Between Life and Death

Debra Jay, an addiction specialist and author of Love First: A New Approach to Intervention for Alcoholism and Drug Addiction (A Hazelden Guidebook), led Kortnie and Penni through an intervention for Chantel. Debra says that meth usage creates "an addiction we can't even imagine."

"Parents get sucked in," Debra says. "You look at this girl and she's so beautiful and you want to believe her. And Penni would believe her over and over again because she thought she was talking to her daughter… And what Penni and all the other mothers and fathers in this country don't understand is it's the addiction talking to them. It's a little bit like The Exorcist, where all of a sudden she looks like the cute little girl, and her head is spinning on her shoulders and she's spewing things out at you. That's what you live with."

At the beginning of the intervention, Debra tells Chantel, "I'm here for one reason and one reason only: your family loves you so much and they wrote some letters, and they want to read those to you now."