Girl Next Door Smuggles, Megan Racer: From Darkness to Light

On the podcast this week I had a conversation with Megan Racer, and her story is one I keep thinking about. She was a straight-A student headed to law school. She ended up at the Mexico border with 89 pounds of meth hidden in a truck she didn’t know was loaded. She’s 34, she works at River Source Treatment Center in business development now, and the way she walks through how all of this actually happened is what makes the conversation worth hearing.

I have to thank my friend Chris Stiegel for the connection. He sent me one of Megan’s LinkedIn posts and I knew right away she belonged on this show. So thank you Chris, and thank you Megan for trusting me with this.

A kid who couldn’t shake the sadness

Megan grew up in what looked like a regular suburban household. Mom and dad, same roof, a sister seven years younger. The picture from the outside was fine. The inside was different.

“I was always plagued with sadness,” she told me. “Sadness is just what I remember feeling from a very young age, which turned into like depression, major depression, and I couldn’t shake that feeling.”

She chased adrenaline to outrun it. Wakeboarding. Motorcycles. Competing at everything. Her dad once told her he wasn’t running an auto parts store and she needed to calm it down, and her honest answer to him was no. That was the high she’d found that worked, and it was, as she put it, a healthy one. She just didn’t know how to keep reaching for healthy coping when she got older.

Affection at home was thin. Hugs and I-love-yous weren’t part of the routine. She told me her dad didn’t say I love you to her until decades later, after she got sober this last time, and hearing it from a man in his 60s for the first time was almost too much to absorb. She was close to one person growing up, her grandmother, who passed away when Megan was around 17. Megan called her a soulmate. After that loss, she was looking for that kind of connection again and not finding it.

By 18, she tried hard drugs for the first time. Cocaine, in a relationship with a man she thought had everything she wanted. He put a pile on the table one night after she got off work, and the thought that came up was not no. It was that this isn’t going to be enough for tonight.

The half a blue pill

The shift she describes after that first line was instant. Then opiates came in. She told me she was in the shower one night, her partner opened the door and handed her half a blue Oxycontin, and she took it.

“I understood why I was given life at that point, or so I thought,” she said. “This is the feeling I have been seeking my entire life. How do I make this happen every day?”

I asked her if there was any fear in those early days. She said no. No fear. Just seeking. The day was built around the chase whether she was getting high that day or not. She kept moving through her bachelor’s at Arizona State in criminal justice. She was three credits short of graduating when she walked away to, in her words, pursue her drug career. She’d been studying for the LSAT. She wanted law school. She quit instead.

Pregnant, sober, and then heroin

She got pregnant with her daughter and got herself off everything by seven months. Two months after the birth, she picked up a heroin habit. That’s when her family started asking real questions.

The kids’ father was already on heroin by then and she didn’t know it. She’d sworn she’d never touch it because she knew what oxy already did to her. The way she crossed that line was almost casual. She found his stash in his truck while he was sleeping, brought it inside, confronted him. He asked her to leave him half so he wouldn’t be sick. She told him she’d do the other half while he was gone. Part of it was wanting to get high. Part of it, she admits, was wanting to hurt him. Either way, it didn’t stop for a year and a half.

CPS got called by her son’s grandfather. Both parents tested positive. She got clean for six or seven months while the case was open, started working for the Maricopa County clerk of court at the filing counter, and during a stretch where she and her kids’ father were both testing clean, they reconnected long enough for her to get pregnant with her son. She hid that pregnancy from her caseworker the whole way through. The case closed a week after he was born.

Working the courthouse, withdrawing at the filing counter

This is the part of Megan’s story that’s hard to picture if you’ve never been around active addiction. She got promoted to courtroom clerk at the juvenile court. She was good at her job. She was also, by then, picking up a gram of heroin a day plus a handle of Fireball whiskey a day. Her dealer told her to start buying in bulk because the daily 45-minute drive was getting ridiculous. She said she couldn’t, because if she had two grams in her hand she’d do two grams.

She’d clock in withdrawing. She’d hold it together at the counter. On her lunch break she’d drive, score, shoot up, and come back. Eventually she stopped bothering with the drive and brought everything to work. A cup of Fireball over ice on her desk. Her kit in her bag. The bathroom at work as the shooting gallery.

One afternoon she took heroin and alcohol together, went to the parking lot for a 15-minute break, and passed out for an hour. Her boss and her boss’s boss were knocking on the window when she woke up. She lied her way through it, told them she was depressed, which was true, used everything real in her life as cover. They suggested time off. She filed for FMLA. A few months later she stopped showing up. She cashed out her 401k and spent it on drugs.

Mexico, the truck, and 89 pounds

She ended up living with one of her dealers, kids with her the whole time. Some men connected to operations in Mexico offered her what looked like a way out. Get a truck. Register it. Make a few runs to test how the border treated her. Eventually move money for them out to California.

She took the kids with her down to Mexico. Her daughter was around five and a half. Her son was around two. She crossed back and forth a couple of times to test the truck. On one of those runs they sent her to secondary inspection. She told her contacts she’d been flagged and asked if they could wait, get her own car, then start running. They said yes.

The truck had been acting up. They told her they’d take it to a shop for her. The next time she crossed, border patrol pulled her into secondary again. She watched them surround the truck. Every one of them looked over at her.

What she didn’t know, and what she said is the hardest part of her story to talk about, is that there were already 89 pounds of meth packed into that vehicle. She thought the California run was a money pickup, a tryout before any drugs ever moved. She wasn’t told. She’d been driving her two kids around with it.

“I would love to say that I knew that there were 89 pounds and that they hid it in my truck, because I wouldn’t look like such an idiot,” she told me. “But I didn’t. I feel a lot of shame over it.”

I told her what I believe, which is that shame isn’t quite the right word for what happened to her. She was desperate. She was using. She wasn’t asking the questions a sober person would ask. People in a haze make decisions they’d never make clear-headed, and she paid for those decisions in a way most people never will.

What she’s doing with it now

Border patrol took the kids. Megan’s mom drove four and a half hours from Phoenix down to Yuma to pick them up. Megan went to a cell, went into hard heroin withdrawal, and went in front of a judge in shackles with her attorney already talking about 20 years in prison.

She survived the system. She got sober. She’s at River Source now, working in business development, using what she lived through to help other people get to treatment. That’s why Chris sent me her LinkedIn in the first place, and that’s why I wanted to have her on the show.

The part of Megan’s story I keep coming back to is how ordinary the start of it was. A smart kid. A good family on paper. Sadness she couldn’t name. A man who put cocaine on the table after work. Half a blue pill in the shower. None of it looked, in the moment, like the road to a truck full of meth at the border. That’s how this stuff works on people who’d otherwise be fine. Megan is doing the work of telling people that out loud, and I’m grateful she came on to do it with me.

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