Portland Author Ashly Lorenzana Gives Readers a Glimpse of What NineYears of Meth Addiction Looks Like

In 2004, deputy Bret King of the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office in Portland, OR began to collect the mugshots of repeat offenders who had a history of drug abuse. These startling photos of faces that were sometimes unrecognizable from the first photo taken would become the drug prevention project known as "Faces of Meth."

Only a year later in 2005, Ashly Lorenzana had just turned eighteen and moved to the Portland area from a small coastal town near Seaside.

Since that time, she has used methamphetamine intravenously on an almost daily basis.

She also began her career in the sex trade around that same time and naturally had to take plenty of photos to feature in her erotic ads over the years.

Though she considers herself "semi-retired" as an adult companion, she does continue to use meth and began to focus her energies on her writing work in 2010, which now serves as her full time job.

Her writing has appeared on some of the biggest sites in the adult scene such as Slixa.com and Dating.com, to name a couple.

As 2015 approaches, so does her 10 year anniversary with meth addiction.

After much reflection on the milestone, Lorenzana explains the vision behind her newest project by saying, "I remember the grotesque photos featured in Faces of Meth and I knew from my own personal experience that not everyone ends up looking that terrible just because they use drugs regularly. I wanted to provide a more complete picture for those who have no experience with drug addiction because I feel like they are not being told the whole truth about what it can look like."

When asked what message she hopes to communicate with her new book Portraits of a Young Addict, her response was, "I just want to share my experience with drugs and that's pretty much it. People can form their own opinions after seeing the photos of me from the past nine years and at least they will know that drug addicts can look like normal everyday people that you would never guess were involved with that kind of stuff...I think that's important."

To post a comment, you must register and login.