[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!''
____________________