Part 1: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a01.html

Part 2: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a02.html

Part 3: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a03.html

Part 4: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n023.a01.html

Part 5: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a02.html

Part 6: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a01.html

Part 7: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a03.html

METH PARENTS GAMBLE WITH LIVES OF CHILDREN

Parents, doubling as meth manufacturers, are recklessly gambling with
the lives of their children in ways no researcher would ever be
allowed to do.

In the only published study on the medical hazards of clandestine drug
labs, the state's law enforcement officers reported mild and
short-lived illnesses after being exposed, albeit briefly, to a
laundry list of chemical ingredients.

In the study, 60 percent of the Washington state clandestine lab
investigators complained of headaches and sore throats. Other maladies
were nose irritation, cough, breathing difficulty, eye or skin
irritation and dizziness, and chest and abdominal pain.

The poison being in the dose, as Swiss alchemist and physician
Paracelsus said, what do you suppose happens to "the children left to
crawl around in the miniature toxic waste dumps," as Lt. Gov. Brad
Owen calls them.

No one knows.

In light of the innate toxicity of the acids, solvents, salts and
gases associated with making meth, "the hypothetical risks are
enormous," says Kathleen West, who is supervising a fledgling
California program to treat children removed from meth labs and then
study them for 18 months.

West's colleague, Mark Miller, the medical consultant to California's
Drug Endangered Children program, explains that children are uniquely
susceptible to neurological contamination in the environment because
their brains are still developing. (It is known that meth, which
affects the central nervous system, causes cell loss in adult brains.)

"Particularly, up to 6 years of age, there is very rapid development,"
Miller said.

He cites lead poisoning as an example. "In a young child, a small
amount causes neurological damage but the same amount in an adult
really isn't a problem," Miller said.

At the federal level, Dr. Richard Jackson runs the National Center for
Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
in Atlanta. He said it is well-documented that "kids carry twice the
body burden of chemicals," because they have more skin surface per
pound than adults. Environmental contaminants pose greater danger to
children because they eat, drink and breathe faster.

And, as any caregiver knows, children are famous for hand-to-mouth
activity.

The ways that children can intersect with meth -- the finished product
or its many precursor chemicals -- are endless. She could lick a wall
that had been inadvertently splashed with a solvent, or fish around in
a container of acid left on the table. He could breathe in a
colorless, odorless gas because a careless meth maker hadn't taken
precautions to vent vapors outside.

"For the adults that are involved," Miller said, "there's a limit to
the sympathy for them. But the kids have no control, and this may
affect them for the rest of their lives."

[sidebar]

ADDICTS NEGLECT THEIR CHILDREN, PUT THEM AT RISK

Heartless as it may sound, it's best for everyone involved when the
babies, as well as their mothers, test positive for drugs at birth.
The double diagnosis is a slam dunk for intervention in the best
interests of the children.

Because Washington state has its priorities straight on this score,
publicly funded drug treatment will be provided to the mother if she
can't afford it. Until the mother proves that she can parent
competently, the baby will not be returned to her.

This is essentially the scenario that unfolded when Tabatha was
delivered prematurely in a motel by the boyfriend of her
methamphetamine-muddled mother. Tabatha, after spending time in a
neonatal unit, was separated from her mother for 18 months. The good
news: Mom regained custody because she is clean and sober, has married
and is working. The not-so-good news: At 5 years old, Tabatha is
beginning to show some effects of her mother's in-utero drug use.

Because it was beyond question when she was born that Tabatha was
drug-affected, as 1 percent of the 80,000 infants born annually prove
to be, the state had ample ammunition to intervene on her behalf.

But what if a child's exposure to drugs is less clear? What if
equipment for making meth is found next to a bunk bed in a bedroom, as
happened in Pierce County? Or, as the Washington State Patrol
discovered in Clark County, two children were eating breakfast at a
table where meth had been left; never mind the handgun on the
television set. Or, in another state patrol find, the 15-year-old son
of a convicted felon was sleeping with a loaded pistol under his pillow.

As meth climbs up the roster of preferred drugs in Washington, police
officers and Child Protective Service workers are routinely
encountering frightening situations like these. Without formal
protocols to follow, neither group is prepared to deal with the
youngest victims of the meth craze.

