They are rich and they are poor. They are the seemingly ordinary people delivering your mail and teaching your kids and working behind the counter at the gas-and-go.

Chances are you know someone addicted to drugs. If not someone in your own family then maybe a co-worker or a friend or someone singing hymns alongside you at church.

"Addiction affects people of all persuasions, it respects no boundaries," says prominent Salt Lake attorney Lou Callister, who started Project Hope with his wife, Ellen, to help Utah addicts. Their son repeatedly battled cocaine and alcohol addiction before he was killed in a car accident.

Roughly 100,000 Utahns, or one out of every 20, suffer from an addiction to alcohol or drugs. One-fifth of all addicts are children under age 18.

The average Utah addict is 31 years old, white and LDS. Two out of three are men.

But women are fast catching up. The number of women admitted to addiction treatment centers increased by 144 percent the past year, compared to a 20 percent increase for men.

The problem, state officials say, is reaching epidemic proportions.

For decades, they watched as the cases of heroin, cocaine and alcohol addiction have mounted beyond capacity of state resources. Now they are seeing a "frightening increase" in the number of women addicted to methamphetamine — better known as "meth" or "speed."

Roughly 1,700 women were admitted for methamphetamine addiction last year, virtually identical to the number of men treated for the same addiction. Until meth, there has never been a drug that women abused in the same proportions as men.

Adding insult to social injury, statistics compiled by the state Division of Substance Abuse say 90 percent of women addicted to speed have young children at home. And experts say those children, in turn, run an extraordinarily high risk of becoming addicts themselves.

The cycle of addiction carries horrific social costs in terms of lives forever scarred by violence, disease and poverty. There are welfare costs, incarceration costs, crime costs and medical costs. There is the cost of broken families, scarred psyches and abuse.

Six out of every 10 cases where the state Division of Child and Family Services is called to protect the welfare of children now involve drug abuse.

A 10th-grade dropout, Joshua was no stranger to drugs. Marijuana mostly, and some pills. He had tried just about everything at one point or another but had always been able to give it up without a second thought.

But 6 1/2 years ago, his best friend's mother opened a door that Joshua, now 25, is struggling to close.