Pubdate: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 Source: Des Moines Register (IA) http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050222/NEWS01/502220393/1001/NEWS Copyright: 2005 The Des Moines Register. Contact: http://desmoinesregister.com/index.html Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/123 Author: Lee Rood Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine) MOM OFFERS SAD 'FACE OF METH' Julie Fatino stood in the back of the news conference Monday at the Des Moines Police Department, clutching two pictures of her dead daughter. One by one, police officers and prosecutors urged Iowa legislators to pass a stronger law to combat methamphetamine manufacturing. Then, when the nearly 30 men clad in dark suits had cleared the room, the mother in the pink trench coat produced her own evidence of meth's horrors. One picture showed a strikingly pretty 12-year-old girl, beaming in a school photo. The second, taken roughly a year later at a Polk County juvenile detention center, was haunting. Angela Fatino appears rail-thin, her long brown hair sheared and dyed. Deep red circles surround her eyes. Her gaze is empty. "I want to make this the face of meth in Iowa," Julie Fatino said. "I want Angie to become the poster child of meth addiction." To Des Moines Police Chief William McCarthy and the many police and prosecutors, Monday's news conference was an opportunity to drive home for state legislators the need to better control sales of cold and allergy medicines used to make meth. For Julie Fatino, it renewed an old hope to bring peace to a memory that will not die. Angela Fatino shot herself to death in October 1997. Not two years after the harrowing photo of her was taken at Meyer Hall, the 15-year-old Des Moines girl put a gun to her head one morning when she was supposed to be in school. A Polk County toxicology report showed the former Dowling Catholic High School and Scavo Alternative School student had methamphetamine in her body at the time. Angela's suicide was preceded by a mix of sad events - her parents' bitter breakup and subsequent custody battles, a string of delinquency and running away, heavy drug use and a sexual assault. Now, however, when Julie Fatino thinks back upon the senselessness of her daughter's death, she believes she knows the reason. "She wasn't just another screwed-up kid in the middle of a custody battle," the mother said. "It was meth." A string of recent reports about meth in The Des Moines Register, Fatino said, reopened deep wounds. Lately, the unemployed woman has found herself traveling to the Statehouse, talking to lawmakers, urging them to keep pseudoephedrine, meth's main ingredient, out of the hands of drugmakers. Lawmakers and others have told Fatino that passage of such a law would not be a silver bullet to the state's meth problem. Even in 1997, when Angela died, a law restricting sales of the decongestant would not have taken the highly addictive drug off Des Moines' streets. "I don't care," Fatino said. "It's a baby step." Fatino said she hoped legislators would look at her daughter's pictures and remember that thousands more families across Iowa have suffered since her daughter died. Removing pseudoephedrine, the decongestant used to make meth, from grocery store shelves is only one part of the answer, she cautioned. State leaders, she said, need to make drug treatment more widely available and to provide more safe, professional treatment for children. "Those pictures are all people need to see," she said. "Back then, I never brought up the meth. I just didn't believe anyone would believe that a child that age could be involved that deeply with that drug. Today, it's everywhere, and it's so severe."