METH CRISIS SOARS IN COLORADO

Addicted Parents Neglect Or Abandon Kids

Before she left, 18-year-old Samantha Zeller stole across the silence
of a suburban home and taped a note to her mother's bedroom door.

"I love you, don't worry," she wrote. When Rhonda Zeller awoke, she
found her daughter had left something else behind: her 1-year-old son.

Samantha reappeared the day he turned 2, only to walk out again while
the birthday boy cried for his mother to stay.

Each time she left, he would stand at the door screaming, "Mommy, no,
don't go, please don't go." She would go anyway.

"That's when I knew how horrible this drug must be," Rhonda said. "She
loved him more than life."

The drug was methamphetamine. Judges and child-protection workers call
it the scourge of parenthood. They label it the "walk away" drug,
because that's what parents do.

In many Colorado counties, meth has become a leading cause of child
neglect. Child-welfare officials estimate the drug now accounts for up
to 80 percent of the cases in which they consider taking kids from
their parents.

Child-abuse investigators "are walking into homes where there is no
water, no electricity. The parents have sold all their furniture,"
said Theresa Spahn, the director of a state program that provides
guardians to neglected children. "They're walking away from their
children. This is a crisis."

Larimer County's child-protection agency takes two meth complaints a
day. Jefferson County puts more kids into protective custody because
of meth than because of either physical or sexual abuse. Denver
tracked a 230 percent increase in drug-abuse-related child-protection
cases in the past two years.

Yet in Colorado, counselors complain, treatment for meth addiction is
generally unavailable unless you're insured, pregnant or caught in a
child-abuse case.

Those cases have been growing not only in Colorado cities but also in
largely rural counties that once had few children in protective custody.

"Basically the meth problem in Mesa County is huge," said Tom Papin,
its human-services director. "We are seeing 80 to 85 percent of our
child-welfare cases have meth-involved parents."

Because meth enables people to stay high for days but ultimately ruins
them physically, emotionally and financially, "it's much more
difficult to put a family back together than with cocaine or other
drug or alcohol use," he said.

For Samantha Zeller, the long journey home from meth addiction took
four years. Many parents never make it back.

First pot, then Ecstasy

Samantha was pregnant at 16. She decided she could become a mother and
graduate from high school, and did. After her baby was born, they both
lived at her mother's home in a middle-class Arvada
neighborhood.

The first forbidden drug she tasted was marijuana, followed by
Ecstasy. Then a friend let her try a white powder that brought instant
euphoria.

"From the very first day I used it, I never stopped," she said. At
first meth felt wonderful. "No worries. You feel like you're on top of
the world. You could do anything, go anywhere. Like
Superwoman."

After about six months, "it got horrible. You'd have to get high just
to function. You're just constantly chasing something you'll never get
again."

At first she could carry on an animated conversation with her mother
while she was high. Eventually her mother began to notice she was up
writing letters at 2 in the morning - and getting thinner and thinner.

As the addiction deepened, she finally faced a choice between her
family and the drug. She chose the drug. She left the note. She left
her mother, her younger brother, her baby son. For a while she called
every few days without saying where she was. Then she stopped calling.

On her own, she lived in an apartment and hotel rooms, then dated a
guy who had a house and sold meth. To support herself, she wrote bad
checks or stole them from mailboxes.

She learned how to replace names on checks by washing off the ink. She
learned how to make a batch of meth in two or three hours by
extracting it from Sudafed cold and allergy pills with chemicals
available from agricultural supply stores.

Those pills became "another part of the theft," she said. "You'd need
25 or 30 boxes."

She smoked meth, the most efficient path to the pleasure center of her
brain. But "I also ate it, snorted it, drank it, shot it. It really
didn't matter," she said. "I guess my all-time low was when I started
shooting it."

Embarrassed by the prospect of needle tracks on her arms, she injected
meth into her feet, until "my feet were like one big bruise."

She said she felt terrible about abandoning her son, but she saw what
happened to children of her meth-addicted friends. "They'd yell and
scream at the kids all the time, and the kids weren't being fed," she
said. "They were sickly looking and pale. And dirty."

At her mother's home, her son sometimes asked, "Where's my
mom?"

"She's far, far away. At school," Rhonda Zeller would tell
him.

And "she'll be back," Rhonda would promise. Even when she didn't
believe it.

Few counties track cases

There are no statewide statistics on child abuse and neglect cases
attributed to meth use. Colorado Department of Human Services
officials say their computer system cannot extract that data. Some
child advocates are urging the state to make it available.

A few counties have begun trying to keep track.

In Jefferson County, where Samantha lived, 106 of 604 child-protection
cases this year were attributed to meth - outnumbering every other
cause except general neglect.

Denver County has tracked a huge increase in cases where parental
substance abuse was the primary cause of neglect or abuse - from 29 in
2002 to 96 in 2004 - but does not break those numbers down by drug.

Larimer County began tracking meth-related calls to its
child-protection hotline in March. So far there have been 450; about
50 resulted in child neglect or abuse cases.

"I believe that child-welfare agencies in this state are being
inundated with referrals indicating that this is a problem," said
Angela Mead, Larimer's deputy division manager for child and family
services.

