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EDITOR'S NOTE: In January 2009, Assistant City Editor Mark Boxley undertook a six-month fellowship with the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at The Ohio State University. The digital media project he completed during the fellowship centered on the societal, economic and personal effects of drug abuse in Blount County. The results of his work are presented here in print, as well as in the online special section at www.thedailytimes.com/wasted. For more stories, video and interactive features visit www.lives-wasted.com.

"Not every moment of every day, but it's sort of there in the back of your mind, that you're going to get a phone call and they're going to say, 'Is this Dru Daugherty? Are you Pam McCaffrey's mother? We have found her body in the woods.'"

Speaking by phone from her home in Vermont, Dru Daugherty recalled what it was like to be the mother of an active crack cocaine addict. Her daughter, Pam McCaffrey -- who has been clean now for nearly two years -- started using alcohol and drugs early in life.

For many years, Daugherty was in denial over Pam's addiction -- believing her when she called to ask for money for things like groceries, rent and medical bills. Little did she know the money was being spent on drugs.

Now working hard on the process of recovery, Pam will tell you that she deceived a lot of people in her quest for drugs.

It started off as a $20 a day habit, which was easy to hide, Pam said.

"You just become a good liar," Pam said. "I covered up taking that money from him (from her husband at the time) -- groceries, I spent the money on groceries.

"I know he probably knew something was up, because my behavior was crazy," she said. "He got paid on Fridays and I had it arranged that his boss would come by the hotel and give me his check so that I could do things like pay bills and grocery shop.

"(His boss) would drop off the check and I would buy crack."

But $20 a day soon turned into $40, then $80, $100, $200 and soon there was no way for Pam to pay for the drugs with money she earned legally, let alone hide what she was doing.

Pam happened upon a source of income for drugs quite by accident while walking down Lincoln Road in Alcoa on day. A man pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a ride -- needing one, Pam said yes and got in his car.

"Well, between the beginning and end of Lincoln Road, he offered me money for sexual favors," she said. "That's how that started ... I didn't think I would make a career of this, you know?"

The year was 2002 and Pam had not yet been in Blount County for a full year, having moved to the area from North Carolina.

Growing up Pam

Pam's early life was one of difficulty, filled with parents leaving, one foster home after the other, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and a lot of partying. But it was also one full of promise -- Pam won a prestigious scholarship and said she was accepted to Boston University, where she attended for a short time before dropping out. She was smart, pretty and fun to be around, but when it came to the choices she made during that time, Pam says they sent her down a different road.

Picking up a photograph from a stack of snapshots on her coffee table, Pam turns the shiny paper over to look at a red number stamped on the back. The picture is of a young pajama-clad girl with short, dark hair holding up a red and yellow toy. She is smiling, with one front baby tooth missing, and is sitting on her knees in a chair at a kitchen table that looks like it could be from any happy home in America.

Pam looks at the date printed on the back and after a few moments of mental calculation, quietly says that this is was a picture of her at age 7.

"It was a year later from this picture here, that I took my first drink of alcohol," she said. "One year later, when I was 8 years old."

Her parents would have dinner parties and the mornings after Pam would sneak down and find glasses still containing alcohol on the table. She would drink what was left.

"I don't ever recall getting high off of it or suffering consequences -- getting sick or getting in trouble," she said. "But I really think the curiosity is what set me into ending up like I did."

For Pam, alcohol set the stage for tobacco, marijuana, pills, and eventually harder drugs like cocaine and crack.

'Extreme adaptation'

It was pretty much the worst period of her life to start because the human brain goes through periods of "extreme adaptation" when a person is young, said Dr. Brad Lander, clinical director and addiction specialist at The Ohio State University Medical Center's Talbot Hall. When a person is young, their brain is learning what it needs to be good at -- the violin, football, math -- "and how it makes that decision is basically: What is it doing?" he said.

When a child starts using alcohol or drugs, "the addiction process, that adaptation, kicks in at a much, much faster rate than it would if that same person had started at age 21," he said. "Someone who starts using before the age of 15 is four times more likely to become addicted than if that very same person had started at age 21."

