BILLINGS - Mandi Smith and Amanda Brum have a story to tell. A story they hope will stop others from ever using street drugs.

Amanda says, "My parents divorced and I decided to take off from home." Mandi says, "Well, it started just because I was always kind of interested in it." For Mandi Smith and Amanda Brum's drug-use escalated as quickly as it started. Before they even graduated high school, they were in the grips of an uncontrollable addiction.

Addictions that not even the best treatment centers could cure. Mandi says, "I was doing anywhere between 20 and 40 delodids a day and anywhere between 200 and 400 milligrams of morphine."

Amanda says, "I needed it to get up. I needed it to go to bed at night. Yeah, it ran my life." She also says, "I have jaw effects from it. I mumble a lot. Damaged teeth." Mandi says she had, "Pulmonary abscess in my lung and Merca due to IV drug use." Amanda continues, "I was literally dying from Meth addiction and alcoholism."

Mandi nearly lost her life to the drug ridden streets of Phoenix, Arizona. She says, "I got a knife put to my throat and got drug into an alley and was raped and stabbed. I had all my tendons lacerated in my left arm." She adds, "The insanity of the disease is that before I allowed anybody to call the ambulance I had to smoke that crack I had in my pocket."

Amanda says, "I've lost my son. I lost the trust of my family." Mandi says, "I was a monster. Anyone who came into my path I'd figure out a way to use them for what I needed."

But this is not how their stories end. In the next installment of Drug Court, we'll learn about the City Court program that got Mandi and Amanda clean and sober.