THE FALLOUT: 'I FELT MY FACE JUST MELTING'

Burn Units Struggle To Cope With The Flow Of Meth Users Straining Their
Resources

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - Wired on methamphetamine and craving more, Ricky Dale
Houchens set out one night last November to cook a fresh batch of the drug.
He met some buddies in rural Scottsville, Ky., at a trailer that doubled as
a crude lab. As the concoction simmered, Houchens, 27, noticed it was
getting too hot. When he picked up the pitcher, the bottom gave way and the
combustible mixture splashed onto a burner. The resulting blast engulfed
Houchens in a ball of fire. "I felt my face just melting," he recalls. "The
skin was running down my arm ... like lard." Eventually, he was transported
to Vanderbilt University Burn Center in Nashville, where specialists
treated him for severe burns on 40 percent of his body.

Burn victims like Houchens are increasingly popping up in hospitals across
the country. In Tennessee, meth-lab seizures have skyrocketed, from 226 in
2000 to 942 in 2004, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. When
labs explode, they not only kill and maim the cooks; they wreak financial
havoc on the facilities that treat them, since the vast majority of meth
victims lack health insurance. In Houchens's case, his hospital charges
totaled more than $553,000, only $110,000 of which was recovered from
Kentucky Medicaid. As many as a third of Vanderbilt's burn cases at a given
time in the past year have been meth-related. "If we continue to take on
this large burden" of $5 million to $10 million per year in uncompensated
care, says Dr. Jeffrey Guy, Vanderbilt's burn director, "I don't know if we
will have a burn unit five or 10 years from now." Across the state line,
the Mississippi Firefighters Memorial Burn Center suspended new admissions
in May and may need to shut down permanently. Part of the reason: the
financial strain from treating meth-lab burn patients.

Since many meth ingredients are flammable, one false move by a cook can
yield disaster. When Selena Humphrey, 19, used to make the drug with her
friends, "we were always on pins and needles," she says, as they would
accidentally spill chemicals or start small fires. Eventually, an explosion
sent her to Vanderbilt, where doctors had to chisel melted plastic-which
had lined the walls of the lab-off her face.

Jonathan Torgovnik for Newsweek 'I felt my face melting': Ricky Houchens,
27, suffered severe burns on 40 percent of his body

The toxic substances make patients like Humphrey tougher to treat. A
recently published study by the University of Louisville's burn center laid
out the typical traits of meth-lab victims: deeper chemical injuries,
greater resuscitation requirements, longer periods on a ventilator. Even
worse, most of them offer dubious explanations for their injuries, says Dr.
Michael Smock of St. John's Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis. That
dishonesty complicates diagnosis and slows the response to things like eye
injuries, which can cause severe damage if not treated quickly.

Meth patients' treatment is expensive-$10,000 per day on average at
Vanderbilt. But the hospital can at best recover about 30 percent of that
from the state Medicaid program, which is already overextended. "This is
just another set of pressures that we don't need," says Will Pinkston, who
coordinated Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen's meth task force.

Few meth-lab burn victims ever face arrest. Authorities are reluctant to
enter hospitals because of the potential chilling effect on doctors and
nurses who have a professional responsibility to treat all patients. Though
a Tennessee anti-meth law enacted in March contains a provision requiring
health professionals to re-port meth-lab burns and injuries to law
enforcement, Vanderbilt's Guy hadn't been informed of it until asked about
it by NEWSWEEK.

If jail can't set lab-accident victims straight, you'd think at least the
agony of burn recovery would. But few seem to learn their lesson. Guy
recalls one meth patient who was snatched from near death and was about to
be discharged when he made a final request: some pseudoephedrine for
supposed sinus problems. As for Houchens, the Kentucky burn patient, it
took less than a month after his discharge for him to snort a line of meth
again. "I felt bad, like I let everybody down," he says. But meth is
"Lucifer himself." The burn specialists who tend to the drug's human
detritus would surely agree.

With Catharine Skipp