From Pills to PCP: On the Road to Destruction

It began with pills, “reds” and “whites,” when Dalton Smith was a sixth-grader in East Los Angeles.

Marijuana, LSD, Ritalin, cocaine and heroin followed. Smith used virtually every drug for sale on city streets during a 22-year stint in the seamy subculture of chemical abuse and dependency.

Now 34 and off drugs, he is quick to denounce what he considers the most damaging substance of all. He says it cost him a driver’s license, a job, a marriage, several convictions for driving under the influence and a yearlong jail sentence for robbery, handed down two days before his 21st birthday.

“PCP was the one that brought the most trouble to my life,” said Smith, who earns his living collecting trash for the City of Los Angeles and gives anti-drug talks in his spare time.

He asked that his real name be withheld.

$300 an Ounce

“I first got involved with PCP as ‘angel dust,’ and I’d smoke it on parsley leaves,” he said. Later he took to selling the drug. “I could get $300 for an ounce.”

He would smoke a “sherm,” a PCP-laced cigarette, and sip a beer while driving home from work on a freeway.

“I didn’t want to use PCP at home because my wife was against my using drugs,” he said. “I kept my supply under the dashboard of my car and always used beer to go with it.”

Smith had used alcohol since his preteens, mainly wine, malt liquor and beer. But he had long since developed another reason for drinking a single can of beer when using PCP behind the wheel of his car. If police stopped him for erratic driving and smelled liquor, he would take a breath test, then be released when it showed alcohol well below the legal intoxication level.

Smith, articulate and animated, grew up in a family of 10 children in a Los Angeles public housing project. Now, seven months after completing a yearlong rehabilitation program, he has the appearance of the solid blue-collar citizen.

“I never thought of myself as a dope fiend, and I tried to make sure that no one else saw me as one,” Smith said. “I kept up my appearance and worked a steady job.”

Drug Use at Work

Work, however, was part of the problem. “Several of the guys were into drugs when I began working for the city Recreation and Parks Department and I just continued using with them.”

At times, he and fellow workers used drugs on the job. Sometimes as many as a dozen would get together after quitting time on paydays.

“We would gather around,” he explained, “and each would buy $100 worth (one gram) of rock cocaine. Sometimes we’d blow our entire paychecks--$1,200 to $1,400 each in one session.”

Smith, the father of girls ages 10 and 11, says drug abusers are oblivious to such losses and to the dangers of their habits. “I knew of people who overdosed or jumped off tall buildings while under the influence of acid, yet later the same day I’d take some.”

The apparent cocaine overdose deaths of athletes Len Bias and Don Rogers will have little effect on addicts, he said.

“You don’t think anything can happen to you because you feel you’re in control of the drugs, not the other way around.”

He turned his life around after twice losing control of his car on the freeway.

PCP Undetected

He came to his senses in the Van Nuys police station in the San Fernando Valley after crashing into another car on the Ventura Freeway about 20 miles northwest of where he worked.

“I didn’t know what had happened until I saw the police report,” Smith said. “But, once again, the cops busted me for drunk driving because they didn’t find my PCP under the dash.”

Smith, who had lost his job with the Recreation and Parks Department because of his drug use, was persuaded to seek help by his supervisor in the Sanitation Department.

He had tried rehabilitation programs twice without success, including a two-week detoxification stint at Metropolitan State Hospital. He injected some heroin the day he was released.

He was admitted to the Hillsman Drug and Alcohol Center upon the recommendation of his girlfriend’s father, who was undergoing treatment there.

“They told me the first day that only one or two of the 72 people in the program would succeed in getting off drugs, but I was determined to be the one,” he said.

It took a five-month leave from his job and seven subsequent months as a resident patient before Smith began his new life. True to predictions, he is one of only two in his group of 72 patients to remain drug-free.

Now he does volunteer work at the center and speaks to community and school groups about drugs.