TOWNS PITCH IN TO SAVE 'METH ORPHANS' OF APPALACHIA

As Drug Busts Rise, Locals Build Foster Homes And Donate Toys To Help
Children Left Behind After Arrests

Meat Camp, N.C. - It is a disturbing scene that plays out all too often
across the hog hollows of Appalachia. Authorities raid illicit meth labs
set up in rickety trailers and mountain shacks: Using hoses, scrubs, and
soap, they decontaminate children on the spot and throw away tainted
blankets and teddy bears.

The loss of personal items may seem like a small price for the crimes of
their parents, but for many experts, it symbolizes the plight of the
region's growing ranks of "meth orphans:" losing their childhoods to what's
called the "scourge of the mountains."

Now, however, a growing number of communities across Appalachia - where
methamphetamine use has become a virtual pandemic - are finding ways to
care for the hundreds of children separated each year from their parents as
a result of drug busts.

In some towns, residents are building group homes and taking in the
children. In other areas, business people and Brownie troops are donating
clothes and toys to replace at least some of the contaminated belongings
that have been discarded. And in places where as many as 60 percent of meth
lab busts involve children, authorities are now changing their tactics to
take into account the welfare of broken families when making arrests.

"It's become a rescue mission," says Betty Dotson-Lewis, a historian in
Somersville, W.Va. "Our communities are having to assume the responsibility
to save these children."

The task is a large one. The underworld of meth labs, in which people
combine or "cook" household chemicals with readily available
over-the-counter drugs to produce powerful stimulants, has become a
significant problem nationwide. But is particularly entrenched here in the
mountains of Appalachia.

Up Meat Camp Road in this steep valley just outside Boone, N.C., for
instance, black-painted pickup trucks and broken-down shacks are the
outward manifestations of a hollow where "there's six labs cooking right
now," says Harry Ray, a car mechanic who's lived in the valley most of his
life.

In and around the valley where Indians once hunted buffalo to trade the
meat at the camp up on Snake Mountain Gap, officials have noted one of the
greatest concentrations of meth labs in the country. As the meth trade
moved West from California and through the heartland over the past 30
years, experts say it's found a home in the region where the Feds and
moonshiners once battled it out over another illicit enterprise.

Indeed, officials say a 400 percent rise in meth arrests in Boone alone in
the past two years only hints at the scope of a problem that may now be
worse than the days of the stills.

And it's children who are increasingly getting wrapped up in the lawless
culture - both as participants and innocent bystanders.

Here in North Carolina's Watauga County, for instance, one elementary
schoolboy recently recited to his class in detail the recipe to cook meth,
to the astonishment of his teacher. In another local case, a boy was
working for his parents, removing striker strips from the sides of
matchbooks to distill a key ingredient (red phosphorus) used in making the
home-brewed drug.

Often, small children are found playing on the floor, where the dangerous
fumes congregate. On Dec. 15, investigators in White County, Tenn., found a
stash of ingredients under an 11-year-old's mattress - in an area where 80
kids were put into foster care last year.

But children are also playing a part in stopping the scourge: A recent case
in Tennessee involved a 14-year-old girl who informed on her parents after
they kept telling her younger brother they were going to stop manufacturing
meth and never did.

For police, it's sometimes hard to tell the innocent from the lawless: In
Myrtle Beach the week before Christmas, police arrested a man and a wife
and their two teenage boys after discovering a meth lab in their motel room.

Children caught in the middle

For the most part, though, children are being caught in the middle. In
Tennessee some 500 children have been placed in foster care in just the
past few years because their parents were arrested for making methamphetamine.

"Our system is overwhelmed right now," says Russ Dedrick, the US attorney
in Knoxville, Tenn.

As a result, officials are taking greater care in trying to protect the
children being caught in this netherworld of "crystal" and "crank." In some
cases, the approach is to discourage the parents from involving them at
all. Missouri, for example, now makes it possible to be sentenced to life
in prison for cooking meth in front of a child.

But those laws have yet to make it into the hidden crags of Appalachia,
where there's still a deep distrust of - and solidarity against - outside
authorities. Thus local officials are developing other procedures to help
the young, such as involving social workers early in the process and
decontaminating children at the scene of raids.

Boone has changed the name of a local meth task force to the
"Drug-Endangered Children's Program." A dozen other mountain counties have
sent representatives to the town to learn its methods. A conference in
Tennessee in early December brought 300 deputies and social workers for a
first-of-its-kind conference on the meth pandemic.

On a recent Friday, dozens of families came to the Social Services building
in Watauga County, N.C., to donate toys and clothes for the dispossessed
children. More dramatically, Cumberland County, Tenn., recently bought an
old church and turned it into a foster group home mainly for "meth orphans."

"Everytime we've needed something, it's just shown up," says Butch Burgess,
the county sheriff.

One man's crusade

Mr. Burgess himself is an example of how people are pitching in. Last year
he took in a foster boy from a drug-addled family - one of 31 foster kids
he's cared for in the past 11 years, many of them meth orphans.

"He was three years old and 22 pounds when we got him and now he weighs
40-something," says Mr. Burgess. "The first four days he didn't speak at
all, but last night at the Christmas service at the church, he led the
closing prayer for 10 minutes. We couldn't understand half of what he was
saying, but there wasn't a dry eye in the church when he finished. It just
tells me that if we can break the cycle with these kids, we've done
something positive."

All the attention is yielding results. "What we're finding is that more
people are [cooking meth] away from their homes and their kids," says
Roslyn Thompson, a supervisor at Watauga County Social Services.