The Journal illustration<br><br>Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment show meth’s enduring presence in the state. The drug was found in the systems of 280 Coloradans who died of overdoses in 2017 – up sharply from the year before. That number was more than five times that recorded in 2012.
Huddled at a computer screen at the Denver Recovery Group, counselor Melissa McConnell looks at the latest urinalysis results for her client, Sara Florence.
Last fall, it lit up like a Christmas tree. Now it’s all clean. Florence says she stopped using heroin five months ago; she stopped using methamphetamine not long after that.
“Shooting it, smoking it, snorting it,” Florence says. “It’s horrible, just made me feel like crap, you know. But I’d still did it. Just makes no sense, you know. It’s just really addicting.”
Meth is particularly insidious, she says, because it’s cheap, readily available and “very common. Everybody does it.”
Read the rest of the story at Colorado Public Radio.
