Pubdate: Thu, 24 Nov 2005
Source: Phoenix New Times (AZ)
Contact:  2005 New Times, Inc.
Website: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/640
Author: Robert Nelson
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/women.htm (Women)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

ICE, ICE, BABY

Arizona Moms Are Abusing Meth More Than Any Other Drug. Want to Get 
Them Clean, Save the Family and Save Tax Dollars Try Dangling Their 
Kids As the Carrot

Maggie Voss cried as her 7-year-old son, Ryan, received a Student of 
the Month award from his school's principal recently. The weeping was 
a little weird, but the other parents didn't seem to notice. Some 
suburban moms tend to overreact to their babies' accomplishments. 
That's a given. It's better than the alternative.

The reason Maggie Voss was crying, though, was precisely because she 
used to be the alternative; the scourge, the blight, the problem, the 
drain on our resources, the decay of our society.

Think crank whore, and Voss was it.

A pistol-packin', trash-mouthed meth mama who kept getting knocked up 
by the next guy who knocked her around. Three dads, four kids, even 
more felonies. (See "Meth and Sex" 
(http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2005-11-24/news/feature2.html) 
about the relationship between meth addiction and sex addiction.) In 
most people's eyes, she was hopeless, irredeemable, evil.

And that kid up at the podium? He's a "meth baby," the modern 
equivalent of the dreaded "crack baby," born to a meth-addicted 
mother, stigmatized by our culture at birth as messed up, hopeless, 
sure to be a lifelong drain on the public coffers.

But the truth is, Maggie and Ryan are living proof that 
methamphetamine addiction can be overcome. They also prove that 
meth-addicted moms can be good moms again, that kids are more 
resilient than we think, and that kids, in general, are better off 
with mom than with a foster mom.

And much better off with mom than with an institution acting as mom.

Right now, though, some Arizona policymakers are working in the 
opposite direction. Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas is working 
with legislators to craft a bill to give mandatory minimums and 
lengthen prison time for mothers who use meth while pregnant. 
Governor Janet Napolitano's well-meaning and often successful 
"Protect Children First" mandate to Child Protective Services workers 
is succeeding at getting children out of dangerous situations, but 
doing far less to help remove the drug problem from the home torn 
apart by drugs.

Essentially, the program Napolitano started as attorney general in 
1999, the Arizona Drug Endangered Children program, has done well at 
getting drug-abusing parents and their children into the system. It's 
just not doing a very good job of getting them out.

At the same time, the state Attorney General's Office, as well as 
certain Valley governments, including Phoenix's, are releasing 
sometimes erroneous and sensationalized information regarding the 
effects of methamphetamine on the children of meth-addicted mothers 
or meth households. It is, many health officials say, a replay of the 
"crack-baby scare," the politically motivated, short-on-science 
hysteria of the late 1980s and early 1990s that damaged the lives of 
children much more than the crack cocaine ingested by their mothers.

The stakes of bad meth policy are extremely high for Arizona.

According to a February 2005 report, methamphetamine is the most 
common drug abused by individuals entering the Arizona Families 
F.I.R.S.T. program, the five-year-old state-run program for 
substance-abusing families entering the child welfare system.

Of the 1,763 individuals referred to the program, 40 percent reported 
methamphetamine use, beating out pot (26 percent), cocaine (13 
percent), and even alcohol (32 percent) for the most-abused drug.

These are stunning numbers that suggest methamphetamine is hitting 
Arizona like no other state in the country.

Consider these national statistics: According to a report by the U.S. 
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, meth was 
the drug of choice for 7 percent of those who sought treatment, while 
alcohol abusers made up 42 percent, marijuana users 16 percent, and 
cocaine abusers 14 percent.

The problem, experts say: Only 10 percent of those parents with drug 
problems in Arizona were given residential drug treatment. And of 
those, fewer than 1 percent received residential drug treatment in 
which they had full access to their children.

In the case of methamphetamine -- arguably the toughest addition to 
kick -- research shows that mothers placed in long-term residential 
treatment along with their young child or children have the highest 
rate of recovery.

Under intense and often yearlong supervision, often with the threat 
of serious prison time hanging over them, mothers learn to be, and 
learn to take pride in being, sober and responsible parents again.

Look at Maggie Voss.

