Beauty Queen Ends Up Jailed Addict

T E M P E, Ariz., Feb. 25, 2002 -- When Mistie Kline was crowned Miss Teen Arizona in 1994, the 15-year-old blond beauty used her speech to trumpet the importance of good, solid values.

"We need a world we can believe in and trust," Kline told the crowd. "A world we can love and will love us back. We need a world that is God-fearing and law-abiding."

Kline, who had also won previous beauty contests, spent her one-year reign as Miss Teen Arizona working with teenage drug addicts. But in the years that followed, her own world seldom matched the ideals she'd extolled at the pageant.

When her reign was over, Kline became convinced she was getting fat. The 16-year-old started taking "crystal meth" — methamphetamines — after a friend told her that the stimulant would help her lose weight.

Six years later, the decline that began with that initial drug use hit bottom. Police arrested Kline on felony drug and theft charges, and she landed in Phoenix's Durango Jail on a nine-month sentence that included serving on the world's only female chain gang.

Released from jail last week after completing her sentence, the 23-year-old Kline told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America she hopes her story will help teens say no to drugs, and also give pause to girls who fixate on their weight.

"For all these years I used drugs to stay skinny," Kline said. "If I would have know that I was going to wind up in jail, 45 pounds overweight, would I have used? No."

An Ugly Fear

For Kline the trouble really began even before she won the Miss Teen Arizona crown. Behind the bright eyes and big smile she flashed in the spotlight was a desperate fear that she would never be able to stay slim.

She received good grades and played sports in high school, but had always worried about her weight. Kline, who weighed 130 pounds and stood 5 feet 5 inches tall, had muscular legs because of athletics. She wasn't fat, but she thought she was.

Soon, Kline was nibbling on a chunk of crystal meth every day before high school to reduce her appetite. Eventually, she says, she could go three weeks without eating.

"I thought, if I could just be thin enough, I'll be good enough,'" Kline said.

Kline graduated high school and community college, but her drug habit became an addiction. She held down a job, but avoided her family, as well as her friends who did not use drugs.

In June 2001, Kline was arrested twice in two weeks, all in her quest for more crystal meth.

First, she was arrested for being in possession of drugs packaged for sale and a loaded gun. Police were called after she rented a room with a friend under a false name and put $8,700 in a hotel safe deposit box. Police found a large baggie of methamphetamine in her bra and a loaded gun in Kline's pocketbook.

Soon thereafter, police arrested her for driving a stolen car and possessing stolen credit cards. By that time she weighed 110 pounds and her drug habit was costing $150 a day.

"I was on a rampage," Kline said in a recent jailhouse interview. "Nothing was going to stop me. Not family. Not friends. Not anything."

Scared Straight?

The former beauty queen traded her tiara and satin sash for orange rubber slippers and a black-and-white striped jail uniform.

Kline was placed in a disciplined, military-style chain gang as part of her sentence. She lived with two other women in an 8-by-10-foot cell. When they were sent out on work duty, they often were charged with burying indigent children and adults. Many of the adult bodies were those of drug addicts who overdosed, Kline said.

For Kline, completing the burials of the drug overdose victims reinforced the message that she had to stay clean after her release from jail.

The jail conditions hardly befit a former glamour girl. In jail, Kline washed her hair with dishwashing liquid and was not allowed to use a blow dryer for her hair or a razor to shave her legs. She gained 48 pounds thanks to a prison diet that consisted of mostly bread, potatoes and bologna.

Changing Her World

Now that she is out of jail, Kline says she will spend three nights a week in a halfway house for drug-addicted women, where she will focus on remaining sober. Although she will be completing specific types of community service as part of her five-year probation, Kline also wants to speak publicly, as a volunteer, so that she can warn young people about the dangers of drugs.

The time in jail changed her for the better, Kline says. She plans to return to school to study interior design.

About two weeks before her arrest, she confided to a friend that she did not know how to stop using drugs; because her sentence was long, Kline says was forced to get off the drug — cold turkey. With so much time to reflect on her mistakes, she says she prayed daily and built up her determination to avoid jail.

Now Kline said that she realizes she has a lot to offer young people, which is why she wants to share her tale.

The emphasis on her looks and how much she weighed is what led her into trouble from the beginning, she says.

"I realize now that there is more to life than that," Kline said. "I have more substance than what I look like on the outside."