A Madness Called Meth: Chapter Eight

SUFFER THE CHILDREN

The Impact Of Meth On The Most Defenseless

Sue Webber-Brown is an investigator for the Butte County District
Attorney's Office. She also is the founder of the Drug Endangered Children
program (DEC), which has become a national model for similar programs.

When police and socialworkers in other California counties, and even in
other states, wonder why she spends so much energy advocating for children
from meth homes, she shows them. Since she began DEC in 1991, she has
collected photos that tell a terrible tale:

- - In one Yuba City home, above a tidy bookcase of children's stories, a
brewing pot of meth has overrun its container and dripped brown stains on
the children's nightstand and onto the carpet beside their bunk beds. An
infant is sleeping in a nearby crib.

- - In an Oroville home where an 8-year-old lives with her mother and
stepfather, there's a jar of meth and acetone in the ice tray in the
freezer. On the spice rack, investigators find a small jar of iodine
crystals. On the floor in front of the sink, drops of iodine have burned
into the linoleum. The girl's parents told her they were concocting
gasoline for their truck. Her parents were wearing gloves and breathing
masks to shield them from fumes, but the girl had no such protection as she
stood in the doorway watching them make meth in the kitchen sink. She tells
a social worker she's had headaches, a sore throat and a queasy stomach for
several weeks before her parents are arrested and she is taken into
protective custody.

- - In another Butte County home, raw meth sits in a 2-liter Pepsi bottle in
the fridge. A piece of chicken wrapped in tin foil on a lower shelf tests
positive for meth. Three children live in the home.

Before Webber-Brown came along, narcotics officers would arrest parents,
then look for the nearest adult to baby-sit the children. Toddlers might be
left with a neighbor; babies might go to a grandparent. Older children
might stay with another adult living in the same drug-infested home. No one
checked the children for medical problems unless they were readily
apparent. Rarely did anyone call county child welfare services.

The mother of three children, Webber-Brown grew weary of the neglect and
started the Drug Endangered Children program. Operated as a pilot program
in seven California counties -- Butte and Shasta are the only ones in
Northern California -- the program teams drug cops with social workers,
doctors and other experts to evaluate and track children who have been
exposed to meth, and provide care for them.

"They just tear at my heart when I see how cute they are," says
Webber-Brown, whose team has removed more than 620 children from
drug-abusing parents in Butte County since 1993. "I had one guy tell me,
'You shouldn't get so emotionally involved' . . .[but] if we all say we
have our own lives, our own families, our own Little League, then who will
take care of these children?"

Across California, thousands of children live with meth addicts behind
shuttered windows in homes that often lack electricity, adequate food or
proper plumbing. Many children are too young to understand the white
powdery stuff in baggies. All they know is that Mommy and Daddy don't want
to play.

"The older kids, over 10, will have a general understanding that there is
drug usage in the home," says Marv Stern, Sacramento County's child-abuse
special prosecutor. "But the more likely description of what life is like
is: 'They started getting madder at me. They wouldn't let me go out and
play. They never served food anymore. People would come over at odd hours.
They always kept the house dark. . . . Why am I being treated this way? Why
can't I have anybody over? Why am I not going to school anymore?' "

These are the children clogging the child welfare system. More than 120,000
kids in California live in foster homes. In some parts of the state, social
workers estimate that up to 90 percent of their cases somehow relate to
meth. Even officials reluctant to quantify how much child abuse and neglect
may be attributed to meth are willing to say their highest proportion of
serious cases can be directly linked to it.

"We look at methamphetamine as ancillary to child death and child abuse,"
says Sheila Anderson, director of Sacramento County's Child Abuse
Prevention Council, which puts out an annual report on child abuse and
neglect and oversees the county's child-death review team.

The council only recently has started cataloging the drugs involved in
children's deaths, but Anderson says the anecdotal data about meth are
overwhelming. Many of the Valley's highest-profile child deaths have come
at the hands of parents who were high on crank.

"I've heard people say meth makes you violent, but meth doesn't make you
violent. But I tell you when you come down, you get real cranky, real
tense. When I came off my drugs, I hit Dustin. Maybe I did hit him a little
too hard in the mouth." -- Douglas Haaland Jr. from the Fresno County Jail.

On Jan. 12, 1999, the body of 4-year-old Dustin Haaland was found battered
and buried in a shallow grave in a vineyard west of Fresno. Authorities
believe he was beaten for months by his father, who was on parole for
abusing Dustin's older brother, Dougie, four years earlier. Dustin's
mother, Kathy Haaland, did nothing to stop her son's death.

Instead, she helped her husband bury the boy before the couple moved in
with her sister. Kathy, then 23, was six months pregnant with the couple's
third son.

