METH AND DEATH

The Central Coast's Increasingly Popular Drug Of Choice Is Hurting
And Killing Kids

Imagine waking up and finding that your twin one-month-old babies had
died during the night. Christa Perry woke up to just such a nightmare
on the morning of Jan. 23.

According to reports from the Lompoc Police Department, the twins
were sleeping in the same bed as Perry, 35, and their father, Jason
Moises Gomez, 31, both of Lompoc. When Perry woke up, she reportedly
found both babies covered by Gomez's body. She took them to Lompoc
Hospital at approximately 12:50 p.m., but both babies were pronounced
dead upon arrival.

The twins lived the duration of their short lives with their parents
in a motor home parked in the 500 block of North F Street.
Preliminary investigations show that the babies may have suffocated
sometime Sunday night or early Monday morning. Autopsies were
scheduled in an attempt to determine the exact causes of death, but
as of press time, the Lompoc Police did not know when the results
from the coroner would be released.

At the time of the apparent suffocation, however, it seems that the
twins' parents were recovering from a meth binge, said Sgt. Mike
Collins of the Lompoc Police Department. Sleeping off the effects of
the drug, their senses and instincts would have been dulled.

Gomez is now in jail, being held with no bail on suspicion of using
or being under the influence of a controlled substance, voluntary
manslaughter, and violation of his probation, Sgt. Collins said.

Perry was released on a citation. Her only alleged crime-using or
being under the influence of a controlled substance-is technically a
misdemeanor.

As horrible as it is to read about two babies who didn't make it to
their first birthday, an even more horrible fact is that they're not alone.

Sgt. Collins said that he's seen numerous cases of infant death
directly attributed to meth use combined with co-sleeping. In Lompoc,
he said, there've been several such cases, the most recent of which
happened within the last year-though no charges were filed. In Santa
Maria, too, parents have taken the lives of their children while
sleeping off a meth binge.

"It's not an uncommon story, as tragic as it is, " said Santa Maria
Police Chief Danny Macagni.

Meth's indirect effect on babies is only the tip of the iceberg where
the drug is concerned. Methamphetamine use has become a major problem
in Santa Barbara County, its effects trickling through the school
system, hospitals, law enforcement, child services, and the budget of
every city in the area.

Methamphetamine is a derivative of amphetamine, a powerful stimulant
that affects the central nervous system and was developed for use as
a nasal decongestant.

Meth can be smoked, snorted, ingested, or injected. It's also easy to
obtain. Chief Macagni estimated that an average person with no
previous drug experience could walk outside and, within 30 minutes,
find someone from whom to buy meth. A few doses can run as low as $20, he said.

Those doses can also start the user on an addictive cycle that
includes an intense rush (caused by high levels of dopamine in the
pleasure center of the brain) followed by an intense down period. An
eventual tolerance for the drug leads users to take more and more,
while side effects ravage their bodies.

Convulsions, dangerously high body temperatures, stomach cramps, and
shaking are only the beginning. Chronic use can lead to rapid weight
loss and psychotic behavior, including paranoia, hallucinations, and
out-of-control rage that explodes into violence. Frequent users also
often develop sores all over their bodies from scratching at "meth
mites" or "crank bugs"-a common delusion that bugs are crawling under
their skin.

Despite all of these adverse effects, however, meth use continues to
grow in popularity.

"It's an epidemic," Macagni said, "and it's going to get worse before
it gets better."

Katherine* first noticed that her daughter Tara* was having problems
after the girl and some friends got busted for sneaking alcohol into
the movies.

Katherine, a stay-at-home mom in Santa Ynez, did what many concerned
mothers would do: She searched her daughter. She found a hollowed-out
pen cap, a mirror, and a white substance. Not knowing exactly what
she had found, Katherine knew enough to call the police, who
confirmed her suspicions: Her 14-year-old daughter was doing drugs.