Responding to a survey by the Washington State Narcotics Investigators
Association, the public servants who raid clandestine meth labs in
homes or RVs indicate that children are frequently present.

Grays Harbor, Spokane, Thurston and Klickitat counties all reported
that children are living in or visiting about half the labs their
officers investigate. At one lab in Grays Harbor County, a 16-year-old
was helping cook meth inside a small camper trailer. In Lewis County,
children were found at 60 percent to 70 percent of the labs; in
Clark-Skamania, the figure was 35 percent.

Another powerful indication of this new form of child abuse and
neglect can be seen in the rising number of people referred by Child
Protective Services to the state Divison of Alcohol and Substance
Abuse for meth treatment. CPS referrals more than doubled in King,
Pierce and Clark counties and statewide from the 1996-97 to 1998-99.

People on meth "seem to just space out entirely and forget they have
kids," Carolyn Anderson, acting CPS program manager, said.

CPS, the State Patrol and the health department are developing
guidelines to be followed when children are found in places where meth
is being manufactured. The protocol will cover thorny issues ranging
from the immediate and long-term safety of the children exposed to
meth's toxicity as well as the instant effects on CPS workers and
police officers at the scene.

"We've pretty much determined there's less risk than we'd been led to
believe," Anderson said of the children. "In most cases, the parents,
if they're going to brew up meth, are going to do it in an outbuilding
and the kids are not really involved."

The larger issue is probably how meth users or addicts perform as
parents.

Not well, is the answer from the experts. "Kids don't fit in the
lifestyle at all," says Dr. Alex Stalcup, who practices addiction
medicine outside San Francisco.

"Where in the course of the (meth) binge is there any time to be a
parent?" he asks only rhetorically because he believes that the
children of meth users/addicts are neglected at best. Two women in his
practice literally gave up their children in exchange for the drug, he
said.

Although the use of meth is far more extensive in California than in
Washington state at this time, Anderson notes, "As of what we know
right now, meth probably is right at the head of the list" of illicit
drugs that are most dangerous to people who are parents.

"We are discovering that meth users react to that drug differently
than any other drug. There is some question that even when they are
not stoned whether they are capable of parenting," she said. Because
substandard parenting is much harder to prove than actual child abuse
and neglect, the state finds it more difficult to convince judges that
children should be removed from the home.

Nor is the "science" adequate to demonstrate actual physical damage to
children from meth, Anderson said. "Meth is a relatively recent drug
and we haven't seen the effects yet in the kids."

Although the formal protocol is still in the works, if CPS workers in
Pierce County are in doubt about their safety or the children's, they
are to call 9-1-1. If there is evidence that children have been
physically exposed to meth, they are to be decontaminated and checked
out at a hospital.

After doing meth duty for 2 1/2 years, one Thurston County sergeant
has developed a protocol to be used when children are found in meth
labs on his turf.

Wes Rethwill has carried children ages 1 to 5 out of meth houses so
messy that "the only way you can get through the residence is to walk
through piles of stuff."

"Washington is behind in realizing how large this problem is going to
be," Rethwill says. "I know we haven't reached the crest yet."

From the more than 200 meth labs he has investigated, Rethwill has
fashioned a profile of meth parents that is not pretty. "If you put
dope and their child in front of them, I would bet my last paycheck
they would take the dope," he says.

[sidebar]

CALIFORNIA PROTECTS THE CHILDREN OF METH ADDICTS

Program Should Be Copied In Washington

As accustomed as Californians had become to the methamphetamine
epidemic, they didn't react forcefully to the plight of its youngest
victims until the day after Christmas 1995.

In a remote area of Riverside County, about 60 miles north of San
Diego, a mother left behind her three youngest -- ages 1, 2 and 3 --
while she climbed out the bathroom window when her mobile home
exploded into flames.

Perhaps Kathey James, whose commercial meth-making operation had gone
horribly awry, was too delerious from her burns to pull Megan, Jackson
and Deon from the death trap. But she was thinking clearly enough to
move her car away from the heat of the fire.

The James case resulted in meth manufacturing being classified last
year as "an inherently dangerous felony" by the Court of Appeal of
California.

