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By Max McCoyP IERCE CITY, Mo. — Lightning from a winter storm flashes over the Shoal Creek Revival Church on Highway 60 south of town. Rain pounds the roof of a classroom behind thesanctuary.Inside, 40 people are holding hands and swaying to “My God Is an Awesome God,” a Christian rock anthem booming from a CD player. Singing with the music, a microphone gripped in her hand, is Denise Ledbetter, a Goodman woman whose face, at thismoment, is one of bliss.Like most of the others in the room, Ledbetter is a former methamphetamine addict.These are people who either have beaten the odds or are desperately trying to do so. Some of them got high the night before, and those who didn’t probably were thinking about it. But Billy Ray Harvill, the 46-year-old pastor of the church,says he doesn’t turn people away because they are still using.Harvill discourages use, of course, but he says he would rather have them here.“We’re trying to help people understand that their battle with drugs is between good and evil,” Harvill said.“It’s a spiritual battle. And it takes some time.
These people, when their brains become damaged. It usually takes a year for some of the paranoia and fear and those types of things to begin to leave.
The sad part is, some people’s brainsdon’t ever get healed.”Recovery is hard work, and the statistics are sobering. The success rate at the Shoal Creek group, Harvill said, is about 50 percent.Delivered “Back in the ’90s, when meth really started showing up around here, people couldn’t afford high-priced drugs like cocaine and heroin,” Harvill said. “Today, the problem is we’ve got a drug that’s literally being manufactured atour back door.”The group isn’t a 12-step program, and there’s no doubt that when anyone mentions a higher power, he’s talking about Jesus Christ. Instead of concentrating on the “red and black” method used for cooking meth at home, the support group membersare encouraged to spend time reading the red and black of the New Testament.The approach undeniably works for some.Daryl Long, a 38-year-old Joplin resident, said he tried to quit meth for years before finally being delivered in the prison chapel at Boonville Correctional Center, where he had been sent for a 120-day shock sentence after being busted.At the time, Long said, he was ready to be delivered. He had been making LSD and other drugs since he was 13, he was making $2,000 a day, and he believed he was invincible — “10 foot tall and bulletproof.” He was afraid of nothing, heremembers, and he regularly practiced black magic, which he says the drug tricked him into believing worked.He had been addicted for 20 years. But when he was arrested, he said, authorities took his 13-year-old son away, and that was the turning point.“In prison, I made a personal vow to the Lord to do what I could to help other addicts,” Long said.
“And I didn’t know exactly what that meant at the time. But I had a little church bus given to me the day before I went to prison, and I juststarted picking people up and taking them to church here in town. Then I started taking them to different Christian recovery groups, and that’s where I met Steve Box.” ‘Methed-out lunatic’Box is a recovering addict from Pierce City who has written a slim book titled “Meth = Sorcery.” It isn’t a metaphor. Box believes meth is inspired by Satan, and that the ritual of cooking the drug is literal sorcery.In the book, Box tells, in an honest but rambling way, about his slide into meth addiction after his 2-year-old son was killed in an automobile accident. He lost his welding business, his wife and his credit.In Las Vegas, he dismantled a room at the Luxor because he has tweaking and forgot where he hid his drug stash. In his hand was a.357-caliber Magnum that went off by accident, drawing the attention of hotel security.“The voices in my head were telling me that they were going to kill me,” Box writes.Box describes popping pills, growing marijuana, and trying to cook meth on his own because he cannot stand the idea of someone else controlling his supply. He tells of voices in his head that tell him to shoot family members, of sharedhallucinations of shadowy figures and giant pigs, of ghostly footsteps and power tools starting up by themselves.He also describes how Harvill cast the devil from him:“He spoke in other tongues and the awesome power of the Holy Spirit fell and expelled the darkness in me.
It was almost unbelievable. The methed-out lunatic melted into a pile of mush and the real me returned.”The book was Harvill’s idea and was funded by donations.
Now, more than 100,000 copies are in print. The book has been sent to every county jail in the country, Harvill said, and it recently has been translated into Spanish. He prides himselfon sending a book, for free, to anyone who needs it.“The response started coming in from all over the nation,” Harvill said.
