KIDS OF ADDICTS BEAR SCARS AS METH SWEEPS RURAL AREAS

Downstate Family Struggles to Rebuild

FLORA, Ill. -- Misty Cobb's four children lived in fear.

Donnie was afraid of the men who beat up his mother, a methamphetamine
addict, and who turned on the boy when he tried to protect her.

Michael was afraid of what he found around his mom's house: used
needles, handguns, drugs in plastic bags and a constant stream of
drugged-out strangers.

Carissa wasn't sure if her mom would survive her violent, chaotic,
drug-addicted lifestyle, or if she'd lose her forever.

Jessica, the youngest, was afraid of Cobb, who would go into paranoid
rages when coming down off drugs. "She'd hit me in the face and drag
me by the hair and slap me on my back," she says matter-of-factly.

Over time, all four children were taken away to live with their
fathers, grandparents or other relatives. High on meth, Cobb neglected
to visit or call them for weeks or months on end.

Children are paying an enormous toll as a meth epidemic sweeps through
rural Illinois and much of the Midwest. Frightened, neglected kids are
living in homes with parents who think only of their next high.
Abused, abandoned children are pouring into the child-welfare system.

In parts of southern Illinois, as many as half of child-welfare cases
being handled by social service agencies are now meth-related, agency
officials report. The children involved often come from squalid,
dangerous homes, where toxic brews cook on portable burners set up in
bedrooms, and chemicals are stored in refrigerators, according to
child-welfare workers, police, narcotics investigators and parole officers.

The scars inflicted in meth homes are long-lasting.

"I don't trust nobody, not even my friends," says Donnie Simpson,
Cobb's 19-year-old son, whose bright blue eyes flash with anger while
describing his hurt. "They don't know what I've been through."

Meth Spreading Fast

Until a few years ago, little attention was paid to children exposed
to meth, the fastest growing illegal drug in the country. Kids were a
distraction when police broke into houses and made drug arrests.

Gradually, though, awareness began to build that meth wasn't like
heroin, cocaine, crack or even marijuana, at least not in the Midwest.
Unlike these drugs which come from outside the U.S., meth was being
home-cooked by addicts eager to use the drug, not sell it on the streets.

Most were young adults in their 20s and 30s, prime child-bearing and
child-rearing years, according to the national drug statistics.

Virtually all the meth circulating in Illinois is made in small labs.
Last year, 971 labs were busted, up 43 percent from 677 labs in 2002,
according to newly released data by the Illinois State Police. Kids
are discovered at these crime sites 30 to 40 percent of the time,
police officials report.

In another measure of meth's spread in Illinois, admissions to
publicly funded treatment facilities soared to 3,582 in fiscal 2003,
compared with 2,149 the year before, according to new data from
Illinois' Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse.

Illinois is beginning to address what this epidemic means to children.
On Jan. 1, a new state law doubling prison sentences for people who
cook meth around children went into effect.

"These children are exposed to a very, very violent lifestyle of drug
using, drug dealing, and drug manufacturing," says Bruce Liebe, who
oversees the clandestine lab program for the state police. "Once their
parents are addicted, nothing but getting the drug seems to matter."

Kids' Private Terror

Each time the kids' school or neighbors would call the Department of
Children and Family Services on Cobb--there were eight incidents,
according to department records--she'd clean up her act temporarily,
park the kids with family members or just move to another small
Illinois town.

"Addicted people are good at covering their tracks and good sprinters:
they're able to show significant accomplishments over a short distance
and, quite frankly, trick our system sometimes," says Bill Peyton,
administrator for the southern region of the Illinois DCFS.

No one kept track of what was happening to Cobb's kids. "I've seen her
get beat by multiple people all the time. There was blood everywhere,"
says Donnie Simpson. "I'd try to get in the middle, to keep them off
her, but I'd get hit.

"We'd walk in (after school) and we'd find syringes, drug
paraphernalia everywhere. Sometimes she'd be gone for a day. Sometimes
longer," says Donnie.

"You never really knew when she'd be back. You never knew where your
next meal would come from, or even where you'd live the next day. I
was just scared all the time," Donnie says quietly, speaking to an
outsider for the first time about what he and his family went through.

Part of meth's thrill is a high that can last for 8 to 12 hours, and
that can keep constant users up for more than a week at a time.
Sleep-deprived, meth addicts become paranoid and dangerous. Then they
crash, falling into a deep sleep that often lasts for days.

"If you even looked at (my mom) wrong, she'd pick you up and throw you
against the wall and punch you in the face. This happened hundreds of
times," says Donnie, who didn't start fighting back until he was in
his teens. "She was like a monster."

