Meth
Panic
Mantra:
Save
the
Children
4/2/04
Methamphetamine has been the most demonized drug in recent years -- the crack of the new millennium, if you will -- and as its current wave of use spread from Hawaii and the West Coast a decade ago on to the monotonous plains towns of the Midwest and now the hidden hollows of Georgia and the Carolinas and the gay clubs of New York City, shrill and desperate measures to fight its use and abuse have followed apace. Legislatures and localities across the country have not only brutally increased sentences for meth sales and even possession, they have also reached heretofore uncharted territory in the war on drugs: Various states have now banned or restricted the sales of legal products, such as cold remedies containing epinephrine, that can be used in home manufacture of meth, while others have made possession of certain combinations of those legal products a criminal offense. Yet others, unsatisfied with the efficacy of existing theft and burglary statures, have crafted laws making the theft of anhydrous ammonia, another potential meth ingredient, a distinct and harshly punished offense. And increasingly, the states, abetted by funds from the federal government, are played the kid card. Like Mrs. Lovejoy, the reverend's wife in the venerable TV comedy the Simpsons, crying out "What about the children!?", some foes of methamphetamine in law enforcement, child welfare bureaucracies and legislatures are using the specter of the damage done by meth users to their children to lobby for -- and pass -- new laws further criminalizing meth users, and they are acting in an organized fashion to remove the children of drug users from their homes. Which is not to say that child abuse and neglect by people who are strung out on meth does not exist. The evidence is plentiful that it does. "It's a huge problem," said Allen Pollack, head of children's services for the Boulder County, Colorado, Department of Social Services. "In recent years we have had about a 70% increase in dependency and neglect filings, and the vast majority of that increase is directly related to the meth problem," he told DRCNet. "The link between substance abuse and child protection is not new -- some data suggests that 80% of child abuse and neglect cases are linked to substance abuse -- but in traditional cases, say where alcohol was the drug in question, parents could go and get clean and get treatment and get their kids returned. But with the meth cases, what we are seeing is that even when the parents go in for rehab and get clean, it's not long before they're back using again. One of our real concerns here is what appears to be ineffective treatment for meth." Receiving especially hysterical notice have been "meth labs," a misleading phrase that conjures up visions of industrial facilities, when what is usually being discussed is a motley collection of chemicals and containers that would fit on a kitchen table top. Meth labs are killing our kids, shriek cops and prosecutors. But a look at the hard numbers shows that, despite the alarms sounded by law enforcement and an upward trend, the number of children involved is small, both relatively and in absolute terms. According to statistics provided by the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), there were some 15,000 meth lab busts in 2002, with children present at 2,077 of them. Nearly half of those kids (1,026) were taken into protective custody. In 2002, a grand total of two children died in meth lab incidents, leaving the number of children killed in meth lab incidents this century in the single digits. The number of children injured in meth lab incidents from 2000 through 2002 was 52. Nevertheless, if the problem is less severe in terms of physical injury than one might think from reading the newspapers, tweaked out parents are still causing problems for their kids. "What we are seeing is this same sort of emotional symptoms we see in many other abuse or neglect situations," said Boulder County social services' Pollack. "In the meth cases, it is mainly neglect. We see situations where infants have been in the same soiled diaper for two or three days or kids being dropped off with babysitters and not being picked up. With younger kids, you get problems of attachment; with older kids, it is that they're not going to school, not wearing clean clothes, not getting their basic needs met," he said. "Meth doesn't necessarily make you an idiot," said a former South Dakota meth user, who, along with his wife, went to prison while their child stayed with relatives. "But if you were an idiot before, it makes you even more idiotic. People who had their act together could tweak out and still maintain normal lives, but people who were fucked up to begin with just get even more fucked up. We managed to take care of our child, keep him fed and dressed, get him to school every day, and all of that, but I've seen other tweakers who didn't watch out for their kids or who just let social services take them because they'd rather be partying. And that was probably the best thing for those kids," he told DRCNet. But while police and other drug war entrepreneurs spout horror stories at public presentations, responsible scientists involved in the question of meth labs and kids are much more cautious. In its information on meth labs, Colorado Drug Endangered Children, Inc. leaves the rigorous evaluation of the dangers to Dr. Robert Palmer, clinical toxicologist at the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center. Palmer does a good job of lowering the decibel level, explaining, for example, that a clandestine lab "is simply defined as a place where preparation of illegal substances takes place." And unlike the common perception of meth labs as something akin to radioactive waste dumps, Palmer explains that, like any other operation involving chemical reactions, "numerous hazards exist in this environment, including potential toxicities from the chemicals and gases produced, fires, explosions, and chemical and thermal burns." But, he explains, meth labs are more dangerous because "they are usually designed for ease of concealment of the activity and not for safety" and "the persons running the lab often have little or no formal education in chemistry." Palmer similarly deflates fear-inducing terms like "decontamination," which tends to conjure up images of space-suited personnel fending off lethal poisons. The term "simply means thoroughly washing to remove any potentially harmful residue," he wrote, adding that for most police officers entering meth labs, decontamination would consist of washing their shoes with soap and water. As for the nature of the threat, Palmer noted that "no studies involving long-term effects of continuous clandestine laboratory exposure exist. Currently, no prospectively collected data exist describing the effects of acute or chronic exposure to children in illicit methamphetamine labs." Furthermore, he notes, again contrary to what the anti-meth maniacs would have us believe, "these children are usually asymptomatic," although he noted that they should be monitored for symptoms of respiratory distress or changes in mental status. Palmer also downplayed the threat of meth-addicted children, writing that while 10% of kids in homes with heavy use will test positive for the drug, "a positive screen does not equate with addiction, which is very hard to define in this setting." Such cautious words, however, do not win funding or