Life after meth has rewards, challenges

Monique Knudsen figures taking methamphetamine cost seven years of her life.

Looking back she realizes how much time she wasted. She lost her way. She lost her sense of right and wrong. Her dreams of teaching school or practicing law drifted away like smoke from her meth pipe.

"I can't understand how things got so twisted in my life to get to that point," she said. "I lost a lot, and I will pay for it for the rest of my life."

Knudsen, 27, lives with her mother and two of her four children. She attends Salt Lake Community College and wants to be a paralegal. That's the best she can do because felony drug convictions will keep her out of the courtroom and the classroom, professionally anyway.

She does serve in the PTA at her daughter's school.

"I thought it would be baking cookies or something," she said. Actually, she finds herself as the legislative liaison, monitoring lawmakers' actions on education issues.

There is life after meth. But it isn't easy, especially for a single mother with limited job skills.

Knudsen works as a flagger on construction projects.

"What other options do I have? Going to look for work as a felon, it's crazy," she said. "There's no amount of help that can really erase that. It's pretty hard out there."

Getting through treatment and perhaps drug court means having to face the real world again. It means finding a job and a place to live. It means parenting for the first time. And then there's the ever-present desire to pick up the meth pipe or the needle again, especially when something goes wrong.

"Any small life event is a huge crisis to these people," said Jane Patience, who runs a Salt Lake life skills and self-sufficiency program called the Chelsea Street Foundation. "The things you and I can wade through hits them like a ton of bricks."

The 6-year-old nonprofit program, located in a State Street motel, is patterned after the successful Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco. It receives no government funds. Participants are asked for $700 a month to cover rent and utilities, but the majority do not pay. They must be sober to get in.

"They're absolutely clean when they get here," Patience said. "Keeping them clean is the hard part."

She and co-founder Chris Sorensen, both of whom spent time in prison for white-collar crimes unrelated to drugs, help people find jobs but hope to create their own businesses through the foundation. That way they can better monitor the working environment for drugs.

Of the six women there, four are battling meth addiction. Some come straight from prison.