Oregon's Meth Epidemic Creates Thousands Of "Orphans," Abused And
Neglected Children Who Fall Into The State's Care After Their Parents
Are Arrested

THE CHILDREN OF METH

When Sadie's parents were ramped-up on methamphetamine, they fought.
Vicious fights, with fists, screams, guns and blood.

Sitting in Carol Chervenak's examination room at the ABC House in
Albany, the 9-year-old girl recalled standing in the driveway,
watching her dad, high and wild-eyed, hammer on her mother's head
with the butt of a pistol.

One night, the gun was left out, her parents asleep. Sadie described
for the doctor how she pressed the barrel between her eyes and
struggled to hook her finger around the trigger.

"I wanted it over," Chervenak recalls the girl whispering.

Wearing a borrowed blue dress, Sadie was on her way to a Linn County
foster home, about to join the growing list of what police and social
workers call Oregon's "meth orphans."

They are the children of the epidemic, abused and neglected, taken
from moms and dads who nurture only their addiction. They represent
the human tragedy of meth. Growling stomachs. Rotting diapers.
Bruises, burns and a lifetime of deep scars.

"Our society should be ashamed for allowing this kind of abuse and
neglect of our children," said Eugene vice and narcotics Sgt. Lee
Thoming. "We're going to pay down the road, when these kids get older."

Although methamphetamine has threatened the welfare of children in
Oregon for 20 years, no comprehensive information on the problem exists.

The Department of Human Services conducted its first statewide
analysis last year, when 5,438 children entered state foster homes,
up from 4,906 in 2003. Last year, roughly 2,750 children -- more than
half of all foster cases -- were taken from parents using or making
the potent drug, the study found.

Welfare workers in several counties hit hard by methamphetamine have
scrutinized their local cases, confirming what their guts have long
told them: Meth is straining the child-welfare system.

In Lane County, welfare workers suspected meth was why they had
"babies coming out of our ears," said Pat Larson, a DHS intake
supervisor. So, they tracked foster-care petitions during the first
six months of this year. Of the nearly 200 children's cases related
to meth, 81 involved newborns.

In Multnomah County, nearly 60 percent of calls coming into the
child-welfare hot line involve the drug. In Coos County, meth is
linked to 75 percent of the 180 children in foster homes, and the
problem is worsening, officials said.

Of the 32 children placed in foster care in Coos County since June 1,
90 percent were taken from meth homes, said Nancylee Stewart, the
county's DHS child-welfare program manager.

Smoked, swallowed, snorted and injected, meth floods users with
feelings of euphoria and invincibility. But the highly addictive
drug's adverse effects, including irritability, insomnia,
hallucinations and paranoia, can lead to violence in the home, experts say.

At times, the abuse is extreme.

Jesse Caleb Compton is on Oregon's Death Row for killing Tesslynn
O'Cull, the 3-year-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend. High on
methamphetamine, the 21-year-old Springfield man systematically
tortured the girl, including burning her with a propane torch he used
to cook his meth.

But more often, the children are neglected. Last month, Keizer police
say they found a 16-month-old boy, wearing a T-shirt and diaper,
walking along the city's busiest street as his parents slept off a
meth binge at home.

Craig Stoelk, a detective with Salem's child-abuse unit, has a stack
of photos dating to 1988, showing the dismal places meth children
call home: Carpets stained with caustic meth-making chemicals.
Pacifiers on a makeshift lab. Toys next to dirty needles. Toddlers
with sores and burns from exposure to the drug's toxins.

In Stoelk's pictures, the children stare at the camera, their eyes
filled with a stinging loneliness.

This month, Oregon became the first state to require prescriptions
for cold and allergy medicines that can be converted into meth --
primarily to cut down on home meth labs.

The new law isn't expected to stop people from using the drug,
especially since most meth comes from Mexico. But reducing the number
of mom-and-pop labs in Oregon homes, where children are exposed to a
toxic and volatile stew of chemicals, is bound to stop some of the
suffering, Stoelk said.

And it's a small sacrifice, he said.

"People are being inconvenienced for a few minutes to get a
prescription," Stoelk said. "Stop and think about the children living
in this dark world 24 hours a day."

A Danger Like No Other

Meth addiction is quick, and so is the destruction of the user's
family. It can be a complete and sudden collapse, said Una Swanson,
manager of child protective services for the children and families
division of DHS.

Although not dismissing the dangers of alcohol, marijuana or crack,
Swanson said the character of meth use -- a rush lasting for days,
followed by a long period of deep sleep -- means the drug endangers
children like no other.

"There are such long periods of time when parents are unavailable to
their children," she said.

Constant chaos, isolation and fear is a recipe for abnormal brain
development in the children of meth addicts, said Bruce Perry, an
internationally known child psychiatrist with the Child Trauma
Academy in Houston.

Perry, who helps train DHS employees, said research on trauma tied
specifically to meth has just started. But the children of parents
who abuse drugs tend to suffer from profound delays in their verbal
and social skills, he said.

"These people aren't getting on the floor to enrich their children's
lives, to talk to them, to hug them," Perry said. "Their kids are
essentially on their own."

Often, the result is behavioral problems that can make it difficult
to find foster parents willing to keep the meth children, said
Larson, who supervises Lane County's incoming foster care cases.
"Once the shock wears off these kids," she said, "the behavior issues pop up."

