[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 99 (Wednesday, July 20, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8547-S8548]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         METHAMPHETAMINE CRISIS

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, to draw attention to the meth crisis facing 
Oregon and a growing number of States around the country, I stand once 
again on the floor of the Senate introducing two more newspaper 
articles into the Record. Both articles highlight the plight of the 
most vulnerable victims of the meth crisis: America's children.
  As the first piece, ``The Little Round Faces of Meth,'' from The 
Oregonian points out, ``The drug lurks behind nearly all of Oregon's 
most shocking and horrifying cases of child abuse and neglect.''
  The second article, ``A Drug Scourge Creates Its Own Form of Orphan'' 
was printed in the New York Times a little over a week ago. As the 
article explains, ``In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the [foster care] 
system in 2004, up from 4,946 the year before, and officials there say 
the caseload would be half what it is now if the methamphetamine 
problem suddenly went away.''
  The burden that meth is placing on Oregon communities is enormous. 
And we have to do something about it. Because even if we get the 
epidemic under control right now, we are going to be dealing with the 
consequences for years to come. And one of these consequences will be 
taking care of the child victims of meth. As Jay Wurscher, director of 
alcohol and drug services for the children and families division of the 
Oregon Department of Human Services explains in the New York Times 
article, ``In every way, shape and form, this is the worst drug ever 
for child welfare.''
  We cannot afford to wait any longer. Each day we fail to act, another 
child is neglected, abused or even worse--dead--as a result of meth. I 
urge Congress to pass and the President to sign the Combat Meth bill, a 
solid step that will help us fight this terrible drug in Oregon and 
around the country. Among other things, the bill provides $5 million in 
grants to help kids affected by meth.
  Mr. President, I ask for unanimous consent that the full text of The 
Oregonian article and the New York Times article be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   [From The Oregonian, July 9, 2005]

                     The Little Round Faces of Meth

       You will have to imagine the face of a tearful 16-month-boy 
     found toddling alone last Wednesday morning alongside River 
     Road North in Keizer. You usually only see the faces of the 
     child victims of methamphetamine, or learn their names, when 
     they die.
       The familiar faces of meth are the mug shots of the drug 
     users and dealers spilling out of Oregon's jails and prisons. 
     You have seen them so often in newspapers and on television 
     newscasts that they have all but blurred into one gaunt face 
     with hollow eyes, straggly hair, jack-o-lantern smiles.
       But when a toddler winds up standing alone in a T-shirt and 
     soiled diaper along a busy Oregon commuter street, while his 
     parents apparently sleep off another night of drugs, it is 
     time to realize the most awful thing about meth is not the 
     rotten teeth it produces but the rotten parents.
       That little boy in the diaper standing along River Road is 
     among thousands of Oregon children who have suffered neglect 
     and abuse linked to methamphetamine. State authorities say at 
     least half of the investigated cases of abuse and neglect in 
     Oregon trace back to the drug found in the apartment of the 
     little boy's parents, Kurt Michael Quinn, 42, and Ivory 
     Angela Williams, 26. The couple was arrested on multiple 
     charges, including child neglect and possession of a 
     controlled substance.
       Of, course, meth was there. The drug lurks behind nearly 
     all of Oregon's most shocking and horrifying cases of child 
     abuse and neglect:
       The parents who nailed a sheet of plywood over their baby's 
     crib so that he would not escape while they were on a meth 
     high.
       The 10-month-old baby who crawled out of a two-story window 
     and fell to the ground while his mother was strung out on 
     meth.
       The infant who died of an overdose from breast-feeding from 
     a mother addicted to meth.
       There was meth in the family of Ashton Parris, who died at 
     15 months from severe head injuries after the state returned 
     him to his birth mother.
       Jewell Newland was only 3-months-old when her meth-laden 
     father, James Dean Newland, picked her up and then fell on 
     her--with what the police affidavit called a ``whoof.'' Baby 
     Jewell was bleeding from the mouth, but no one took her to 
     the hospital for 14 long hours. She died of her injuries.
       These are the little round faces of meth. They are the 
     faces that demand the additional police, the tougher prison 
     sentences, the expanded drug treatment and the hassle of a 
     few extra minutes at the pharmacy waiting for the cold 
     medicines that drug cookers turn into meth.
       Yet, some still are not enlisted in this fight. Some oppose 
     the tough international restrictions needed to control the 
     ingredients in meth. Others want to weaken restrictions on 
     cold medicines.
       If only they all had a chance to pass River Road the other 
     morning. If only they could see the face of that little boy 
     toddling along in his T-shirt and diaper.
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, July 11, 2005]

