A DRUG SCOURGE CREATES ITS OWN FORM OF ORPHAN

TULSA, Okla -- The Laura Dester Shelter here is licensed for 38
children, but at times in the past months it has housed 90, forcing
siblings to double up in cots. It is supposed to be a 24-hour
stopping point between troubled homes and foster care, but with
foster homes backed up, children are staying weeks and sometimes
months, making it more orphanage than shelter, a cacophony of need.

In a rocking chair, a volunteer uses one arm to feed a 5-day-old boy
taken from his mother at birth, the other to placate a toddler who is
wandering from adult to adult begging, "Bottle?" A 3-year-old who
arrived at dawn shrieks as salve is rubbed on her to kill the lice.

This is a problem methamphetamine has made, a scene increasingly
familiar across the country as the number of foster children rises
rapidly in states hit hard by the drug, the overwhelming number of
them, officials say, taken from parents who were using or making
methamphetamine.

Oklahoma last year became the first state to ban over-the-counter
sales of cold medicines that contain the crucial ingredient needed to
make methamphetamine. Even so, the number of foster children in the
state is up 16 percent from a year ago. In Kentucky, the numbers are
up 12 percent, or 753 children, with only seven new homes.

In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up from 4,946
the year before, and officials there say the caseload would be half
what it is now if the methamphetamine problem suddenly went away. In
Tennessee, state officials recently began tracking the number of
children brought in because of methamphetamine, and it rose to 700 in
2004 from 400 in 2003.

While foster populations in cities rose because of so-called crack
babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly a rural phenomenon,
and it has created virtual orphans in areas without social service
networks to support them. in Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here,
a group is raising money to convert an old church into a shelter
because there are none.

Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and destructive
nature and the way it is often made in the home conspire against
child welfare unlike any other drug.

It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents because the
children of methamphetamine arrive with so many behavioral problems;
they may not get into their beds at night because they are so used to
sleeping on the floor, and they may resist toilet training because
they are used to wearing dirty diapers.

"We used to think, you give these kids a good home and lots of love
and they'll be O.K.," said Esther Rider-Salem, the manager of Child
Protective Services programs for the State of Oklahoma. "This goes
above and beyond anything we've seen."

Although the methamphetamine problem has existed for years, state
officials here and elsewhere say the number of foster children
created by it has spiked in the last year or two as growing awareness
of the drug problem has prompted more lab raids, and more citizens
reporting suspected methamphetamine use.

Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the
last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where
methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the
problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children
whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it
relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.

On July 5, the National Association of Counties reported that 40
percent of child welfare officials surveyed nationwide said that
methamphetamine had caused a rise in the number of children removed from homes.

The percentage was far higher on the West Coast and in rural areas,
where the drug has hit the hardest. Seventy-one percent of counties
in California, 70 percent in Colorado and 69 percent in Minnesota
reported an increase in the number of children removed from homes
because of methamphetamine.

In North Dakota, 54 percent of counties reported a
methamphetamine-related increase. At what was billed as a "community
meeting on meth" in Fargo this year, the state attorney general,
Wayne Stenehjem, exhorted the hundreds of people packed into an
auditorium: "People always ask, what can they do about meth? The most
important thing you can do is become a foster parent, because we're
just seeing so many kids being taken from these homes."

Officials also say methamphetamine has made it harder to reunite
families once the child is taken; 59 percent of those surveyed in the
national counties study agreed.