COLLABORATION IS ONLY WAY TO SAVE CHILDREN OF METH FAMILIES

Mind-boggling as it seems, Pierce County's methamphetamine plague has had
one bright side effect: The people trying to help busted meth addicts and
their children are talking to one another.

They call it "collaboration," which doesn't quite do justice to the
grit-and-paperwork nature of the work that begins with hauling blighted
families out of contaminated houses.

Even the busts are unlike those needed for virtually any other crime. The
adults get law enforcement officers who launch them into court and jail.
The house gets a hazardous-materials team, possibly the fire department.
And the children get social workers who shepherd them into emergency care
that often starts at the hospital and ends in a foster home.

That's just the beginning. Everything that comes after is a complex, often
frustrating effort at rehabilitating the adults so they can stay off drugs,
keep jobs and become reliable, decent parents.

The attorneys, law officers, health and social workers, teachers,
counselors and housing specialists trying to pull those families back
together were the very first to shout that the bureaucracies for which they
work had lost the knack for cooperation. They began to beg for
collaboration, and, over the past two years, to hold what they call "meth
summits" to drag all the players into one room.

Last week, the Greater Pierce County Community Network and the state
Division of Children and Family Services hosted the latest summit, "Our
Meth Mission," at Bates Technical College.

That mission, agreed on at previous summits, is to make saving children the
top priority of the war on meth, said Christine Robinson, a regional
administrator for the Department of Social and Health Services Division of
Children and Family Services.

Combine that with the priority the state puts on reuniting families
whenever possible, and the effort can use dozens of agencies on two tracks
- - one for the children, the other for the parents.

"Meth kids are basically neglected," said Michael Laederich of
Comprehensive Mental Health.

They've lived in squalor with parents who haven't given them any kind of
schedule, medical care, emotional support or hygiene. If they're old enough
to be in school, most of them are struggling, he said. They need medical
and dental care, emergency housing and a safe and stable place to stay
until they can get settled into foster care or, about 60 percent of the
time, with members of their extended families.

That's the easy path.

Parents are far more complicated.

Most start in drug court, and need drug treatment. They have to learn the
basics of good parenting. Many of the women have had child after child
taken from them. Most are angry, have alienated their families, blown their
educations, work histories, credit and have criminal records. Many have
mental health problems ranging from depression to schizophrenia. Even if
they do manage to pull themselves together and get jobs, most find that
landlords look at their records and just say no to the risk that they might
relapse and turn their home into a meth lab.

Virtually every program they need is handled by a different agency.
Virtually every service is in short supply, and virtually every recovering
addict needs a case manager to ferret out appropriate care. Without that,
pieces fall out, and the whole recovery process falls apart.

Meth addicts are not likable people. It's tough to throw money at them,
until you realize that fixing them is more efficient than cutting them
loose to crime, courts and jail - and losing their children to the same life.

Collaboration makes sense in human and economic terms. If it takes money up
front to make it work, it's well spent.