             A Drug Scourge Creates Its Own Form of Orphan

                           (By Kate Zernike)

       The Laura Dester Shelter here is licensed for 38 children, 
     but at times in the past months it has housed 90, forcing 
     siblings to double up in cots. It is supposed to be a 24-hour 
     stopping point between troubled homes and foster care, but 
     with foster homes backed up, children are staying weeks and 
     sometimes months, making it more orphanage than shelter, a 
     cacophony of need.
       In a rocking chair, a volunteer uses one arm to feed a 5-
     day-old boy taken from his mother at birth, the other to 
     placate a toddler who is wandering from adult to adult 
     begging, ``Bottle?'' A 3-year-old who arrived at dawn shrieks 
     as salve is rubbed on her to kill the lice.
       This is a problem methamphetamine has made, a scene 
     increasingly familiar across the country as the number of 
     foster children rises rapidly in states hit hard by the drug, 
     the overwhelming number of them, officials say, taken from 
     parents who were using or making methamphetamine.
       Oklahoma last year became the first state to ban over-the-
     counter sales of cold medicines that contain the crucial 
     ingredient needed to make methamphetamine. Even so, the 
     number of foster children in the state is up 16 percent from 
     a year ago. In Kentucky, the numbers are up 12 percent, or 
     753 children, with only seven new homes.
       In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up 
     from 4,946 the year before, and officials there say the 
     caseload would be half what it is now if the methamphetamine 
     problem suddenly went away. In Tennessee, state officials 
     recently began tracking the number of children brought in 
     because of methamphetamine, and it rose to 700 in 2004 from 
     400 in 2003.
       While foster populations in cities rose because of so-
     called crack babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly 
     a rural phenomenon, and it has created virtual orphans in 
     areas without social service networks to support them. In 
     Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here, a group is raising 
     money to convert an old church into a shelter because there 
     are none.
       Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and 
     destructive nature and the way it is often made in the home 
     conspire against child welfare unlike any other drug.
       It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents 
     because the children of methamphetamine arrive with so many 
     behavioral problems; they may not get into their beds at 
     night because they are so used to sleeping on the floor, and 
     they may resist toilet training because they are used to 
     wearing dirty diapers.
       ``We used to think, you give these kids a good home and 
     lots of love and they'll be O.K.,'' said Esther Rider-Salem, 
     the manager of Child Protective Services programs for the 
     State of Oklahoma. ``This goes above and beyond anything 
     we've seen.''
       Although the methamphetamine problem has existed for years, 
     state officials here and elsewhere say the number of foster 
     children created by it has spiked in the last year or two as 
     growing awareness of the drug problem has prompted more lab 
     raids, and more citizens reporting suspected methamphetamine 
     use.
       Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that 
     over the last five years 15,000 children were found at 
     laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number 
     vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, 
     because it does not include children whose parents use 
     methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on 
     state reporting, which can be spotty.
       On July 5, the National Association of Counties reported 
     that 40 percent of child welfare officials surveyed 
     nationwide said that methamphetamine had caused a rise in the 
     number of children removed from homes.
       The percentage was far higher on the West Coast and in 
     rural areas, where the drug has hit the hardest. Seventy-one 
     percent of counties in California, 70 percent in Colorado and 
     69 percent in Minnesota reported an increase in the number of 
     children removed from homes because of methamphetamine.
       In North Dakota, 54 percent of counties reported a 
     methamphetamine-related increase. At what was billed as a 
     ``community meeting on meth'' in Fargo this year, the state 
     attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, exhorted the hundreds of 
     people packed into an auditorium: ``People always ask, what 
     can they do

[[Page S8548]]

