Meth in the Family

A Tucson family was kind enough to let me witness their struggle with Meth. When I first started working on this story, it began with an interview at a park with a mother, her ex-husband and son. The mother–who is remarried–shared that she’d allowed her ex-husband to move into her home in an effort to keep their son off of meth. The ex-husband has a history of using meth. And the mother’s hope was that her son would stay clean if he and his father worked together to kick any still-existing meth habit. Well, things got even more interesting. Roughly two weeks after that interview in the park (my story had not yet aired), the mother told me that her son had gone missing after his father disappeared from the scene. She told me she would be going out that night to look for her son on the streets. I asked the mother if I could tag along. She agreed. So, I grabbed my own home video camera and went out and shot “the rest of the story.” In addition to shooting most of this story with my consumer-model mini-dv camera, I also edited it. While the mini dv camera’s picture and sound quality is not professional, I found the gritty look worked okay for this piece. More importantly, I really think working alone and with a simple camera kept the family more at ease. They didn’t seem to feel as if they had “a TV crew” in their house. And they didn’t. Just me with my humble (and limited) gear. In the end, the aim of this story was to take the viewer a bit deeper than what they might …