Whitefish woman finalist in Meth Project video contest

“I used to have dreams,” a young girl says. Ceremonial tribal song and dance fills the screen, snow-capped mountains in the background. Suddenly it all goes wrong, as bright images give way to dark, haunting scenes that flash between depictions of methamphetamine use. “Now I only have nightmares.”

This is Laira Fonner’s message, played out in a 30 second video for Montana Meth Project, a nonprofit focused on curbing statewide meth use. Fonner’s video won the 2016 Life or Meth Video Contest for Montana, earning her a prize of $2,500 and a trip to Denver for SeriesFest, an international TV and video festival. Fonner and other state winners will move on to compete for a $20,000 national prize.

Fonner, a Whitefish native, now works as a psychiatric nurse at Pathways Treatment Center in Kalispell. Her experiences working with struggling addicts, along with her other roles as photographer and poet, combined to shape her vision for the video.

“It’s only 30 seconds, so every frame has to be significant if you want to tell a story,” she said. “I wanted to have images that create a feeling in people rather than just being graphic and just showing junkies and people picking at their skin. That’s the truth of meth, but I wanted to show something that’s more metaphoric and poetic because that’s my nature.”

“That’s why I just tried to choose all these images, especially the concept of dreams,” she said. “As a psych nurse, I see a lot of young people whose lives are devastated by making that one poor choice, and then it just slides down from there. They should be having these incredible futures with their whole lives ahead of them.”

According to MMP, Montana ranks in the top-10 nationwide for per capita treatment admissions for meth. Fifty percent of adults in prison in the state are there for meth-related issues, and 53 percent of children in foster care are there because of the drug.

Unlike other finalists in the contest, Fonner chose to focus on the drug’s prevalence among communities on reservations. In a different project, she and her husband Adam Pitman, who is also a filmmaker, visited reservations near Browning and Missoula to interview meth addicts and hear their stories. When she began thinking about how to go about crafting her video, these native communities immediately came to mind.

“To create a video with a Montana feel, it makes sense to show the native culture,” she said. “It’s a beautiful culture but when addiction kind of spreads throughout, it’s like an illness, and it’s very devastating.”

Her video, along with separate ad campaigns and documentaries, is part of MMP’s overall attack: a blunt, honest approach for discussing the destruction of meth use. According to MMP, in the four years since the organization started, teen meth use in the state decreased by 63 percent, and adult use fell by 72 percent. Efforts have been successful, but as Fonner put it, these are just drops in a very large bucket.

“A lot more work needs to be done,” she said.

At work, Fonner said she sees firsthand destruction of the drug far too often. Pathways has both adult and adolescent treatment centers, and while messages warning teens of the dangers of meth are out there, Fonner said she’s worried these messages aren’t even targeting a young enough crowd. The age of first use is inching closer to eight or nine years old, she said, and this usually happens at the urging of an older sibling, cousin or friend.

“It just shocks me that I’m still seeing kids that come in with severe meth addictions,” she said. “Even if statistics show that things are getting better, things are still really bad. Obviously, a lot more work needs to be done educating kids, and I think we need to start younger.”

Fonner’s video, along with nine other finalists from other states, can be seen at http://facebook.com/MontanaMethProject, where videos can be voted for via Facebook “likes.” Voting ends July 15, when the top three videos will go before a panel of judges to determine the winner.