     about meth? The most important thing you can do is become a 
     foster parent, because we're just seeing so many kids being 
     taken from these homes. ``
       Officials also say methamphetamine has made it harder to 
     reunite families once the child is taken; 59 percent of those 
     surveyed in the national counties study agreed.
       The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, enacted 
     as babies born to crack users were crowding foster care, 
     requires states to begin terminating parental rights if a 
     child has spent 15 out of 22 months in foster care. It was 
     intended to keep children from languishing in foster homes. 
     But rehabilitation for methamphetamine often takes longer 
     than other drugs, and parents fall behind the clock.
       ``Termination of parental rights almost becomes the regular 
     piece,'' said Jerry Foxhoven, the administrator of the Child 
     Advocacy Board in Iowa. ``We know pretty early that these 
     families are not going to get back together.''
       The drug--smoked, ingested or injected--is synthetic, cheap 
     and easy to make in home labs using pseudoephedrine, the 
     ingredient in many cold medicines, and common fertilizers, 
     solvents or battery acid. The materials are dangerous, and 
     highly explosive.
       ``Meth adds this element of parents who think they are 
     rocket scientists and want to cook these chemicals in the 
     kitchen,'' said Yvonne Glick, a lawyer at the Department of 
     Human Services in Oklahoma who works with the state's 
     alliance for drug endangered children. ``They're on the couch 
     watching their stuff cook, and the kids are on the floor 
     watching them.''
       The drug also produces a tremendous and long-lasting rush, 
     with intense sexual desire. As a result of the sexual binges, 
     some child welfare officials say, methamphetamine users 
     are having more children. More young children are entering 
     the foster system, often as newborns suffering from the 
     effects of their mother's use of the drug.
       Oklahoma was recently chosen to participate in a federally 
     financed study of the effects of methamphetamine on babies 
     born to addicted mothers. Doctors who work with them have 
     already found that the babies are born with trouble suckling 
     or bonding with their parents, who often abuse the children 
     out of frustration.
       But the biggest problem, doctors who work with children 
     say, is not with those born under the effects of the drug but 
     with the children who grow up surrounded by methamphetamine 
     and its attendant problems. Because users are so highly 
     sexualized, the children are often exposed to pornography or 
     sexual abuse, or watch their mothers prostitute themselves, 
     the welfare workers say.
       The drug binges tend to last for days or weeks, and the 
     crash is tremendous, leaving children unwashed and unfed for 
     days as parents fall into a deep sleep.
       ``The oldest kid becomes the parent, and the oldest kid may 
     be 4 or 5 years old,'' said Dr. Mike Stratton, a pediatrician 
     in Muskogee, Okla., who is involved with a state program for 
     children exposed to drugs that is run in conjunction with the 
     Justice Department. ``The parents are basically worthless, 
     when they're not stoned they're sleeping it off, when they're 
     not sleeping they don't eat, and it's not in their regimen to 
     feed the kids.''
       Ms. Glick recalls a group of siblings found eating plaster 
     at a home filled with methamphetamine. The oldest, age 6, was 
     given a hamburger when they arrived at the Laura Dester 
     Shelter; he broke it apart and handed out bits to his 
     siblings before taking a bite himself.
       Jay Wurscher, director of alcohol and drug services for the 
     children and families division of the Oregon Department of 
     Human Services, said, ``In every way, shape and form, this is 
     the worst drug ever for child welfare.''
       Child welfare workers say they used to remove children as a 
     last resort, first trying to help with services in the home.
       But everywhere there are reminders of the dangers of 
     leaving children in homes with methamphetamine. In one recent 
     case here, an 18-month-old child fell onto a heating unit on 
     the floor and died while the parents slept; a 3-year-old 
     sibling had tried to rouse them.
       The police who raid methamphetamine labs say they try to 
     leave the children with relatives, particularly in rural 
     areas, where there are few other options.
       But it has become increasingly clear, they say, that often 
     the relatives, too, are cooking or using methamphetamine. And 
     because the problem has hit areas where there are so few 
     shelters, children are often placed far from their parents. 
     Caseworkers have to drive children long distances to where 
     parents are living or imprisoned for visits; Leslie Beyer, a 
     caseworker at Laura Dester, logged 3,600 miles on her car one 
     month.
       The drain of the cases is forcing foster families to leave 
     the system, or caseworkers to quit. In some counties in 
     Oklahoma, Ms. Rider-Salem said, half the caseworkers now 
     leave within two years.
       After the ban on over-the-counter pseudoephedrine was 
     enacted--a law other states are trying to emulate--the number 
     of children taken out of methamphetamine labs and into the 
     foster care system in Oklahoma declined by about 15 percent, 
     Ms. Glick said. But she said the number of children found not 
     in the labs but with parents who were using the drug had more 
     than compensated for any decline.
       The state's only other children's shelter, in Oklahoma 
     City, was so crowded recently that the fire marshal 
     threatened to shut it down, forcing the state to send 
     children to foster families in far-flung counties.
       At Laura Dester, three new children arrived on one recent 
     morning, the 3-year-old being treated for lice and two 
     siblings, found playing in an abandoned house while their 
     mother was passed out at home. The girl now wanders with a 
     plastic bag over her hair to keep the lice salve from 
     leaking. She hugs her little brother, then grabs a plastic 
     toy phone out of his hand, leaving him wailing.
       ``Who's on the phone?'' asks Kay Saunders, the assistant 
     director at the shelter, gently trying to intervene. ``My 
     mom,'' the girl says, then turns to her little brother. 
     ``It's ringing!''

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