get legislation passed, nor are they par for the course among proponents of tough new meth child abuse laws or the police, social services, and medical personnel focusing on the issue through Drug Endangered Children (DEC) programs, which began as a local initiative in California in the mid-1990s and have now spread to states and localities across the country, although mainly in the West and Midwest. "It is not about drugs, it is about saving the children," Phoenix narcotics detective Tim Ahumada told a DEC conference in Michigan last week. "Child endangerment is often overlooked," Ahumada said. But he said social workers and police have to learn to work together to make the program work. "This takes a case from being a victimless crime to putting a face on these crimes, and that is how you are going to save these kids," he said. Calhoun County Prosecutor John Hallacy explained why meth required tougher penalties, in a way that both confused and demonized the issue. "It should be an enhancement in the penalties," he said. "Drug dealing is often violent, but meth is so different because it is so toxic." Such remarks are typical of DEC conferences and advocates of tougher laws, and they are often accompanied by unquestioning press coverage along the lines of "Meth: Threat or Menace?" Nancy Becker Bennett, manager of the law enforcement section of the Michigan Office of Drug Control Policy, was in charge of last week's DEC conference in Battle Creek. She told DRCNet that meth labs in the state have increased in recent years, but she could not say how many children had been exposed or seized by the state. "It's hard to tell because we haven't a DEC protocol to determine that," said Bennett. "We've found children at meth lab sites, but we don't know if they've been exposed." Still, she said, Michigan is moving ahead to set up a DEC program. "Our next step is to develop a Michigan methamphetamine strategy," she said. "It will decide on statewide DEC protocols or whether legislative action is needed," Bennett said. "What we are seeing is the social dynamics of a manufactured panic," said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (http://www.nccpr.org). "There is a panic over child abuse and foster care. What happens is a particular horrible case hits the headlines, and every case worker is thinking 'I don't want to have a case like that,' so they tear away every child in sight. You certainly saw that around the so-called crack babies," he told DRCNet. "When the panic over child abuse meets the panic over drug abuse, a lot of children suffer, and so do their parents. The problem is serious and real, but the solutions have been phony," he said. "Again, we saw this with crack," he emphasized. "But what we found was that these babies did better staying with their mothers than going to foster care. For those foster children, separation from their mothers was more toxic than cocaine. If we believe the rhetoric about putting the child's interest first, we have to have drug treatment, not foster care. But we are more interested in punishing mothers, so the first reaction is take the child and run." It goes beyond meth lab habitués, Wexler said. "We have seen cases where children have been confiscated at birth because the mother smoked a joint during birth to ease her labor pains," he said. "That points to a problem with the statistics on all these so-called drug involved cases. It's one thing to be selling your child on the street to buy crack; it's quite another to say you are abusing your children because you used a drug." And while proponents of taking kids from meth users and sending parents to jail as child abusers can point to horror stories -- the New Mexico man who cut off his son's head, the California women whose three children died in a meth lab fire -- so can people whose children have been turned over to the tender mercies of child protective services. April Zinsser, 21, of Merced, California, lost custody of her children after being convicted of meth possession and child endangerment. Last month, her 6-month-old son died under mysterious circumstances while in foster care. "I want some answers from them," a grief-stricken Zinser told the Merced Sun-Star. "They don't have any answers for me." The newspaper reported that Zinsser had been arrested after less than a gram of meth was found in her home. "Child endangerment charges are common when drugs are found around children," the newspaper noted. Something even worse happened to Teresa Lopez, a Utah mother whose infant son Casey was grabbed by child protective services workers after she was accused of being a drug user. While Lopez, who denied using drugs, tried to prove them wrong, the state placed Casey and an older sister in foster care. A few months ago, Lopez got to see 17-month-old Casey for the last time as he was being unplugged from a respirator after being "beaten and shaken into unconsciousness -- and the boy's foster mother was to blame," reported the Salt Lake Tribune Tuesday. Lopez came to the attention of authorities after Casey fell ill a year ago with a lung infection. An anonymous tipster informed social workers that Lopez was a drug addict, and they asked her to pass a drug test. She did and she passed. But a hair test on Casey showed traces of meth, and the child was seized. And now he's dead, and Lopez is worried about the safety of her other child, Caylee, who is still under social services control. "I don't want to be paranoid," she said, "thinking if I do one thing wrong they'll come and take Caylee away." "Psychologists agree -- at least those outside of child protective services -- that the psychological trauma inflicted on a child of toddler or preschool age abruptly torn away from a family is devastating and lasting," wrote Sharon L. Secord, a Michigan-based researcher and writer specializing in issues relating to parenting, family and culture who compiles a list of such incidents. "The damage done to their ability to love and trust may very well affect their ability to create and maintain adult relationships. It may leave them without the tools to parent their own children successfully. Aside from the tremendous psychological and emotional damage inflicted by the unnecessary removal of children -- at any age -- from their families, it is abundantly clear that CPS cannot even assure the physical safety of their client-victims." None of this has stopped the spread of laws aimed at further criminalizing meth users or makers who have children. Such laws have followed the spread of meth from West to East, and beginning with California, are now in effect in states including Colorado, Georgia (which was the only state in the nation to have a child endangerment law until this week, when, propelled by meth fears, it passed), and Minnesota (where a bill making meth cooking with children present a crime passed Wednesday). And more states are headed in the same direction, with either bills pending or DEC-inspired legislation being crafted in Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Washington. April is Child Abuse Prevention Month. Let's all vow to do our best to keep our kids safe from out-of-control tweakers, drug-fightin' cops, and child-grabbing bureaucracies alike. To read the Justice Department's
Office of Justice Policy bulletin on meth and kids, go to:
To read Colorado Drug Endangered
Children, Inc.'s rigorous and cautious look at the dangers of meth labs,
go to:
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