Fighting the good fight against meth

When Gerri Gardner's teenage daughter, and then her husband, killed themselves, Gardner decided to exact revenge.

But her vengeance is not against a person. Quite the opposite. Her goal is to protect people. The bull's-eye for her retaliation is methamphetamine - the illegal, highly addictive stimulant that stole Gardner's family from her. She wants its sale, use, and manufacture shut down, so that no one else has to face what she does.

Gardner's daughter, Angela, was 19 when she surrendered in a fight she had waged for a few years with methamphetamine. Sixteen months after Angela killed herself, her grieving father did the same thing.

Gardner pulled herself through a paralysis of pain to make something positive of it.

She made her story public, bravely told about what happened to Angela, and started a movement in the Flathead Valley that has reached hundreds of families. It began in 2001 when awareness of methamphetamine was just starting.

After her story ran in the Daily Inter Lake, Gardner answered her phone and heard from a desperate father. Ron Clem told Gardner about his daughter, then 18, who was also addicted to methamphetamine. Reading about Gardner's story made him and his wife panic, he said at the time.

"Death was not an option" for his daughter, Clem said.

The Clems and Gardner banded together, a wounded trio trying to take on an entire culture of addiction.

They formed Teens in Crisis, a non-profit organization that supports addicts and their parents and educates schoolchildren and the community about methamphetamine.

Gardner and Clem are not unlike others who seek out people with similar experiences in crisis. Often, those alliances are fleeting, serving their purpose for a while and then fading away.

Teens in Crisis hasn't.

Clem's daughter completed treatment and came home to her family with a restored promise of a happy future. Clem didn't excuse himself from the group with that ending, but continues to raise funds for families that need help with treatment costs, and continues to raise awareness of the threat that methamphetamine poses to real people who live right her, just like his daughter.

And Gardner continues her mission. Petite, driven, committed to what she's doing, she tells of a dream she had of Angela after her daughter's death. In the dream, Angela wouldn't accept the attention her mother wanted to focus on her. Instead, she wanted her mother to see "the other girls."

Gardner is doing that. She loved and misses her daughter. But she keeps moving and keeps working with Teens in Crisis for "the other girls" and boys and parents.

Thank you, Gerri Gardner and Ron Clem.