“We’ve traveled to several different prisons around the country.”The book was the beginning of the recovery group at Shoal Creek Revival Church. There now are at least nine other associated groups in the area, including three in Joplin. Someone in trouble, Harvill said, could go to a meeting practicallyevery night of the week. There’s even a group that has its own dormitory, he said, if people have nowhere else to stay.‘Idolizing Hitler’ Harvill has never tried meth, but he agrees that the drug is demonic.“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Just about every one of these people who have been deep into that world, those that are cooking the drug, they all experience the same set of symptoms. They are highly paranoid, they live in fear, they feel likethings are watching them. They all see these shrouded figures.
Some of them actually speak to these things, and it’s a back-and-forth conversation. And these things are telling them what to do.” Long said the addiction quickly turns.“At first it makes you feel good, but after a while it just sucks all your willpower out of you,” Long said. “About the only thing you live for is to use more and fill up the emptiness inside of you with the meth.” Long said he had morethan hallucinations.“I had blackouts that would last two or three months long,” he said.
“I was awake and cooking dope, but I just wouldn’t remember anything. The further I got into my addiction, the more I start idolizing Hitler. And then I started getting intowizardry.
At the time, I thought it worked, but it was the drug that was leading me to believe that. I do believe that methamphetamine is a tool of Satan.”Long said he has been clean since July 12, 2002.
His son, he said, was returned to him a month after his release from prison. “When I was in prison, God gave me a vision of an army he was raising up against methamphetamine,” Long said.“When I went down and met Steve, I told him I was there to help. He said there were no meth support groups in Joplin. “I had been attending Central Christian for about six months, so I started a support group there.” Since then,Long said, he has remodeled three homes in Joplin as recovery houses. Currently, he said, 10 people are living in them, and all are obeying a strict set of house rules — and are grateful for a place to stay.“It’s tore them completely apart, and they’re just tired of living in the pit of hell,” Long said.
“The drug itself and what it’s doing to people is definitely getting worse. It’s getting harder for people to get the things they need to cookit, so they’re substituting other chemicals for these things, and it’s making it to where it’s even more unsafe to use.
It is doing harm to people.” ‘Books of hope’ Since the success of Box’s book, the Shoal Creek group hasproduced two more. One is Box’s sequel, “The Leviathan,” which is heavier on Scripture than narrative. The other is Denise Ledbetter’s account, “Methed Up.”In it, Ledbetter offers poems, songs and meditations on love, prayer and peace. In the most powerful passage, she also gives a glimpse of what it was like when she hit bottom:“Yeah, I was done all right. Moving back home at 48 years old. Broke, hurt and sick.
Years of being a junkie had taken its toll on me. I weighed 110 pounds and looked sick. I had tested positive for Hepatitis C. “All I did was sleep, eatand cry. I felt miserable, worthless and a failure. I had lost myself.” Said Harvill: “Our goal is to be able to send these books of hope out into the nation, everywhere. We get quite a response.
People read the books, and they get tosee that there is hope out there. Our goal is to get these books into as many hands as possible.”© Recovery Times. All rights reserved.Revised: 11/06/07RTv3.1 © Recovery TimesAll personal stories and graphics are copyright of the © writer themselves unless otherwise indicated.Recovery Times only publishes with their permission.
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Meth Equals Sorcery by Steven BoxBefore I can even get into critiquing this abomination unto the Lord that purports to be a book, I have to first register a complaint about how it came to be in my possession. For, you see, Meth=Sorcery is a perfect example of the kind of religious hogwash that passes itself off as reading material in jail.
Of all the books in the detention facility’s library, I would say that at least half are Christian. Not only that, but all the classes and programs, from Anger Management to Rehab, are based on the Bible.This seems to me like a flagrant violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It’s not as if they are offering any alternative religious perspectives. In fact, when they told me I could have “the religious text of my choosing”, I asked for a Satanic Bible, which they didn’t have. This really pissed me off, even though I’m not a Satanist. I just wanted something interesting to read. In Lieu of the Satanic Bible, I ended up reading some Ayn Rand, which is pretty much like Satanism, but I digress.When I found out that the particular detention facility at which I was being housed had a drug rehabilitation program, I was interested.
