KIDS SUFFER WHEN PARENTS ABUSE DRUGS

There is a devastating impact on the lives of young Iowans

Kudos to Iowa House Speaker Ron Corbett for his courageous decision to
share with the public a very painful personal matter ("A Painful Lesson on
the Peril of Drugs," Feb. 20). The disclosure of his mother's struggle
with a drug addiction is a good reminder, to those who may prefer to
forget, that the impact of drug abuse is felt without regard to social or
economic status.

The story also focused our attention on this problem from the unusual
perspective of a parent's drug problem, rather than the far more familiar
story of youth gone astray. The distress and disruption caused in the life
of a successful, professional adult child of a drug abuser were obvious.

Imagine what it must be like for the thousands of children in Iowa whose
survival each day depends on a parent who is using and abusing drugs. Their
question is not whether they should succumb to a parent's demand for money,
but whether their parent will have enough money left over to buy milk for
their breakfast. Rather than struggling with how to balance the demands of
a career and a family crisis, these children wonder whether anyone will
wake them in the morning to send them to school. No doubt Corbett spent
many sleepless nights worrying about his mother. The children of drug
abusers find their difficulty in sleeping is often caused by the loud party
going on in their living room. As they lie awake in their beds, they get
high from the secondhand crack smoke they breathe all night. And in the
morning, they are the ones who will find their parent lying on the bathroom
floor amid spilled aspirin.

At the Youth Law Center, a private, nonprofit law office that represents
abused and neglected children, we set a disturbing record last year. For
the first time in our 20year history, tbe largest percentage of our
approximately 1,000 child clients 37 percent were children who were under
the jurisdiction of the juvenile court as a result of parental substance
abuse. Physicalabuse victims are in second place, at 35 percent, and
sexualabuse victims made up 17 percent of our client base. Ten years ago,
physical and sexual abuse reigned supreme, and parental substance abuse was
not even a problem category for which we maintained statistics.

Unfortunately, that does not mean the actual number of physical and
sexualabuse victims has been reduced. Instead, this reversal of misfortune
is the result of the number of child abuse and neglect court actions in
Polk County nearly doubling in the last 10 years, and part of the reason
for that staggering increase is the devastating impact of drugs on the
lives of helpless, dependent children. Unlike Corbett, these children must
deal with the sometimes "vicious" behavior of their parents up close and
personal, rather than over the telephone. And they are incapable of
choosing appropriate action for themselves to take until their parents
finally get back on the road to recovery. They must depend on us to choose
one for them.

So this year, while we debate social policy, work to balance the budget and
calculate incometax cuts, let's remember the youngest citizens of Iowa, the
ones who can't vote.

Perhaps Iowans would be satisfied with a somewhat smaller tax decrease, if
it meant that the parents of these children had the opportunity for better,
more readily available drug treatment.

Maybe we would be willing to pay just a little more, if it meant that these
children had a better fostercare system with the resources to find them
permanent, alternative homes if their parents are unwilling or unable to
make the lifestyle changes necessary to care for them.

This year, before the final flurry of deadlines pass, while we struggle to
decipher the budget's bottom line, let's think about what we can do so that
the story for these children might have a happy ending, just like Corbett's
story.

KATHRYN MILLER is executive director of the Youth Law Center, Des
Moines.