Douglas Haaland Jr., then 25, had nursed a raging meth habit for years
before landing in prison in 1994 for hurlingDustin's older brother to the
ground in a rage. Dougie went to a foster home. Haaland went to prison, and
Kathy went to jail. Haaland had been using meth for several months before
the assaults on Douglas, according to a probation report:

"Haaland said he had not slept for eight days because he was snorting a lot
of crank, and he ran out about three days before his arrest. He said he was
very agitated and irritated."

Before he was convicted in 1995 for felony child endangerment, Haaland
wrote a letter to Superior Court Judge Gene Gomes:

I want to start off by telling you that I'm sorry for doing what I did. I
do need help for my drug problem so this or anything else won't ever
happen. I've never been in trouble with the law before. . . . I'm never
going to forgive myself for what I did to my son. We all make mistakes, and
I made the biggest of all . . .

Sincerely,

Douglas Arthur Haaland

Nearly three years later, and two months after he was released from
Corcoran State Prison, Haaland ran into a friend who had some meth. Haaland
was hooked again.

Five months later, Dustin's body was found. Authorities believe the boy had
been killed weeks earlier, and his parents convinced family members the
child was visiting relatives during the 1998 Christmas season. Dustin's
mother pleaded guilty to child endangerment and testified against his
father, who contended he was not guilty. On July 13, a jury convicted him
of second-degree murder in the death of Dustin, and he was sentenced to 44
years to life in prison.

- - When Amber Walker died in her crib of starvation and dehydration, her
tiny body was literally used up. "Particularly noteworthy," states the 1996
autopsy report, was "increased wrinkling of the lower buttocks consistent
with the depletion of fat."

The skeletal 3-month-old weighed 5 pounds when she died, less than a pound
above her birth weight. Amber was discovered lying wide-eyed and motionless
by her mother, Theresa Walker, in the motel room they called home on
Bakersfield's run-down Union Avenue.

Despite the volumes of tears she shed for her baby after Amber's death,
family members said, the meth-addicted mother often left the infant in
soiled diapers and rarely touched her. The woman's mother told reporters
Walker had struggled with meth addiction since she was 14, about the same
time she got pregnant with the first of her eight children. One earlier
baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), also at 3 months of age.

Walker's three oldest children were living with their grandmother when
Amber died. But a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy lived with their
mother, Amber and Amber's twin, Adam. Neighbors said the 4-year-old often
dressed and fed her younger brother and that both suffered from head lice
that went untreated.

Theresa Walker was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1996 and
sentenced to three years in prison.

- - Alexia Real was just 5 years old when her mother and stepfather,
delusional from their meth addiction, decided they must rid Alexia and her
13-year-old sister of the "demons and vampires" that inhabited their souls.
For eight straight days in the summer of 1997, Barbara Carrasco, for three
meals a day, blended a special milk shake for her daughters: Clorox bleach,
vanilla ice cream, garlic and other spices.

"It was horrible. It tasted chalky," the elder sister testified later at
her stepfather's murder trial.

On the eighth day, the teen emerged from her bedroom in Elk Grove, a
Sacramento suburb, and saw Alexia lying motionless in the hallway. Her
mother was trying to resuscitate her. The next time the teen saw her
sister, Alexia's body had been dismembered with a pruning saw and her
mother was giving instructions on what to say if anyone asked questions.

Then, the girl told authorities later, Barbara and Larry Carrasco burned
Alexia's body in the family's fireplace and dumped her ashes and the tools
used to dismember her into the Sacramento River. Terrified and confused,
the 13-year-old said nothing for months until one fall morning when she
appeared at school with chemical burns on her arms, back and hips. She had
been doused with bleach by her stepfather in another attempt to rid her of
demons. When detectives grew curious about her missing sister, the story
emerged.

Larry Carrasco, a former bus driver in Sacramento, was convicted and
sentenced to 40 years to life in prison. Barbara Carrasco was sentenced to
15 years to life after a judge ruled she was legally sane at the time of
the murder and that the evidence showed that she had a longtime "festering,
loathing of the child."

Sacramento County prosecutor Marv Stern, who helped send the Carrascos to
prison, says the combination of methamphetamine and parenting is as
sinister as anything he's ever seen.

"If you have a child death case and there's a drug involved, it's more
likely to be meth than any other drug," he says. "I don't know why, but I
can tell you there is a clear link between parents who abuse meth and
physical abuse."

There is no shortage of horror stories. In addition to being victims of
murder, physical abuse and passive neglect, the children of meth users
often are targets for sexual molestation.

At the Child and Family Institute in Sacramento near the University of
California at Davis Medical Center, therapists encourage children to play
in sandboxes or create families out of dolls so they can teach them how
"normal" children interact with adults. Many never have lived in a family
where parents are caretakers and child's play does not include explicit
sexual acts.