In Adams County, juvenile-court Judge Chris Melonakis estimates 40
percent of his child-welfare cases involve methamphetamine. He has
created a special Thursday "drug court" for selected families he hopes
can recover with appropriate treatment, employment, housing and
supervision.

"They're very resource-intensive cases," he said, "and that just makes
it really hard for the system to accommodate these folks."

Statewide, methamphetamine treatment-program admissions doubled from
1999 to 2003, surpassing cocaine-treatment admissions last year.

While meth-lab seizures declined in Colorado this year,
law-enforcement officials suspect their success in shutting down local
sources has been offset by imported meth from Mexico, which may
account for 80 percent of the supply.

Cmdr. Lori Moriarty of the North Metro Drug Task Force sees the small
faces behind those statistics.

One was the boy in the skeleton suit.

It was 5 in the morning, just before Halloween. In the dark, officers
staking out a house noticed someone repeatedly popping out of the
front door, canvassing the street, and "all you could see is the
skeleton in his skeleton costume," Moriarty said.

They wondered if he was a lookout.

When they raided the house, they found a 4-year-old boy wearing
nothing but the skeleton costume. He had dressed himself for a
Halloween party, "but I can't wake my mom up and I don't know where
the bus stop is," he explained. "I thought if I just watched down the
street, I could catch the bus as it went by."

In another raid, officers found a meth lab and the finished product
hidden in the diaper bag and toy box of a 14-month-old boy. In
another, they found chemicals stored in the same refrigerator where a
4-year-old girl had fixed herself a breakfast of ice cream and
leftover mac and cheese.

In trouble with the law

Rhonda Zeller, a human-resources manager for an office-furniture
company, grew accustomed to seeing police cars parked on her cul-de-sac.

Her gaunt daughter came and went. In early 2001, Samantha had been
arrested for possessing meth in Denver. Various counties were
investigating her forgeries and thefts.

Strangers came to Rhonda's door, threatening to harm Samantha if they
didn't get money she owed. Rhonda borrowed money to protect her
daughter. She met one man at night in an alley and paid him $1,000.

When Samantha was home, she doted compulsively on growing collections
of pens and pocket knives she stored in Rubbermaid containers. She
spent hours sorting them.

She grew paranoid, hiding in a corner of her bedroom closet for up to
12 hours because she imagined she heard police knocking on the
windows. Her mother brought soup to the closet to make sure she ate
something.

Samantha once went more than two weeks without a night's sleep. She
was so weak and thin that her mother sometimes helped her into the
shower.

In December 2001, Rhonda got a call at work. "I've just kicked in your
door," a Colorado state trooper informed her. "Your daughter tried to
commit suicide. You need to get here."

Samantha had pointed a gun at her head and guzzled antifreeze when
police broke in to arrest her. When she went to jail, after getting
her stomach pumped at a hospital, her 5-foot-4 body weighed 79 pounds.

"Highest priority in life"

Photos of 18 babies whose pregnant mothers sought drug treatment cover
one wall of Tonya Wheeler's office. She displays them as living proof
that meth addiction is treatable - and worth treating.

She knows it's not easy. The president of Advocates For Recovery,
Wheeler is a Denver drug-addiction counselor who once deserted her own
daughters to pursue a meth addiction.

"Meth will do that," she said. "It will become the highest priority in
life."

Now she sees meth addiction as an illness that Colorado does too
little to treat. If adults seeking treatment lack insurance, aren't
pregnant and don't have a pending child-welfare case, "they don't have
access," she said.

Colorado's Medicaid program covers drug treatment only for pregnant
women, "so what message does that send to the female addict? Go and
get pregnant?" Wheeler asked. "We don't need any more drug-affected
newborns."

In a recent report to legislators, the state Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Division acknowledged that national surveys rank Colorado high for
drug use and low for treatment.

A 2003 federal survey put Colorado second among 50 states in
"past-month use of any illicit drugs," the state agency reported. At
the same time, "Colorado ranks last in the nation in investing in
treatment, prevention or research."

Colorado invested in Samantha. She was charged with racketeering for
theft and drug crimes in seven counties and could have gone to prison
for 16 to 48 years.

Instead she was sentenced to eight years' probation and an intensive
treatment program by a judge who gave her another chance. She spent 2
1/2 years in the Cenikor program, sometimes believing she could not
last another week.

Seven months ago, she returned home to live with her mother and
son.

Now 22, she has regained 80 pounds and some of her self-esteem. "There
are still days I feel like the size of an ant. They come less often,"
she said.

Almost daily, Samantha tells her mother she can never thank her
enough. She works for the company that employed and stood by her
mother and is slowly paying off about $22,000 in restitution.

"My kids are home. They're healthy. This is the first Christmas in
five years with the family happy and back together. There's nothing
better than that," Rhonda Zeller said. "We're very, very lucky. If you
had asked me three years ago, I'd have said she's never coming home
alive."

Samantha's son is 6 now, a kid with a beguiling pout, a plastic sword,
a knack for sleuthing where his mom hid Christmas presents - and an
innocence of her past. He never saw her in jail. When she entered a
long-term drug-treatment program, his grandmother again told him she
was away at school.

In truth she was learning to live again and become a mother once more.
During her last 18 months at Cenikor, her son was allowed to join her
at the place they called school.

That is his understanding to this day. He finally got to live with his
mom at the school far, far away.