Knowing that I faced a million years of probation upon my release, I felt that I needed help to stay away from weed, crack, junk, toot, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, etc And plus, attending rehab would make me look good in court, since I was facing charges of manufacturing SuperCrack in my bathtub and marketing it to kindergarteners.So as you can imagine, my curiosity was piqued when I saw a flyer on the day room bulletin board advertising a class which taught “proven techniques to overcome addiction”. As someone who happens to hold a degree in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, I happen to know that the only drug rehabilitation techniques that have any documented success are cognitive therapies that revolve around mental techniques to regulate and control habitual behavior, not necessarily eliminating it, but merely reducing it to a manageable level.Complete reformation and abstinence are too lofty and unrealistic goals, and thus one minor breach of faith leads to a downward slide and the total abandonment of sobriety. Also, just because someone wants to quit dope doesn’t mean they should have to embrace religion in order to do so. This is why faith-based programs like Narcotics Anonymous have a 99% rate of recidivism. But hey, I guess that 1% is proven, right?Anyway, thinking that surely the wise, benevolent, government rehab masters probably knew much more about quitting drugs than I did, I signed up for the class, and was appalled when such a low-caliber book was issued as curriculum. And the instructor of the class was a middle-aged church volunteer who had never touched drugs in his life!
It seemed like his training was mostly religious, and he had no psychiatric expertise at all!The class began with a hymn, and as I listened to a dozen tone-deaf inmates sing ‘How Great Thou Art’, I found myself wondering: what if a Buddhist wants to get off drugs? Or an Atheist? But religious tolerance is not in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s lexicon, apparently. So these so-called ‘proven techniques’ to get us all off the yam-yam were simply: ‘Jesus up your ass’.Which was pretty much what this book is. Jesus up your ass. The first part is a story that describes one of the biggest druggie fuck-ups in the history of drug abuse:He killed his son via vehicular homicide while high on meth. He ruined a good marriage.
He flushed his business down the toilet. He blew thousands of dollars on drugs, which he then hid in the desert and lost due to being high and paranoid.And all this is chronicled in a writing style that makes you wonder if he’s really clean now. The run-on sentences and spelling errors were painful to behold. Clearly this man was mentally impaired independently of any substance abuse problems. This part of the book actually made me feel better about my own mistakes made while high.But the later chapters are simply these disjointed, Bible-inspired diatribes about the Satanic nature of meth: using it, making it, and selling it.
It’s within these pages that you will find gems like: “Those who make meth must stir many ingredients together in a cauldron like a witch. The Bible says that ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, with a ‘witch’ being defined as an ‘administer of potions’.”So, according to the logic of this book, if you stir something together in a bowl, it’s a potion, and you are a witch who must be put to death.
I wonder if that applies to the makers of Tylenol, or even just a cook in a kitchen? Come to think of it, my spaghetti is pretty fuckin’ magical.Ultimately, I felt like the author of this book was just another fuck-up who blamed all of his problems on an inanimate substance, rather than taking personal responsibility for his own stupidity. It’s the modern-day equivalent of saying: “The devil made me do it.” I am reminded of the scene in Hunter S Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ where the lawyer spilled all of the cocaine and it flew out of the speeding convertible, and into the desert air.“Did you see what GOD just did to us, man?”“God didn’t do that,” said Thompson, “You did.”Now that I have checked the book’s website, I see that it is marketed in bulk, in that there is a discount on purchases of more than one copy of the book. So that’s probably how it came to be used as curriculum in this horrible jailhouse rehab class, ironically called ‘Breaking Free’. The class itself’s main message was a horrifying marriage of fundamental Christianity and authoritarian government.“According to John 3:4, sin equals lawlessness!” said the preacher who taught the class.I raised my hand.“But wasn’t Jesus himself a fugitive from the law?
He was executed by the religious and political establishment.”The preacher clearly wasn’t used to being challenged. “Well, yes, but that’s-““Furthermore,” I said, “Didn’t Jesus himself instruct his followers never to let any authority tell them what they could and could not put into their own bodies when he overturned the Levitican dietary tables?”The preacher grinned sheepishly, “Well that’s also true, but-”“And finally,“ I interrupted once more, ”Isn’t making nature against the law kind of like saying that man knows better than God? I mean, where is the faith in that?”This caused a stir amongst my fellow inmates, much like when that monkey first used tools in the movie ‘2001’. The preacher sensed the seeds of dissent I had sown in his prisoners- ah, I mean ‘parishioners’.And thus, I was kicked out of rehab. For being logical.Whoever said that getting me off of drugs would make me a better person was wrong.
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