stories — not that it came easily.

"We just stayed on her," Wuest said. "We believed in her from the beginning."

Eventually, Meyer said, she'd like to return to school or get a job with a telephone answering service.

Most of all, Meyer is proud her transformation: "Life is pretty good now. I look at life as a whole new adventure."