CHILDREN, COUNTIES BEING STUNG BY BURGEONING USE OF METH

SULLIVAN, Ind. - The Newsstand is the kind of business often found in small
towns, where folks pick up a newspaper or the latest gossip, grab a
sandwich or a fountain drink.

From behind the counter, co-owner Brad McMahan keeps tabs on the
courthouse square, watching cars and pedestrians file past old-fashioned
buildings in a town that Sheriff Johnny Waterman says looks "a little like
Mayberry."

But this Mayberry has a dark side that concerns McMahan and county
officials. Some places call it crank or zip. Here, everyone just calls it meth.

And it's hurting Sullivan County's children at an alarming rate.

Last year the rate of child-abuse and -neglect cases nearly doubled the
state average. For every 1,000 people, 22.4 cases were reported.

The county's rate is one of the highest in the state, and child-welfare
officials blame methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that has been
sweeping across Indiana and other states for a decade.

"The parents are choosing the drug over the child," said James Bedwell,
director of the Sullivan County Office of Family and Children.

Meth labs have been found in nearly every Indiana county. Though they're
most common in rural areas, where the pungent smell is less likely to be
detected, labs have been cropping up in more populated areas in Central
Indiana.

That can put even more children at risk, and Sullivan County has been
dealing with those risks for years.

From December 2001 to December 2002, the county's Office of Family and
Children had a caseload of 56 children - 48 of them from families in which
meth was present.

Today, half of the 67 children who make up the office's caseload come from
meth homes.

Jackie Gadberry, who investigates most of the abuse and neglect complaints,
and Bedwell said that's not surprising because of how the drug works.

Meth produces a reaction similar to an adrenaline rush. A high can last up
to 24 hours, depending on the form of the drug ingested. People who use the
drug every few hours can go for days without eating or sleeping.

Parents become unaware of their surroundings and unable to tend to the
needs of themselves or others, officials said.

"First it starts out as, 'Mom forgot to pack my lunch.' It keeps building
up, and they (the parents) are unable to function," Gadberry said. "These
kids are raising themselves."

BEDWELL and Gadberry said they see such cases far too often.

In one investigation, they found a woman sitting in the road outside her
home, eating rocks while her children were inside. "How do you even begin
talking to someone who is eating rocks?" Gadberry said.

At another home, they found a meth user rocking back and forth in a fetal
position, pleading with caseworkers not to take her children because she
was a good mother. Her son, a boy about 8 or 9 years old, told the
investigators, "My mommy needs help."

One teenager whose parents used meth was hospitalized because exposure to
the fumes had damaged his immune system.

A woman who had a small child tried to kick her habit but failed.

"She struggled to stay clean," Bedwell said. "She finally came into the
office and said, 'I can't do this.'" Faced with choosing the drug or her
child, she chose meth and turned her infant over to a relative.

IN SOME cases, the children also become addicted. Bedwell and Gadberry said
the youngest meth user they've encountered was a 12-year-old whose parents
also used the drug.The El Paso Intelligence Center, a collaboration of more
than 15 federal and state agencies led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, reports that 2,023 children in the United States lived in
homes where illegal meth labs were discovered in 2003.

More than 200 of those children were in Indiana, according to the state police.

The cases are taking a toll on more than just the families.

In Sullivan County, which is in southwestern Indiana and has a population
of 20,000, the budget for the Office of Family and Children has jumped by
$100,000 since 2000 because of the costs of helping meth families, Bedwell
said.

Three or four years ago, it was rare for the county to place a child in a
therapeutic foster home, where providers have extra training to deal with
difficult cases, Bedwell noted. Now his office has eight children in such
homes. The placements cost the county $70 to $80 a day, compared with $14
to $18 a day for traditional foster care.

In Knox County, just to the south of Sullivan County, state police found 71
meth labs last year, up from 52 in 2000.

The number of children there in need of services has more than doubled
since 1998. Larry Marchino, director of the Knox County Office of Family
and Children, estimates that three out of four cases are related to meth use.

THE CASES have forced the county to increase spending on efforts to
preserve families and on adoption assistance in cases where parental rights
have been terminated, Marchino said. In 2003, the office completed the
adoptions of 11 children, and drugs were a factor in every case. In 10 of
the 11 adoptions, the drug that caused the breakup of the family was meth.

Marion County is not immune to the trend.

Only one meth lab was discovered there in 2000, according to state police.
Last year, police uncovered 20.

Last week, Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi announced that he is
pursuing child-neglect charges against an Indianapolis couple accused of
manufacturing meth in the home they share with their 12-year-old son. On
Friday, in a second case, prosecutors charged a couple with neglect, saying
they had exposed their infant son to a meth house.

Law-enforcement officials say they're fighting an uphill battle.

In 1993, state police uncovered three meth labs. They found 1,260 last year
- - more than a third of them in the southwestern part of the state. Labs
were found in all but 10 of the state's 92 counties.

The drug's accessibility has contributed to its spread.

METH IS produced in homemade labs from a mix of materials that includes
over-the-counter cold medication, ether, lithium batteries, camping fuel
and anhydrous ammonia, a common agricultural fertilizer that's plentiful on
farms. Even drain cleaner has been used to make the off-white powder.

"It's scary simple" to make, said 1st Sgt. Mike Eslinger of the state
police post in Terre Haute.

And it's cheap.

Master Trooper Tom Hannon said that for $25 to $35, people can acquire
enough materials to make at least 2 or 3 grams of meth - then turn around
and sell it for $100 a gram.

Waterman, the Sullivan County sheriff, said meth use in his county dates to
the early 1990s, when biker gangs from the West Coast brought it to the
Midwest. As simple methods of producing the drug became known, local people
began making it themselves.

Now, he said, it's so prevalent that when his deputies arrest someone
making the drug, people call to find out how much the bond will be before
the police get back to the jail.

"We've even heard stories about people having cook-offs (of meth) to raise
money," Waterman said.

MCMAHAN, 42, the Newstand proprietor, has seen the hold meth has on county
residents, and it saddens him.

When he is in a store and sees people buying camping fuel and paint
thinner, he finds himself wondering what they are doing.

When a vehicle pulls up next to him at a stoplight, he worries that the
volatile materials used to make meth could be "cooking" in the trunk.

He looks for signs of drug use in people he's known for years.

He doesn't want to leave his hometown, so he's trying to help by working as
a volunteer for children in the court system.

But what the future holds for those children is uncertain.

"You don't see old meth users like the old hippies," McMahan said. "It just
takes them out."