Editor's note: This is part of an occasional series on methamphetamine's hold on North County.

The teenage boys sat at the late-night Carlsbad coffee shop, twitching and anxious, laughing and loud, out of their minds on methamphetamine and oblivious to the police officers sitting in the next booth.

The police, apparently unaware that they were witnessing the effects of a deadly drug that was quickly gaining a foothold in their city, were likewise oblivious to the boys' ruckus.

It was the early 1980s, and Robert Church, 39, was one of those boys.

"In the early days, police were not even hip to meth at all," Church said in a recent interview.

The fast-spreading drug seemed one step ahead of the law back then. Penalties for possession were light, users were not as easily recognized and the drug itself was plentiful.

A commercial laboratory on Palomar Airport Road openly sold what could only be called do-it-yourself meth kits, with precursor chemicals, heating elements, flasks and cooling devices packaged together for their customers, Church said.

The lab eventually was shut down, but by then meth had become the drug of choice for many in the community.

Old and the new

Church said the emergence of meth in Carlsbad was quick and a seemingly natural outgrowth of the small beach town's permissiveness and laid-back character.

"Carlsbad then was nothing like Carlsbad today," he said about his childhood city of the 1970s. "It was nothing but surfers and bikers. It was a whole different scene."

It seemed everybody was smoking marijuana in those days, Church said, and nobody in the beach community made a big deal about it.

"My parents didn't (smoke), but they had friends who did," he said. "Smoking pot was just like smoking cigarettes. When somebody offered me some as a kid, it wasn't even a thought. It wasn't anything taboo."

Meth was greeted in the early 1980s with the same acceptance, although Church said he very quickly realized he was not dealing with the same type of drug.

His first hit made him feel smart, energetic and excited. This was not like pot, mushrooms or even cocaine. Things that were boring and mundane were now fascinating. He felt more alive, more awake. He wanted more of the drug.

"I don't think I ever really had an experimental period," he said.

Church liked the lifestyle that went with meth, the feeling of getting away with something and listening to punk rock, which he still enjoys today.

A deadly grip

But he soon began to feel the drug taking over his life. He snorted, smoked or shot meth daily. He missed days at school. He was up all night then slept for long periods. He began getting in trouble and was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

He was 14. Twelve more years would pass before he would shake the drug. In those years, he would be in and out of jail and homeless. Friends would die, and he would twice overdose on the drug.

His parents were concerned, but didn't realize what was wrong with him. After his assault charge, they agreed to send Church to a mental hospital for three months.

"That's the difference between then and now," he said. "If you were doing crazy things, the first thing they thought was you were crazy, not that you had a drug problem."

By 1986, Church had moved out and was living with a girlfriend in Oceanside, where he sold meth and collected money for dealers.

Police had become aware of the area's meth problem, and Church was caught in a sting operation by an undercover officer.

"They came out of a big roll-up van, about seven of them, and pulled me out of a car," Church said about the bust.

The arrest would have shaken up most teenagers, but it didn't faze Church, who was two months shy of his 17th birthday.

"I was pretty hardened by then," he said. "I wasn't really that scared. In fact, I was kind of an arrogant kid. I remember laughing at the police because they thought I was over 18. I kept telling them that I wasn't going to do any time for this."

In and out

He was wrong. Church was sent to Rancho del Campo, a probation camp for youths in Campo. He ran away after three months, crossing over the Mexican mountains because he was lonesome for his girlfriend.

He turned himself in after a week and stayed eight months.

Church said the experience was good for him because he saw positive role models. He began working out and thinking that he could do something else with his life.

But when he was released at the end of 1986, Church fell back into his old habits. Mad at the world and stronger than ever, he became somewhat of a thug. He moved into an old house on the edge of Leucadia.

"We had a house and trailers and a lot of guns," he said. "Let's just say it was really crazy for a lot of years."

His life became erratic. Some times he was flush with cash. Other times he was living on the street and broke. He did brief jail stints for misdemeanor drug possession.

In 1989, Church sought drug treatment but wasn't ready to work at it. About nine months later, he was expecting to start a family with his pregnant girlfriend, 18, when she stormed out after an argument.

"She took off with some dude," he said. "She was in a motel room, smoking meth, and her lungs collapsed, which can happen if you have any kind of bronchial problems."

Starting and stopping

Her bronchial problem was severe asthma, and as she started to gasp for air in the smoky room, the drug-users around her panicked

"These guys didn't want to call the police because they had all these drugs on them," he said. "They kicked her out of the room."

She died outside the motel.

"It was horrible, and I stopped (using meth) at that point," he said.

Church moved back home and enrolled at MiraCosta College. But with no rehabilitation program to help with his addiction, Church was using meth again after three months.

"I had an obsession that I couldn't shake," he said. "Every day, day or night, if I wasn't using, I was thinking about using. No amount of grief about what happened or what I'd seen it do to other people could get past it."

Church dropped out of college, bailing out of rehearsals for a school play he was cast in as an actor.

Back on the street, the North County drug culture had changed.

"It just got really bad, really ugly and really violent on the street," he said. "The whole drug trade had changed over. I went from being the man to having to work for the man."

He felt himself "losing his hustle," he said.

"If you see homeless guys on the street pushing their carts, those are addicts who lost their hustle. They just switched to alcohol."

No salvation

Facing a similar fate, Church checked into a treatment center in the Lake Wohlford area, but got into a fight with someone and was kicked out.

He found work on a Salvation Army truck in Van Nuys, but ended up using heroin with another driver. When the 1992 Los Angeles riots erupted, Church was arrested on a curfew violation and served 30 days in jail.

By then, the drugs were no longer working for him, and he had every reason to quit. He had hit bottom, his teeth were falling out and he had lost people he loved. Recalling one image he still can't escape, Church once found a girlfriend sitting in nothing but her underwear in the bathroom, covered in blood, desperately jabbing herself with a needle while trying to find a vein.

With nowhere else to go, Church found a place to sleep on the floor between two cribs at a friend's house. He remembers the mother passed out on a bed while her 2-year-old child walked around hungry, with only the discarded end of a syringe cap to chew on.

He could take no more.

"What ultimately did it for me was, I got tired of watching the little kid's suffering," he said.

He last used drugs April 25, 1994. Church checked into Casa Raphael, a substance-abuse recovery home in Vista, and began attending 12-step program meetings two or three times a day.

The first year was a blur. Church took odd jobs and stayed clean. After a year, his parents realized he was serious about his recovery and took him in. He returned to MiraCosta, and a man he met at a 12-step meeting suggested he become a professional counselor.

He got the job, and after two years moved with a girlfriend to Boston, where he was accepted at the University of Massachusetts and worked for an outpatient treatment program for heroin addicts.

After a breakup, he returned to North County and took a job nobody else wanted: working with teenage addicts.

Today, Church is a specialist for San Diego Juvenile Drug Court. As part of his job, he often visits the very school he ditched during his teenage addiction.

Church is the first to admit that his journey from the street to a career was very difficult, and continuing on the right path is a constant challenge.

But having survived, he has only one thing to say about his life today.

"It's great," he said.

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at (760) 740-5410 or gwarth@nctimes.com.