TENNESSEE STRUGGLES TO CURB METHAMPHETAMINE USE

Foster Care System Strained As Few Addicts Beat Odds

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. - The last time Norma Barney got high was the same
spring day last year when her children were taken from her, whisked
out of school by the state and placed in foster care.

"In one day, I lost my kids, I lost my home, I lost my husband," said
Barney, now 31, whose husband is behind bars for cooking the
methamphetamine they had both sold. "A complete stranger had my kids.
It about killed me."

Barney entered rehab. She found a job, went to Narcotics Anonymous
meetings, and for the first time in her life, earns a paycheck and is
off public assistance. "I finally did something with myself," she said.

Hers is a rare success story, the case of a methamphetamine addict who
beat the overwhelming odds of a 95 percent relapse rate. Now, 15
months clean, she represents a glimmer of hope in a struggle that is
as much hers as it is Tennessee's.

For the past few years, this state has been scrambling to figure out
how to beat an epidemic of methamphetamine use considered by some
measures to be the nation's worst. In the last fiscal year, federal
authorities cleaned up 1,147 clandestine labs statewide and are poised
to far surpass that total this year, officials say. Methamphetamine
abuse is taxing police resources, courts, jails, and hospitals.

But officials say the drug's impact is most devastating for the
state's foster care rolls. In an 18-month period that ended July 2003,
the Tennessee Department of Children's Services placed more than 700
children in foster care after they were abused or neglected by parents
using methamphetamine. The issue costs the state an estimated $4
million for care of children in its custody, the department says.

"These are the innocent victims," said Betsy Dunn, a caseworker who
removed Barney's children from their home near Cookeville, midway
between Nashville and Knoxville, in a part of the state hit hardest by
methamphetamine.

"I'm talking to young children that can make meth, children that are
the primary caretakers of their younger siblings," Dunn said. "I've
never seen anything like it. It's just horrific. I call it the devil
drug."

Captain Nathan Honeycutt, a 27-year police veteran, said he, too, has
never seen anything like it. "Most of us in this profession," he said,
"believe it will get worse before it gets better."

Methamphetamine -- known as speed, crystal, and ice -- became popular
during World War II, used by soldiers to stave off fatigue and hunger,
and among California biker gangs in the 1950s and '60s.

Use of the drug slowly spread to other parts of the country. Some
states, particularly in the Northeast, have seen little
methamphetamine use. Only one lab was raided in Massachusetts in 2003,
according to federal officials.

In Tennessee, Drug Enforcement Administration officials trace much of
the speed epidemic to men with California ties who moved to the state
in the mid-1990s and began showing others how to cook the drug on
kitchen stoves or practically anywhere. Made from easily available raw
materials and the essential ingredient, pseudoephedrine -- often
extracted from common cold and allergy drugs like Sudafed --
methamphetamine grew in popularity as the "poor man's cocaine" or
modern-day moonshine.

When methamphetamine soared in popularity in the early '90s, many
mistook it for a short-lived fad. Instead, it grabbed hold and has not
let go.

"It's a neurotransmitter," said Dr. Sullivan Smith, who runs the
emergency room in Cookeville, is the county medical examiner and also
is trained by the DEA to dismantle methamphetamine labs.

"It dumps dopamine into your brain," he said. "You are Superman, you
are Wonder Woman, you can do anything. It doesn't matter what happens;
it's all wonderful."

But the drug damages the brain's ability to achieve pleasure normally,
and users become desperate to renew those feelings.

Often addicts stay awake for days, turning to crime to pay for drugs
and neglecting their children. And, Smith said, the paranoia most
addicts suffer allows for little normalcy in the children's lives.

"It's an abusive environment," he said.

For children found playing or crawling on the floors of squalid homes
that have highly flammable drug labs, where contaminants seep into
walls and settle in carpets, "We just don't know the long-term
effects," Smith said.

In Cookeville, a quiet, low-rise city of almost 27,000 people and the
closest thing to an urban center for the 14-county, rural Upper
Cumberland region, the drug has touched many people.

And many are trying to fight it.

The Putnam County sheriff, David Andrews, pledged to attack the
problem in 2002, and his officers have closed about 100 labs in the
county, which has 70,000 people. A federal grant is paying for a
full-time county methamphetamine prevention officer.

The district attorney, Bill Gibson, won a federal grant to dedicate a
prosecutor to methamphetamine crimes and to mount an aggressive
education effort.

Last year Cookeville also became the state's first municipality to
regulate the sale of over-the-counter medicines containing
pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, requiring shoppers to show
identification and sign for purchases. "If you don't have any
pseudoephedrine, you can't make methamphetamine," Mayor Charles Womack
said, although the pills are available without regulation in
neighboring communities.

Retailers had successfully fought against a bill in Nashville to
require similar regulation statewide, officials said.

In fact, about 30 bills related to the methamphetamine problem were
introduced this year. But state legislators, overwhelmed by the
magnitude of the problem and doubting a piecemeal approach, enacted
two laws and asked Governor Phil Bredesen to appoint a task force.

One of the new laws increased the penalties for possession and
distribution of methamphetamine to equal those for cocaine-related
offenses. The other gave police the power to quarantine homes,
offices, or hotel rooms used as methamphetamine labs.

The governor's task force is expected to issue recommendations in
September.

But Smith, a member of the task force, warned there will be no silver
bullet. "You have to have meaningful sentences for meaningful crimes,"
he said. "And I think addicts need help; they need treatment. And we
need awareness."

Now that Barney has her children back, they are living together in a
home with a big backyard, a hamster named Minnie, two birds, a cat,
and a fish tank.

"My kids never really had pets because I was too messed up," Barney
said. "They didn't get to play for years of their life. . . . They
didn't get to be kids."

"You can see it in their eyes, how hurt they were," she said. "It's
always in the back of their minds now: 'What if Mama gets high today?'