"It really was what galvanized everyone's interest," explained
Kathleen West, who directs the state's fledgling Drug Endangered
Children Resource Center.

California's collective guilt over the casual way public servants were
responding to children at meth lab sites spurred creation of DEC teams
in seven counties hard hit by meth.

Child welfare workers now routinely accompany police officers
investigating meth labs. In the 35 percent of cases where they find
children, the workers focus entirely on their needs, while the police
arrest the suspected meth makers and collect evidence for possible
criminal charges.

Then hospital personnel are required to evaluate the children's health
with a set of tests -- immediately and through the next 18 months.

And, West said, prosecutors routinely file child endangerment charges
against the parents or caregivers, on top of charges for
meth-manufacturing.

The salient question for Washington, where some counties are grappling
with a doubling of known meth labs from year to year, is this:

Will our state respond now to the predicament of children found
wandering through these toxic playgrounds, or will we wait for some of
them to be seriously injured or die? It's not an idle question, as
those who recall the child abuse deaths of Eli Creekmore in Everett
and Lauria Grace in Seattle can attest.

California's program should be replicated in Washington.

The myriad dangers to children at the hands of meth-making adults are
unprecedented, even after the crack cocaine epidemic in the '80s.
Unlike cocaine or heroin, meth can be whipped up in a kitchen blender.
As law enforcement officers are fond of saying, any idiot can make
meth.

The makeshift operations bear little resemblance to legitimate
chemical labs, with two-liter soft drink bottles and juice pitchers as
temporary repositories of the hazardous components. Commonly used
chemicals include lighter fluid, denatured alcohol, acetone, drain
cleaner and a variety of acids. For the method most popular in
Washington state, the Nazi recipe, pieces of lithium (when removed
from batteries) can explode on contact with water.

A child can be harmed by ingesting one of the chemicals from the
unmarked containers, by tasting the finished product or by breathing
secondhand smoke when the parents are indulging.

Any of these scenarios rates as child endangerment in Sue Webber
Brown's book. Brown, with the Butte Interagency Narcotics Task Force
in northern California, is regarded as the DEC program's mother.
Dispatched by the district attorney's office to many a meth lab, Brown
recalls: "Nobody was treating the children as victims." They were not
being interviewed as potential witnesses to a crime or evaluated for
physical or psychological damage; they weren't even being left in
secure places when their parents were arrested.

When Brown's husband focused his master's thesis on the potential for
a statewide program, he discovered that "all the officers were doing
what we were doing (earlier). They were giving those kids away," Brown
said.

If the parents bailed out of jail to await formal charges, she said,
children commonly would be returned to filthy homes still rife with
drug paraphernalia or lacking electricity.

Now, through Butte County's DEC program, all children found at the
site of a meth lab -- regardless of whether they're among the 30
percent who test positive for the drug -- go through juvenile court
dependency proceedings to determine the best placement for them. A
relative may be appointed or the child may go into foster care.

To regain custody, parents must comply with random drug testing once a
week, attend parenting classes, drug rehabilitation and counseling and
submit to supervised visitations with their children. They also face
criminal charges for child endangerment and meth manufacturing.

The scrutiny is well-deserved, in Brown's opinion. Aside from the
physical harm to children, "not only do kids witness spousal abuse . .
. but many have disclosed physical and sexual abuse..

"I'd much rather see kids in a heroin house because there isn't the
physical or the sexual abuse that there is in meth homes," Brown said.

"What's consistent with these kids is they have a detachment disorder.
Other kids would be screaming at the thought of being left" when their
parents are arrested, she said.

"In meth homes, parents drop off kids so often that there's a real
lack of attachment . . . older siblings in all of these homes have
taken on the role of caretaker."

Eight years after Butte County reworked its meth lab protocol, Brown
says, "We are ensuring children have a chance. If we don't take the
kids out of these homes when they're young, they are going to learn
the same way of life as their parents."

She added a cautionary note for states that are importing California's
meth, one that speaks to the need for Washington to create a protocol
for its own drug endangered children.

"The scary thing for everybody else is we're doing so much here that
we're obviously sending these people out of California and they're
coming to your state," Brown said.