METH'S MENACING HOLD

Dangerous drug breaking up families and forcing growing number of kids into
foster care

CROSSVILLE, Tenn. - They are children displaced by methamphetamine, removed
from homes tainted by the powerful drug and addicted parents often facing
criminal charges.

"The saddest thing you can ever see, come in at 3 or 4 o'clock in the
morning, and see a kid sitting there with a paper bag. That's all their
worldly possessions," Cumberland County Sheriff Butch Burgess said.

And their number is growing, with a year-old law pushing nearly 500
children of parents making or using methamphetamine into the care of foster
homes or relatives.

While the parents clog the court systems of many Tennessee counties, it's
the children who create a less visible but equally tragic burden.

Police often rush into their homes, arrest their parents and take the
children to a hospital to scrub their skin clean of hazardous chemicals.
The children can't take a blanket or toys with them when they leave home
because the items are considered contaminated.

Then, they sit outside a jail or a courtroom to wait for someone to take
them to a new home.

"It is destroying families," said Theresa Looper, a Children's Services
team coordinator for Cumberland and six other northern Cumberland Plateau
counties. "I would like to tell you that people's children are more
important to them than being addicted to meth but that's not true. It just
gets such a grip on them they can't turn loose of it."

Meth, sometimes called the poor man's cocaine, is made from easily
purchased items such as Ephedrine in cold tablets, drain cleaner, iodine
and lye. Usually snorted or injected, it makes users feel euphoric,
energized and powerful. Long-time addicts can go days without sleep, and
often become aggressive, paranoid and experience hallucinations.

In the 1960s, the drug moved from the military, where it had been given to
troops to stay awake, to biker gangs. It slowly grew in popularity until
the 1990s, when the ease in making it and concealing it found a new
generation of users, primarily in rural communities.

Users include housewives, college students, factory workers and - parents.

A national report compiled by the Drug Enforcement Administration
Intelligence Center in El Paso showed that children were found in at least
1,504 meth lab seizures in 2002.

Burgess said the chances children taken from meth homes will return to
sober parents are slim.

"I've never seen a parent yet that has gotten straight, that has gotten
over it," he said.

Last year, 22 children in Burgess' county along the Cumberland Plateau were
taken from homes where meth was made and he expects that number to grow
this year.

Addicts get so wrapped up in making and taking the drug that they neglect
their children, he said. He recalled one couple who made meth in a chicken
coop while their three children slept nearby.

"The parents would just lock them up," Burgess said. One of the children
was in a "baby bed with chicken wire over it."

Earlene Yvonne Speer, a general sessions and juvenile court judge in rural
Grundy County, 70 miles south of Crossville, said children are brought into
her court who have grown up breathing the poisonous fumes from meth labs.

The children are accustomed to strangers visiting their homes at all hours,
and seeing their parents make, use and buy the drug. Sometimes they go
without food, bathing or schooling.

Still, since they know no other life, "I have children begging me, 'Please
don't take me away from mama and daddy,' " the judge said.

She said she tells parents: "You can have your meth or you can have your
children, but you can't have them both. You have made a choice."

Medical experts know little about the long-term impact of using the drug,
or exposure to the vapors from mixing and boiling - commonly referred to as
"cooking" - household chemicals to make it. Even less is known about
prenatal exposure.

Richard A. Rawson, associate director of the Integrated Substance Abuse
Program at UCLA, said a pilot study showed that young children whose
mothers exposed them to meth during pregnancy were "significantly delayed
in verbal learning skills," in addition to slowed physical development.

Rawson said meth is possibly more damaging than cocaine because it appears
to destroy the nervous system.

"The idea that meth does possibly produce permanent damage to certain areas
of the brain is a real concern," he said.

Cumberland County Assistant District Attorney Gary McKenzie recently
prosecuted two young mothers whose newborns tested positive for meth.

One of the babies showed signs of withdrawal when first placed with a
foster family. The second baby "would shake uncontrollably and cry for no
reason, be up at all hours." McKenzie said. "It seems to be OK now. The
thing we don't know is the long-term effect."

The babies' mothers made plea deals for 12-year prison sentences. McKenzie
said they each chose to avoid a trial and a possible maximum 25-year sentence.

Eric Coutu, a handyman in Grundy County, said meth touches "everybody's
families."

His 1-year-old granddaughter is now in state custody after his daughter,
Candice, and her boyfriend, Justin Tate, both 21, were arrested on charges
of making meth and child endangerment.

Tate was cooking meth at his girlfriend's home, causing an explosion that
seriously burned his hand as the little girl played in a crib nearby.

"Everybody is embarrassed about it," Coutu said of the fire and arrests.
But he said addicts need rehabilitation, not jail, especially if the hope
is to keep families together.

"There is not one single family in this county that has not been affected
by this" drug, he said.