But early alcohol and drug use were not the only issues in Pam's life.

At age 2, Pam's mom had a "nervous breakdown" and Pam and her siblings went into foster care. Her mother got them back, but when Pam was 11, she left again.

"This was really hard for me," Pam said. "My older sister and my brother went to my father's -- and at that time my understanding was that he didn't think I was his."

She bounced around 13 foster homes in a single year and being abused became a way of life.

"In the foster care (system), I went through a lot of different stuff," Pam said. "Any kind of abuse. They weren't all like that, but I was raped, I was sexually abused other ways, I was emotionally abused, physically abused."

And this all took place, she said, by the time she was 13.

"So I just became a chronic runaway," she said.

That wasted life

Standing in front of a chain-link enclosed heating unit behind Save-A-Lot on South Hall Road in Alcoa, Pam summed up her life -- wondering out loud how a person with so much potential end up sleeping, stoned, in a place like this.

"When you think about sleeping in here, when I'm looking in here knowing, for a fact, that's where I was asleep, with my head up against that wall," she said pointing to the rumbling enclosure. "How did I get there? How did this happen to me?

"It's crazy."

Pam's mother Dru remembers the day she realized what had happened to Pam, how the drugs had made her someone unrecognizable.

"I had to realize that Pam had chosen this path for herself, it was her own path," she said. "And there was really nothing to be done until Pam decided (to change), if she lived long enough.

"And the other side of that was, what a waste. What a waste of a human being," she said. "This beautiful, intelligent, funny, fully alive person has just turned into a prostitute, for drugs."

The realization of how Pam was getting money for her drugs was an especially difficult thing to accept, Dru said.

"I knew somehow she was getting drugs and I assumed she was using men to get drugs," she said. "The word prostitution did not enter my mind, and when it did it was like, ouch, oh crap.

"I knew it in my heart of hearts, but the word prostitute, boy, it was so hard to say that word," she said recalling her moment of realization. "My daughter is a prostitute, for drugs."

`Rehabilitating a community

Pam says if she had not gone into rehabilitation, she probably would be dead right now. She was able to go after turning herself in to police on a warrant after a traffic stop. The officers did not find anything on Pam and were about to let her go when she stopped them.

"I was like, oh no, you can't let me go -- there's a warrant for me," she said.

Handcuffed in the back of an Alcoa police cruiser, Pam remembered a conversation with Alcoa police Sgt. Hank Morris through the cracked window of the car.

"He said, 'Oh Pam, what?'" she said, tears welling in her eyes. "I said, "Hank, it's OK. It's OK. I need to go to jail.'

"I guess in my mind jail was the only safe place to go," she said. "There was no way, out there, that I had any hope."

She went to jail, and during her next appearance in Blount County General Sessions Court, Pam asked to be sent to rehabilitation. She was, and nearly two years later she is still sober.

Maryville Police Officer Shane Collins believes there were things that could have been done to help Pam -- and people like her -- long before that fateful day. Mainly, the community -- the residents of Blount County -- could have made more of an effort to care, he said.

"I wish there was a system to where you could go in and someone (would) donate their time and help someone who truly needs help," he said. "But you don't see that -- I mean, haven't seen it yet."

Collins understands the public's reaction to drug offenders -- seeing them as criminals who break the law, who steal money and property, and who hurt people. But the problem is, he said, if you don't help them get over their addiction, there is nothing to keep addicts from doing those same damaging things over and over again.

"There are people, a lot of people, out there that do try to help other people -- I'm not saying that nobody helps," he said. "But in this fast-paced world that we live in, people don't take enough time to help another person."

One of the biggest things that can be done to improve Blount County's drug problem, Collins said, is to treat people like people.

"They're human beings -- we've got to treat them like that and try to help to take care of the problem," he said. "I think if the community as a whole would come together and try to help, I think you could see a lot of turnaround due to the ... compassion and caring of the community, to see that they (the addicts) do matter."

Mark Boxley has been writing about drug issues his entire career. Connect with him at:

mark.boxley@thedailytimes.com

twitter.com/docboxley

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