They run the gamut, social workers say. Children may fight toilet
training or stay awake through the night. Older children might talk
about pornography, a staple in many meth homes, where the drug makes
users highly sexualized.

But the most common challenge, officials say, is dealing with the
drug pulsing through young bodies. Many children test positive for
meth, from newborns whose mothers used the drug during their
pregnancy to grade-schoolers constantly surrounded by it.

Last week, a 2-year-old Salem girl was flown to a Portland hospital,
suffering from seizures. She had eaten meth she found stored in an
M&M's box at home, police said.

More often, children are poisoned by their surroundings. When meth
enters a child's body, it boosts heart rate, respiration and blood
pressure. Depending on the exposure level, it creates irritability,
hallucinations, insomnia, weight loss, violent outbursts and other
symptoms of what is known as "tweaking" in adults, physicians said.

For breast-feeding newborns, the symptoms grow worse if the mother
continues to use the drug, said Sig-Linda Jacobson, an Oregon Health
& Science University associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology
who works with pregnant women with substance abuse problems.

"The kid is fussy and won't get to sleep," Jacobson said, "and you've
got people who are high and don't have a lot of patience. The baby
ends up getting physically hurt."

When a child is suddenly removed and placed in foster care, it can
take days before the meth leaves his or her body, allowing sleep and
normal eating, she said. Complicates foster homes

Children were found at nearly 3,200 meth lab busts across the country
last year -- one in every five labs, according to the Drug
Enforcement Administration.

In Oregon, 88 children were found in 447 labs busted in 2004.

But police say those numbers vastly understate the problem, because
drug teams try to stage lab busts after children have left for
school. It also doesn't account for the hundreds of children whose
parents use meth but aren't cooks.

Waiting for their parents to break free from the drug, children from
meth homes are languishing longer in Oregon's system of foster homes,
which has fluctuated between 4,300 and 4,450 since 2001.

In Lane County, more than half of the 1,000 foster children don't
have a plan to return home, Larson said.

The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 requires states to
terminate parental rights if a child has spent 15 out of 22 months in
foster care. Yet the law doesn't account for the difficulty of
treating meth, DHS officials say.

A recent study by UCLA's Integrated Substance Abuse Programs shows
meth takes longer to treat than other drugs, largely because of the
neurological damage it does to dopamine terminals in the brain. Users
frequently relapse because they find it tougher to get by without the
drug, which artificially creates dopamine and feelings of pleasure,
researchers found.

Just waiting for the brain's pleasure center to begin functioning
properly again can take six to 12 months of staying clean, researchers say.

Jay Wurscher, director of alcohol and drug services for the children
and families division of DHS, also blames a dearth of treatment. Ten
years ago, he said, the state had a residential treatment bed for
most parents immediately.

But in the past five years, budget cuts have reduced the state's
treatment capacity. Now, meth-addicted parents must wait three or
more months, Wurscher said.

"The government has just come into their house and taken their
child," he said. "There is no lower point in a human's life. What do
you think they're going to do? They're not going to stop using as
they're waiting for treatment. They're going to keep getting loaded."

Usually, the parental instincts of meth addicts kick in as they watch
state workers carry their children out the door, said Liz Lawrence, a
narcotics officer with Bend police.

During one raid, Lawrence lashed out at a parent. Amid the home's
squalor, police found a meth lab set up on the floor, among stuffed
animals and toys.

"What are you thinking?" Lawrence remembers asking the father. "Why
are the drugs more important than your own child?"

"What do you mean?" said the man. "I'm a good parent."

Big shadow on tiny lives

At the ABC House in Albany, nearly 55 percent of the 350 children
referred by police and state caseworkers last year came from homes in
Linn and Benton counties where meth was abused.

One-third of them, according to Chervenak, the clinic's medical
director, tested positive for the drug.

In Chervenak's brightly colored examination room, where a mobile
spins above a table and pint-size chair, the shadow of meth grows
darker. Children sit in the chair, sharing their harrowing stories
from meth homes, tears streaming down their round faces.

None haunts Chervenak like Sadie, the 9-year-old who came in for an
exam in 2001. It was the case that made the doctor realize the
ravages of meth. At home, Sadie had suffered through sex abuse,
hunger and loneliness. But the violence was the worst, she told Chervenak.

Chervenak still has the detailed notes she took of the conversation.

Sadie described a night when her father held his gun to her mother's
head, looked at the girl and told her, "Just say the word, and I'll shoot her."

When the girl told her she once put the gun to her own head, the
doctor stopped taking notes, struggling to control her own emotions.

She remembers asking the girl whether she knew why she was going to a
foster home. Yes, the child said, because her dad makes drugs. Sadie
described how her father broke the tops off matches. "Then he mixes
them with the stuff that burns your skin when you touch it," the
doctor remembers her saying. "It smells really yucky when it's
cooking. It makes me feel oozy."

The girl's voice grew quieter with each sentence, Chervenak said.

At the end of each meth cook, Sadie's father dipped her little
fingers in the toxic stew and made her taste it. It made her head and
stomach ache, she said.

Sadie paused, before asking, "Can you check to make sure that stuff
isn't in me any more?' "