‘I Feel Like I Introduced Meth to Centralia’

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Lois Sibert first tried methamphetamine in the early 1970s as a recently-divorced mother of five and a registered nurse struggling to stay alert during night shifts. 

“I said, ‘This is what’s missing in my life,’ ” she recalled.

Sibert, now 73, of Chehalis, spent the next 35 years chasing that feeling — at all costs. 

In the 1980s, Sibert and a long-time friend passed out meth like candy, wanting others to enjoy the high they craved.

“When I moved back here, Centralia didn’t know what meth was,” she said. “I feel like I introduced meth to Centralia, me and my old man.”

She lost her nursing license. Her father lost his house after police connected it with drug activity, Sibert said. 

She went to prison twice and by her own account was in and out of jail constantly.

Sibert said she gave her son meth when he was 12 or 13 years old and said all of her children and several grandchildren have been addicted to drugs at some point in their lives. One son later became her drug supplier. 

A grandson died of a heroin overdose during Sibert’s last stint in prison.

“I have asked for forgiveness,” she said. “I’m not holding on to the guilt. I knew that I was guilty. I asked my father above to forgive me for it, so I gave it to him.”

Today, methamphetamine is known as one of the most addictive and damaging drugs of modern times. But when Sibert got hooked on what was then better known as speed, she said it didn’t have the widespread stigma it does today. 

Even as a trained nurse, it didn’t occur to her how dangerous and addictive the drug could be. 

“They never mentioned meth as being habit forming,” Sibert said. “It was a diet pill. I took diet pills.”

 

Sibert was adopted five days after she was born in 1942 to a family in Centralia. 

“I lived and was raised in a very fine Christian home,” she said. “I couldn’t have been adopted by anyone finer.”

After graduating from high school, Sibert went to Centralia College and got certified to be a licensed practical nurse. She was married for the first time at 20 years old. Her early adulthood was busy and at times chaotic, but she said her lifestyle kept her away from drug users.

“I hadn’t used drugs yet,” she said. 

She eventually went to Columbia Basin College to get her nursing degree, and graduated in five years to be a registered nurse. By that time, she had three daughters with her first husband and had divorced him. She married again and had twin boys, then divorced her second husband and married the first again.

“Like a fool,” she said. 

Sibert and her first husband moved with their five children to Seattle, where she worked in a nursing home by day and took care of a quadriplegic man in their home full time. Everything worked out for a while, at least before Sibert found out her husband was drinking and smoking marijuana. 

 

One day, he shot a gun in the house, narrowly avoiding injuring anyone. 

“When I came home from work, here’s the cops all over my home,” she said. 

The two divorced again, and Sibert continued to work full time and take care of the quadriplegic man, whose name was Bob. She started hanging out with Bob and his friends, who she said were into drugs. 

“We went to Canada with these friends and they gave us some pills — Christmas trees, they called them,” Sibert said. 

Christmas Trees are a street name for Tuinal, a sedative. 

“They told me to chew them. For a long time, I didn’t recognize that as my introduction to drugs,” she said. 

Eventually, Bob went to live in the nursing home where Sibert was now the head registered nurse, she said. One day, she walked in on Bob’s friend “Mike” giving him methamphetamine, known as “speed” at the time. 

That experience, and the one that immediately followed, started Sibert’s 35-year addiction to methamphetamine. 

“They said, do you want to try some?” she said. 

Sibert and Mike went into a bathroom, where he injected meth into her arm. 

“For 31 days, I stayed high,” she said.

 

Sibert said the drug “changed her brain.” When taking meth, she forgot about her low self-esteem, she said. In no time, Mike moved into Sibert’s house and became her regular meth supplier. 

“He’d come about halfway through my shift and give me another hit of speed,” she said. “Because I was so naive, I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I could just quit.”

Eventually, the drug use did catch up to her. 

Sibert got caught cashing forged checks and was sentenced to the Purdy Treatment Center, now called the Purdy Women’s Correctional Facility, in Gig Harbor. She was only there three months, but it wouldn’t be the only time. 

Sibert lost her nursing license. When she was released from Purdy, she came back to Centralia and started a gift shop. The gift shop didn’t do well, and Sibert soon ran into her old friend Mike. 

“My father, poor man, started praying for me cause he didn’t know what I was involved in,” she said. “My father hated Mike. He said, ‘He made you use meth.’ Even then, I knew it was a choice of mine.”

Sibert and Mike moved to Seattle for a time, living in motels. Eventually, she moved back to a house her father owned in Centralia.

“I never really left my house to go get drugs,” she said. “I could call and they’d get delivered.”

Sibert was primarily addicted to methamphetamine, but tried other drugs. She said she tried cocaine and heroin, but didn’t like either.  

“Twice I tried it and hated every minute,” she said of heroin. 

 

By the mid 1980s, Sibert had been using methamphetamine consistently for 10 to 15 years. On one trip to Seattle to get drugs, she was late coming home and had to call her parents to take care of her children. 

“This time I started to realize the drug was controlling me,” she said. 

As the years went by, she kept using, trying occasionally to quit but only making it a day or two. It didn’t help, she said, that her supplier was her own son.

“My son was dealing drugs in my father’s house,” she said. 

By the early 2000’s. her meth use diminished, partly because she no longer had a steady supplier. 

“I always was trying to quit, but not too hard,” she said. “I had tons of felonies. I’d be in and out of jail.”

Eight years ago she got sent back to Purdy, and says she has been clean ever since, thanks to a group called Celebrate Recovery and to her newfound religious faith. 

Today, she occasionally speaks about drugs and sobriety at jails and prisons.

“By then, I could hardly find a vein,” she said. “I thank God to this day I went to Purdy.”