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As Colorado’s meth crisis grows, doctors try medication to treat addiction

Melinda McDowell sought medication-assisted treatment for her addiction to meth. She has been sober for over a year now.

Melinda McDowell had used drugs since she was a teenager. But she didn’t try methamphetamine until one fateful night in 2017 after her mother died suddenly of a stroke. She went over to a neighbor’s house and he had crystal meth.

“I tried it and I was hooked from the first hit,” McDowell said. “It was an explosion of the senses. It was the biggest high I’d ever experienced.”

But McDowell said that big high started getting more elusive. She went from 240 pounds to 110. Eventually, her children were taken away and put in foster homes. McDowell started having hallucinations, at one point nearly cutting her face.

Read the rest of this story at Colorado Public Radio