At the time, Tara was sleeping till noon and her room was a mess, but
her mom dismissed these signs as normal teenage behavior. Later, when
the police gave Katherine a choice of having her daughter arrested or
put into a treatment program, the decision was an easy one. Tara
started visiting a private counselor twice a week.

Tara's behavior continued to change, Katherine said. She became
combative, irritable, and was sleeping way too much. Katherine found
strange drawings in Tara's room.

"I began to think, 'Who is this kid, and where did she come from?'"
Katherine said.

On Tara's 15th birthday, Katherine hosted a party in her garage,
inviting only girls and checking on the kids periodically. She was
shocked when she went outside a while later and found boys in her
backyard, kids throwing up, and alcohol and other drugs available in
her garage.

Katherine said that she had thought Tara was getting better. Her
daughter had raised her grades and was still attending counseling.
But she was also still using meth.

"She played the game," Katherine said. "She's a charming girl, and
she was using just enough so that you wouldn't know what she was up to.

"I'm the kind of mom who goes through her kid's things," she added,
"so if she could fool me, other kids could easily fool their parents."

Chief Macagni said that 85 percent is a very conservative estimate of
how many crimes in Santa Maria are related to meth use. An officer in
the Santa Maria Police Department for the last 30 years, Macagni
worked in the drug-enforcement unit from 1989 to 1994. He said that
his assignment there was his wildest experience as a police officer.

Macagni said that when he worked in the drug unit, cocaine was the
most popular stimulant. Meth began to gain popularity in the early
1990s. As a drug, it's similar to cocaine, but it costs half as much.

According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration,
methamphetamine is now the primary drug threat in California. Mexican
organizations control most of the production and distribution of
high-quality meth, while a secondary group composed primarily of
Caucasians operates clandestine laboratories within the state.

Rural areas in the Central Valley are the source of most of the meth
produced in California, though laboratories have been found in Santa
Barbara County. One was recently discovered on Marsh Street in San Luis Obispo.

Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Deputy Sandra Brown is familiar with
meth-related crimes throughout the county, including those in rural
areas where meth often hits hardest.

"It's one of the biggest problems we have in Santa Barbara County,"
she said. "If it's burglary, check fraud-even violent crime-it can
almost always be traced to meth. All these people do is victimize
others to get money to get their high."

After the party, Katherine felt that she had to tell other parents
what their children had been up to at her house.

"It got very heated," she said. "I had to speak to them, and they
didn't want to hear it."

She was also growing increasingly worried that counseling wasn't enough.

"Counselors tell you you're doing the right thing. Law enforcement
tells you you're doing the right thing," she said. "But in your gut,
you feel that you're not doing enough."

A year went by. Tara was now 16 and had been clean, she told her mom,
for the last 11 months. Her friends had gone their separate ways-to
juvenile hall, to foster care-and Katherine breathed a sigh of
relief. Without her friends to get high with, the mother reasoned,
the ordeal might finally be over.

Then, during the summer of 2005, Tara met a new group of friends. She
dyed her hair black, started wearing dark eyeliner, and began dating
a boy that Katherine later found out was a heavy meth user.

In November of 2005, one of Katherine's worst nightmares came true:
Tara suffered an overdose.

"That's when I found out everything that I didn't know," Katherine
said, "and it was horrifying."

"Kids are less likely to make correct decisions," Deputy Brown said,
"because they don't always see what the correct decision is."

Brown is active in the fight against youth drug use in Santa Barbara
County. She works with organizations-such as anti-drug action group
Fighting Back Santa Maria-and counsels parents, including Katherine, directly.

Brown said that the Sheriff's Department and Sheriff Jim Anderson are
very generous with time, allowing her to teach workshops in Santa
Maria and throughout the county. She uses a sequence of booking
photos of one woman, 21-year-old Ashly Kytle, to visually demonstrate
the long-term toll meth takes on a human body.

"It's a major goal of the agency to teach the effects and combat the
use of methamphetamine in Santa Barbara County," she said.

Her most troubling experience with kids so far, she recalled,
happened recently when she was teaching a seminar at a junior high
school in Santa Maria. There, she learned that students were using meth.

