Pubdate: Mon, 11 Jul 2005
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: National Desk, Pg A1, Column 2
Copyright: 2005 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Kate Zernike
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

A DRUG SCOURGE CREATES ITS OWN FORM OF ORPHAN

TULSA, Okla -- 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 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.
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