Only now are officials beginning to track how many child-welfare cases
in Illinois are related to drugs, including meth. Though hard numbers
aren't available yet, "definitely, the numbers of children we are
taking into protective custody because of meth is on the rise," says
Peyton.

Neighboring Iowa's experience is better documented and highlights how
much damage the epidemic is doing to families.

In 2001, after the horrific death of a toddler living with her
meth-addicted mother, Iowa became the first state in the U.S. to
create a new category of child abuse: manufacturing a dangerous drug
in the presence of a child.

The next year, the first official count of meth-related cases came in.
About 468 Iowa children were found in homes with illegal labs; another
397 babies were born to mothers addicted to meth and cocaine.

Meanwhile, in August, Carol Gutchewsky, community liaison for Iowa's
Department of Human Services looked in-depth at 1,469 active
child-welfare cases in 16 southwestern counties. Some of the children
were living at home; others had been put in protective custody.

After interviewing social workers, Gutchewsky discovered that 49
percent of these cases involved meth in one way or another. "We're
using up foster home slots for these children from meth families," she
said.

The trend appears similar in Illinois, where about half of the new
foster care cases being handled by Lutheran Social Services of
Illinois' southern region are meth-related, according to regional
director Larry Johnson.

Recognizing the nexus between meth and child abuse and neglect, the
Illinois State Police and Illinois Children and Family Services are
developing a drug-endangered children's program, modeled after a
program from California.

Under the program, set to roll out this year, police will contact
child-protection workers immediately when youngsters are found at a
meth site and gather evidence of child harm as part of their criminal
investigation. In turn, child-welfare staff members will take
responsibility for making sure children receive medical attention and
are placed in safe settings.

Turning Life Around

It was the prospect of losing all her children after getting caught in
a drug bust in July 2001 that finally got Misty Cobb off meth. But for
years, she'd acted like she didn't care.

"When we got busted, four of us women in this drug house, we had 15
kids between us, 18 years to 2," says Cobb, who was charged with a
Class 4 felony for unlawful possession of drugs. "How were these kids
living? We didn't know. Most of the time, I didn't even know where my
kids were ... If we made a phone call to our kids, we thought we'd
done something and then it was over for the next month.

"I'd just get high again and try not to worry about
it."

By then, her oldest son, Donnie, had dropped out of high school and
was living in an abandoned building, depending on handouts from
friends. Eric Patterson, Cobb's former husband, had won custody of her
two middle children, Michael and Carissa Patterson, who rarely saw
their mom.

Cobb's youngest, Jessica Highsmith, 12, was taken away after her
mother's arrest and sent to live with Cobb's mother, June Martin, 65.
Martin now has custody of the girl, who for years had struggled with
severe asthma while living in homes filled with meth smoke. Today, her
asthma is under control.

This is how Michael, now 17, tried to jolt Cobb out of denial several
years ago in a letter: "Mom, why is Jess not going to school ...
Donnie needs specks [glasses] and you are not trying to do anything
about it. ... If you were the mom you are supposed to be you will stop
partying and doin drugs .. [and] always sleeping in. And get a job.
And leave them guys alone till your life is right ..."

Michael, who has a gentle manner, still feels the sting at school,
where it's common for kids to tease him. "It's hard [with so many
people] knowing what your mom did. They think you're not worth
anything. I just put my head down," says the boy, who says he wants to
be a probation officer.

Schools need to be aware of signs that something could be going wrong:
unexplained absences, students so tired they can't focus after their
drug-using parents have kept them up all night, says Chris Boyd, chief
probation officer for Clay County, who has worked closely with Cobb
and her children.

Beating all the odds--fewer than 10 percent of meth addicts stay off
drugs the first time they try to recover--Cobb successfully ended
probation Dec. 18 and has been trying to build a new life. Remarried
for the sixth time, she and her husband, Vance, are running a
construction business in Flora.

Donnie and Carissa have come to live with Cobb again, in part to try
to recover some of the childhoods they never had.

Carissa, 15, still is trying to process all her conflicting feelings.
"I get mad at [my mom] because she shouldn't have done all the bad
things she done, but I feel sad because she hurt herself," says the
girl who, like her siblings, vows she will never try drugs.

"I seen [my mom] lying in her bed and she was so little. She was just
curled up in a ball, all awful, and she couldn't talk to us or
anything. I don't want what happened to her to happen to me," says
Carissa.

For her part, every day Cobb has to face kids who shrink away when she
tries to give them a hug. The guilt she once tried to drown out comes
flooding in now, even as she struggles to find a way to be a mother
again and keep rejecting the draw of drugs.

"Looking at the situation sober, I can see what happened. These kids
have to struggle now just to get through every day of life because of
what I've done," this former addict says. "It isn't something I think
they'll ever get over."