"I guess I was hoping that kids that age weren't involved in meth,"
she said, "and to find out that they were really upset me."

Chief Macagni explained that kids can get meth from their brothers,
sisters, gang members, and even from parents. Drug dealers will give
the substance to them for free to get them hooked, he said, and kids
that might have started with alcohol or marijuana are getting exposed
to meth way too soon.

"Our children today aren't listening to us," he said. "We go after
them heavily in education, to tell them this is bad, and they still
succumb to peer pressure."

Parents, he said, need to do research on drugs. They need to learn
the slang, find out what meth looks like, and pay attention to what
their kids are doing.

On the night of the overdose, Tara came home earlier than expected,
and Katherine could sense that something was wrong. Tara walked into
her room. Katherine then heard a thump as her daughter collapsed in
front of her door.

She was unconscious, Katherine said. Her breathing was shallow and
her eyes rolled back in her head.

"I can't tell you how scary it was," Katherine said. "I was trying to
revive her. My fianc" was there. He said, 'Honey, call 911. You can't
wake her up.'"

At the hospital, doctors told Katherine that Tara's blood-alcohol
level was 1.5. They suspected designer drug use: meth, ecstasy, and
possibly a date-rape drug.

"My ex-husband and I, we don't have alcohol in the house. We don't
have cold medicine, nothing!" Katherine said. "I must have thrown out
$200 worth of stuff: air freshener, nail polish remover, anything
that she could inhale. I can't explain it. Sometimes it makes you
crazy. What am I supposed to do? Lock cold medicine in my trunk?"

"It's rather unusual that teens use only one drug," said Ken Friesen,
program director at Santa Maria Youth and Family. "They always want
to try new things."

Friesen treats teens with drug addictions at the private, nonprofit
drug-counseling center. Of about 60 teens currently receiving
treatment at the center, he said, approximately 20 use meth
primarily. Two-thirds of them include meth as one of the drugs that they abuse.

At Santa Maria Youth and Family, counselors use the cognitive
behavioral approach. In other words, Friesen said, they talk to the
kids to get to the roots of what they're trying to escape from
through drug use.

"Unfortunately, it's a very slow and tedious process," he said.
"They're all able to move past their addiction, but most of them don't."

According to Friesen, 35 percent of the kids treated at Santa Maria
Youth and Family are successful at staying clean for six months to a
year after leaving the program. After that, the center doesn't keep
track. The fastest a kid ever completed the program was seven months,
but most teens are in the program for years, Friesen said, until they
graduate or "bomb out."

At the beginning of 2006, Katherine was preparing for her biggest
step yet. She was packing Tara's clothes and getting her ready to go
to a 30-day treatment center.

Katherine and Tara's father came up with $12,000 to pay for the
program. Tara didn't know she was leaving until the morning they got
in the car and drove away.

"We could have waited to see if insurance would pay for it,"
Katherine said, "but we felt that we didn't have the time."

So far, treatment is going well. Tara has moved past the shakes and
hallucinations that came with detox and has completed the first two
steps of Narcotics Anonymous. She's even earned enough good-behavior
points to receive a two-hour outing on Saturdays to see her parents,
Katherine said. Last time they saw her, they went to lunch and bought
some chapstick.

"She seems to like being there with other people who've been through
what she has-or worse," Katherine said.

Meth is not limited to one neighborhood in Santa Maria or Lompoc or Santa Ynez.

"It's all over," Chief Macagni said, "and that's what's scary."

The Santa Maria police chief said that a friend of his recently died
as a result of meth use. Macagni explained that he had done
everything in his power to help him, but nothing worked.

"Across the board, whether it's a male or female, wealthy or dirt
poor, it doesn't make any difference," Friesen said. "Drug abuse
knows no boundaries."

Katherine, who also has a 19-year-old daughter and a son in junior
high, learned that hard lesson firsthand.

"I think every parent knows in their gut what they need to do to help
their kid," she said. "I'm just a parent who's trying to save her child."