Poisoned Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

and football players. With beer.
    “It kind of got out of control for a little bit,” Kristin admitted later, saying she didn’t remember whether she’d used meth that night, but it was possible. Kristin let a group of girlfriends stay over, and sometime during the same week, Kristin’s dealer came by with some friends.
    A couple of weeks after her parents returned from their cruise, they discovered that some credit cards, personal checks, and a video camera were missing. On March 21, they called the police and reported a burglary. Constance also found a suspicious package of white powder in the mailbox. When she asked Kristin about it, her daughter said she had no idea where it came from, so Constance turned it over to the police. The lies were starting to pile up, and Kristin’s parents began to think the worst: Their daughter was using drugs.
    Kristin knew she had a problem. She felt tired and worn out, but she couldn’t stop using. In the beginning, she’d smoked crystal because it made her feel so good. But it had become a necessity. She needed it just to feel like herself.
    Methamphetamine is classified as a psychostimulant, just like amphetamine and cocaine. Methamphetamine and cocaine are structurally quite different, but both result in an accumulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that produces an unnatural level of euphoria in the brain. While cocaine is quickly metabolized by the body, methamphetamine stays in the system twelve times longer, and so it creates more lasting effects. Meth can produce a high that lasts eight to twenty-four hours, compared to a rush of twenty to thirty minutes with cocaine. Even in small doses, meth can decrease the appetite and keep people awake for hours. High doses can raise the body temperature to dangerous levels and cause convulsions.
    On the street, methamphetamine has many names, including speed, meth, crank, ice, crystal, and glass. It can be inhaled, smoked, snorted, or injected. Chronic users can have episodes of violent behavior, anxiety, confusion, insomnia, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia that can result in homicidal and suicidal thoughts. Psychosis can persist for months or years after a person stops using the drug. Experts say the continued use of the drug also tends to heighten the desire for sexual gratification and prompts users to seek increasingly high levels of sexual stimulation.
     
    On March 30, 1993, around 7 P.M ., Kristin said she had to go to the library to study for a class. Her parents, who’d been making calls to try to figure out what happened to their credit cards and checks, decided they needed to settle a few things with Kristin before she went anywhere.
    Kristin decided otherwise and tried to leave. Ralph told her he wanted to look in her backpack, but she refused. Ralph tugged the pack away from her and unzipped it. He pulled out a white box and demanded to know what was in it. Kristin said it was a present for her mother. But when Ralph opened the box, he found a glass pipe, a plastic pen casing, and some razor blades inside. He demanded to know how she could have lied to him like this. She had betrayed his trust.
    Ralph became enraged and started yelling as he hit her repeatedly on the upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. Then he grabbed one of her sandals off her bedroom floor and hit her on the butt with it. Constance yelled at him to stop, but she did nothing to pull him away. At some point, Constance slapped Kristin in the face.
    Kristin ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife, and tried to cut her wrists with it until Ralph wrestled it out of her hands. She turned and ran back upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom and made superficial cuts in her wrists with a razor blade.
    “I’m worthless,” she cried through the door. “You’d be better off without me.”
    Because the cuts weren’t deep, Constance and Ralph determined she didn’t need medical treatment.
    Sometime in the next few days, Kristin