After meth

Acting as a role model for women recovering from methamphetamine addiction turned out to be a challenge for Monique Knudsen.

A few days after a portrait of the 27-year-old woman and her two daughters appeared in a Deseret Morning News series, Knudsen broke down to her parole officer. She had made some bad choices with an old boyfriend, she told Dina Draper. He was a bad influence.

After almost two years of sobriety, she used meth again.

"You feel guilty and depressed. You go through a lot of different emotions," Knudsen said. "That's not where I wanted to be."

In another Salt Lake Valley home, 22-year-old Chante Bishop is holding her own against the addiction that nearly separated her from her girls.

"It's nice to be clean," she said last week. "I'm finally getting my life together."

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Cathy Anderson bid farewell to prison walls last Wednesday. She got up at 5 a.m. to get packed and ready for what she hopes will be a new life. She bid farewell to her cellblock roommate who'd also detoured her life by using methamphetamine. With a few papers and her address book, Anderson walked out of prison and into the arms of her sister.

"I'm not taking anything with me," she said.

She completed the prison's drug treatment program and is enrolled in another on the outside. She is staying with a "clean" friend.

"I'm ready," Anderson said. "I hope."

So much can change in the life of a recovering meth addict who lives day to day, even hour to hour, on guard against one of the trickiest drugs in the substance abuse treatment arena.

"Anything can happen," said Jane Patience, founder of a Salt Lake self-sufficiency and life skills program called the Chelsea Street Foundation. "Absolutely anything."

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