DOCTOR STUDIES METH'S IMPACTS ON CHILDREN

Child-abuse experts know that children who live in homes where their parents
make or use methamphetamine are in constant danger.

And although no one has studied the long-term health impacts on children
exposed to the drug or its manufacturing byproducts, Dr. Wendy Wright
suspects the effects also will be serious.

Last week, Wright described some scenarios she's seen in local drug homes
for attendees of the 17th Annual International Child and Family Maltreatment
Conference in Mission Valley. Wright is a local pediatrician who splits her
time between Children's Hospital and the Polinsky Children's Center.

She showed slides of homes with backed-up toilets and clogged sinks. Dirty
syringes hidden from police in a child's clothing drawer. Toxic liquids
stored in plastic soft drink or milk bottles and left on counter tops or
stacked on food in the refrigerator, where the drug can seep through. A
mirror with piles of the drug left within a child's reach atop a microwave
oven. Toxic liquids stored in baby bottles.

"If I'm 2, I'm not sure I'll know which bottle to drink out of," Wright
said.

Then, she said, there's always the chance that the house or trailer might
explode during the cooking process.

"If it doesn't kill you blowing up, then certainly the meth can kill you,"
she said.

Wright said she is working with colleagues here and in Denver, Sacramento
and Oklahoma City to collect data on the long-term effects of
methamphetamine exposure to children.

The researchers already know the short-term effect of drinking chemicals
used in the cooking process such as lye, which can burn the esophagus so
badly that it can scar up and close shut. What they don't know is whether it
may stunt a child's growth, for example, or what other physical changes it
may cause.

Wright is also advocating to increase the number of Drug Endangered Children
teams, so that more children can be protected from living in dangerous
homes. State money for these teams, which bring law enforcement and social
workers together on calls to drug homes, was cut at the end of 2002. She
said the two that are up and running in San Diego County - and a third
planned for East County - must be funded locally.

Without a social worker at the scene, she said, children often are handed
over to relatives, friends or neighbors while the mother goes to jail, and
they end up back in the drug home without any report to county Child
Protective Services workers.

Some people might think children are too young to know what's going on
around them in these homes, Wright said, but that is not the case. They may
be too young to read, she said, "but they can tell me how to make
methamphetamine."

Wright showed a videotape that featured a 5-year-old girl named Sophia as
she explained to an interviewer the step-by-step process of how her parents
smoked drugs.

"They get a piece of foil. They make a little roll," she said. "They get a
lighter and then they light it up. . . . They save it until they do it
again, and they always do it again."

Asked to grab a bunch of crayons to illustrate how many times her parents
smoked the drug again, Sophia couldn't hold them all. So she put a big stack
in front of her on the table.

"I need more crayons," she said.