His fight for her life

By KRISTI ALBERTSON

One father's battle to save his daughter from meth

The Daily Inter Lake

Ron Clem is one of the lucky ones.

His daughter Carren began using methamphetamine when she was 17. He watched his little girl deteriorate from a healthy teenager to a strung-out junkie. He had a heart attack when he thought he saw her prostitute herself for her next fix.

It cost everything he and his wife, Karyl, had to keep Carren in a residential treatment facility. They sold their house to pay the $100,000 bill for her 18-month treatment in Jamaica. It nearly cost them their marriage.

But in the end, Ron and Karyl Clem got their daughter back. Today Carren is 23, happy, healthy, married and the mother of a 3-week-old baby. She's been clean for six years.

She and Clem, a retired Los Angeles police officer who lives in Kalispell, tell the story of her meth addiction in "Loss of Innocence," which was published by Virgin Books this spring. Writing the book and reliving the nightmare of addiction and redemption wasn't easy, but father and daughter are both convinced telling their story will help the families still living the horror.

"For Carren and I, doing the book, that's what propels us," Clem said. "It keeps our motivation high."

IN 2000, Carren was struggling to keep up with her job at a Kalispell telemarketing company and partying with her friends on the weekends. A friend told her he had the boost she needed.

She was 17 when she took her first hit off a meth pipe. That first high worked just like her friend had said it would. She felt invincible.

But the incredible high didn't last forever. Within a week, she needed four or five hits just to get by. Meth had claimed another victim.

Clem tried everything he could think of when he learned his daughter was using. He cracked down at home, setting strict rules and insisting on meeting her friends and their parents, never realizing many of those parents were lying to him and supplying his daughter's drugs and alcohol.

He tried tough love: Carren had to quit using or get out. When she left, he figured she'd be back after a few weeks on the streets.

Instead, she got more and more strung out. She was just like the druggies Clem had seen while working as a police officer in Los Angeles before his children were born.

"These kids that want their drugs will do anything to get them," he said. "If they can't afford their next fix, they'll deal, steal or screw - whatever they need to do."

Local law enforcement agencies couldn't help Clem unless Carren was arrested. Worried that might come too late, he began his own search for his daughter.

When he thought he saw her sell herself to a dealer for her next fix, Clem had a heart attack. After he recovered and realized he was no closer to saving Carren than when he'd started searching, he contemplated suicide.

It was an option Carren was familiar with. After her father's heart attack, she realized the hell she was putting her family through. She didn't know how to stop, so she decided to overdose.

Her attempt was unsuccessful. At rock bottom, out of answers, out of meth, she called her former youth pastor for help.

IT WAS the beginning of Carren's long climb out of the pit she'd made of her life. She agreed to go to a wilderness treatment program in southern Idaho for three weeks for detoxification and evaluation. When she graduated, her parents sent her to Tranquility Bay, a residential treatment facility in Jamaica, for 18 months.

A long-term facility is absolutely necessary for most meth addicts, Clem said.

"You have to, with meth, in order to have any success," he said. "The brain takes that long to heal."

Meth's impacts on the brain and central nervous system are similar to those caused by Alzheimer's disease or a stroke. If treatment is only short-term, the brain has only just begun to recover, and 90 percent of addicts relapse.

While Carren was in Jamaica, more than just her brain began to heal. She and her parents started writing letters, addressing and apologizing for the pain they'd caused one another over the last few years.

"That became our main form of communication," Carren said during a phone interview from her home in the greater Yellowstone area of Montana. "He (Clem) was very supportive all the way through and very committed to my success, even though at times I wasn't."

Carren finally came home after a year and a half in Jamaica. She'll be an addict for the rest of her life, but treatment gave her the tools to fight her cravings and rebuild her life. She found a job in Yellowstone National Park, got married last summer and had baby Kepler at the end of May.

The experience forever changed her relationship with her father.

"My dad always played kind of the tough guy role," she said. "I finally got to see that he wasn't as big, bad and scary as he pretended to be.

"When he finally opened up, that was huge. It opened up the doors for that personal relationship," Carren continued. "The distance was gone. I felt like I could communicate with him a lot more."

They were bound by their experience and a desire to help other families going through the same thing. They began traveling across the country, sharing their story at drug conferences and assemblies. During a conference in 2005, someone suggested they write a book.

Using journals and letters they'd written during Carren's recovery, they mailed chapters back and forth - Clem writing from his home in Kalispell and Carren from her job in Yellowstone. They agreed to tell their story as honestly as they could.

There was a little trepidation in writing like that, Clem said, "knowing that the world's going to know your flaws."

But since the publication of "Loss of Innocence" in April, the world has embraced their story.

They've toured the United Kingdom, promoting the book on TV and radio programs. Clem has met with Scotland Yard's drug task force and learned meth is just now hitting Great Britain.

"They're trying to learn as much as they can from us," he said.

METH USE already is widespread in Australia and New Zealand, he added. It's gaining momentum in Thailand, South Africa and the Czech Republic. He's received e-mails from all those places in the last two months.

"It gives us an opportunity to look at it in a global perspective," he said.

It's impacting thousands of families across the world, including hundreds here in Montana.

"People feel sorry for us," Clem said, remembering some readers' reactions to the book. "But we're not the exceptions. We just wrote about it."

He and Carren wanted to show how dark the days of addiction are, for addicts and their family members. They wanted to show how much families going through it need support from the people around them.

That's the point of Teens N Crisis, Clem said.

Teens N Crisis meets every Thursday to offer one another comfort, advice and support. It formed when Clem partnered with Gerri Gardner, whose daughter, Anji, committed suicide after using meth for two years.

Some in the group, like Clem, have seen their children fall victim to meth or other drugs. Others simply have reached their wits' end with their children's behavioral issues. At meetings, they cry together, laugh together, sympathize with the struggles associated with a child in crisis and encourage one another in the fight for their children's lives.

The group, which is entirely volunteer-driven, mans a 24-hour crisis phone. Parents with children currently in crisis are paired with parents who've been through it already. The group provides information on counselors and treatment programs around the world.

In six years, several hundred families have gotten help through Teens N Crisis. More than 200 have gotten their kids into treatment programs.

"We try not to have the parents do it alone," Clem said. "You kind of implode on yourself" if you try to handle it alone…We've got to do something with families and [children's] desire to use these chemicals, or we're going to lose the war."

The enemy, he added, isn't the children. It's the drugs that seduce them, and the dealers who put it in their hands.

Most of the state's meth is coming from Mexican drug cartels, Clem said, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated and well-organized. They're doing whatever they can to attract new, young users, whether by disguising it as candy-like "Strawberry Quick" or lacing other drugs, including marijuana and cocaine, with meth.

Kids might not go to a party planning to try meth, but they might not know what they're being offered - or who's offering it to them.

"It takes a community to raise a child," he said. "I really believe that."

If meth use continues to spread, it will take a global community to stop the rampage, Clem stressed.

"Families around the world are in awe of the impact of this chemical, what it's doing," he said. "It's an epidemic without any borders, for sure."

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com