Director Sandy Baker says it is common for child molesters to seek out
meth-addicted mothers to date because they can have unsupervised access to
young children: "Many of these kids have been repeatedly raped. It's
happened so many times they just consider it a way of life."

Baker is a member of Sacramento County's child-death review team and was
instrumental in helping revise a Sacramento Child Protective Services
policy in 1997. Under the old policy, social workers were instructed to
view drug addiction as a "culture" and to help parents work within that
culture to fix family problems without removing the children. Under the new
policy, social workers are instructed to place meth abuse high on their
list of potential dangers in evaluating whether to remove children.

"When they're not addicted to drugs, they can be caring, decent parents.
That's why it's so confusing to the kids," Baker says. "But when they're
using, their primary relationship is with the drugs, not with their child."

For these kids, it's day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour, survival.

"They haven't got a clue what they're going to be facing when they get home
from school each day," Baker says, "somebody who wants to exorcise their
demons or somebody who says come on in and do your homework."

And that's when the parents pay any attention to the kids at all. Neglect
is the most common manifestation of meth addiction, welfare workers say.
They describe children who get up before dawn to go through garbage cans
for food or don't go to school because they have only one set of clothing.
In every group of siblings Webber-Brown has taken from meth-using parents,
she says, the eldest child has assumed the role of parent, ensuring little
ones are fed, diapered and kept quiet around unpredictable adults.

In many homes, children are malnourished. Almost always, they lack
immunizations and medical care. Lice is common. So are fecal-oral
infections, which are transmitted from filthy diapers or animal feces on
the floor to children's fingers.

"They are invisible children," says Baker, the Sacramento therapist. "And
they don't live in any one place long enough for anyone to take action."

The 5-year-old boy was borderline anemic ... 13 cavities, 6 root canals, 2
extractions. Needed caps on both front and back teeth ... displayed
problems with sleeping ... talks excessively and at inappropriate times ...
continued to be very stubborn and defiant." -- From a case file of a child
found in a meth lab home

There is little dispute that children who grow up watching their parents
sell and use drugs are more likely to become drug users themselves. But,
with the exception of a few anecdotal studies, the medical community lacks
basic information about the effects of meth on both unborn children and
those exposed passively in their homes.

Among doctors, educators and others who deal with meth-exposed children,
there is growing concern about some specific types of problems that may
result from exposure, such as learning disabilities they assume are linked
to prenatal meth abuse.

"What we see is a syndrome that begins with attention deficit symptoms,
looks like ADHD but begins sooner and is associated with more
aggressiveness," says Dr. Hugo Biertuempfel, a psychiatrist with Sutter
County's Mental Health Department who operates a clinic in schools.

While long-term effects are unclear, doctors do know something about
children who appear at emergency rooms after taking high doses of crank.

"They are inconsolable," says pediatrician Wendy Wright, who has treated
meth-exposed children at San Diego's Children's Hospital. "They have high
blood pressure, high heart rates and high enough temperatures to make brain
injury a concern. Many have a type of seizure that is particularly
difficult to control and is resistant to seizure medication."

Wright has a vivid recollection of one boy, between 18 months and 2 years
old, who was brought to the emergency room by a family member. Repeatedly,
he traced the same steps: He put his Power Ranger doll under a pillow,
covered it with a blanket and walked to the other side of the room. Then he
came back, picked it up, moved it across the room and covered it up.

"He did this for hours, and he was sobbing the whole time because he didn't
want to be doing it but he couldn't stop," Wright says. "These little guys
are miserable. They're high. The meth has them amped up, and they can't
rest, they can't sit down, they can't calm down."

In Sacramento, Dr. Michael Sherman, chief of neonatology at UC Davis
Medical Center, has established a center for preemies who are born at less
than 26 weeks gestation and weigh less than 2 pounds. And he has discovered
a curious, new menace, unique among the tiniest Valley residents: "Meth is
the drug of abuse for the fetus in Northern California." He believes that
prenatal exposure to meth, unlike its sister drugs cocaine or PCP, causes
serious and widespread birth defects.

"I have not noticed the occurrence of so many birth defects with cocaine,"
he says. "I've seen some really heavy users of cocaine, and certainly it
has vascular effects, but it's not anywhere near the problem of meth."

Sherman looked at data on 358 mothers of intensive care unit babies who
admitted using illicit drugs or alcohol between 1995 and 1999. Of that
number, 202 babies, or 56 percent, were exposed to meth. Among them, 108,
or 54 percent, were born preterm. Thirty-three of the 202 had major birth
defects -- a rate of roughly 163 per 1,000 live births. The normal rate of
birth defects is 30 per 1,000 in California's general population, which
would naturally be lower than that of already-sick babies. Still, the rate
appears significant.

"A lot of information needs to come out about this," Sherman says. "There
are a lot of rat studies, but not what I would have expected ."

Chapter 8b, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1504/a06.html