'METH' AND CHILDREN

When law-enforcement officers hit a site where they think methamphetamine
is being manufactured, they go in wearing protective clothing complete with
breathing apparatuses. But the chilling truth is that children walk around
unprotected every day in such crude labs - labs that double as their sad
excuses for home. It's a nightmare reality that demands corrective action
to slow its spread.

"To them (the children), this is normal," Rick Hetzel of the State Bureau
of Investigation said in a story by Monte Mitchell in Sunday's Journal. "We
don't even know what the future holds for them. Are they going to develop
cancer when they're 14 years old from living in a clandestine lab - cancer
they wouldn't have had if not exposed to this from ages 5 to 9?"

Methamphetamine production continues to creep across North Carolina's
mountains like a cancer, ruining parents and their children. It's easy to
get angry at the parents who endanger their children by making the drug
right in front of them, regardless of the parents' stories of their own
addiction. But for the children, there can be nothing but sorrow.

Methamphetamine production can mean children living in campers in their
yards and going to the kitchen window of the house where they once lived to
ask for food. It can mean a pot of chemicals in a sink next to a baby's
bottle. It can mean children getting secondhand exposure to the drug and
showing the same signs as users - sleeplessness, lack of hunger and
irritability - as well as breathing problems.

"It would make you cry just to see that humans live in that condition,"
Sheriff Mark Shook of Watauga County said of one lab.

Last year, 124 children were found at meth labs in North Carolina. Almost
30 children have been found in labs already this year. The children are
often taken from their parents and put in foster homes supported in part by
local money. That's already putting a heavy burden on counties such as
Watauga - and the cost is just one part of this egregious problem.

Methamphetamine promises to have worse long-term results than crack
cocaine. For one thing, many children who grow up in labs could easily
become addicts and criminals themselves, crowding prisons instead of the
job market. And production of the drug has already spread from the
mountains to the Piedmont, although the problem here has not yet reached
the severity it has farther west.

Attorney General Roy Cooper, other law-enforcement officials and social
workers are right to be combating the drug's production and spread.
Improvements have started. Meth producers caught with children at the site
of a lab face longer sentences. And authorities in the mountain counties
have also started to use federal charges, which mean faster prosecution and
longer sentences.

Those involved in this fight deserve all the help they can get. For the
children.