Voss is clean, seven years now. She owns her home, has a good job, 
has all four kids living with her. The kids are successful. And from 
all appearances, they're happy as hell and getting along great.

Voss got clean in a Salvation Army long-term residential care 
facility, where her children could be with her during treatment. The 
treatment center has since been shut down for lack of funds.

Voss went through what national experts say is the rehabilitation 
protocol most likely to be successful.

Right now, there is only one such program operating in the Valley of 
the Sun for indigent meth-addicted mothers, with a total of 24 beds.

One Phoenix Rescue Mission official estimated that those 24 beds are 
all that exists for an estimated 10,000 Arizona women with children 
who could benefit from such a program.

Under current policies, and even under proposed new ones, Voss likely 
would have gone to prison for years, and her ties with her children 
would have been severed.

One more prison inmate to pay for in a critically bloated prison 
system. Four more kids to support in a critically bloated foster-care 
system. Research suggests that when Voss would have gotten out, she 
quickly would have used again. (Why not? What would she have had to 
live for?) Research also suggests that her children would languish in 
foster or institutional care, likely ending up in the same life cycle 
as their mother.

A California study posited that it costs seven times more to imprison 
a mother and take away her kids than it does to break her of her 
addiction with long-term residential treatment.

And to be blunt, that cost just spirals over generations. Because 
drug moms may be really bad mothers, but they are really good at 
making more babies.

This, then, is a cycle begat by strictly punitive measures based on 
politics and bad science.

"People like me are really tough for a community," Voss admits. 
"Hell, they had every right to throw me in prison and take away my 
kids. I was a disaster.

"But I was incredibly lucky to be given a real shot at recovery and 
redemption. That's rare here, trust me. But the payoff is huge. There 
are thousands more out there like me. What's the potential savings there?

"For me, what was saved was my life. For my kids, their mother and 
their home were saved."

- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to the Arizona Attorney General's Office, 362 Arizona 
children have been "rescued from meth labs" in the past four years.

Of the meth-lab busts in Arizona since 2000, children were present in 
about a third of the cases.

Since 2000, 218 children have been taken into temporary custody by 
Child Protective Services at the scenes of meth-related busts.

To be sure, there are real horror stories.
Earlier this year, the Phoenix Police Department busted a house with 
a meth lab in which the air was so toxic it took six hours of airing 
the place out to make it safe enough for investigators to enter 
without oxygen tanks. Living in the house was an 18-month-old baby, 
who now lives with relatives in another state.

Last year, Phoenix police had trouble entering a meth-lab home 
because a mountain of trash blocked the door. Inside, they found 
seven years' worth of garbage. The home had no electricity or water; 
the owner was stealing water from a neighbor's garden hose.

Two children lived in the house. Their father had set up a mattress 
in front of the television set in the living room. The kids slept and 
ate and spent their days on that mattress. They only left the 
mattress to urinate in bottles and defecate in buckets that were 
strewn throughout the house.

Since 2000, two children have died in the Valley from ingesting waste 
from the meth labs their parents operated.

Nobody is saying mixing methamphetamine and children isn't a 
degrading, dangerous and sometimes lethal combination.

What is wrong, many drug-addiction researchers and treatment experts 
say, is that police, prosecutors and political leaders often use 
horror stories to make sweeping arguments that parents must be dealt 
with punitively, which lands their kids in foster care.

Attorney General Terry Goddard, in the "Methamphetamine Fact Sheet" 
on his office's Web site, lists "facts" that many researchers argue 
are not facts at all.

For example, the AG states: "Prenatal exposure to meth causes infants 
to be six times more likely to be born with birth defects such as 
spina bifida, club foot, intestinal abnormalities and skeletal abnormalities."

Also: "Children found in meth labs often suffer from developmental 
delays and have likely been abused or neglected."

That line is followed with: "Justice Department statistics show that 
neglected or abused children are 50 percent more likely to be 
arrested as juveniles, 40 percent more likely to be arrested for a 
violent crime as adults and 33 percent more likely to be substance abusers."

Ergo, meth-exposed kids can end up as drug-addicted criminals who 
resemble the Elephant Man.

"That stuff about the children being more likely to have defects is 
just absolutely not true," Dr. Barry Lester, probably the nation's 
leading researcher on the effects of meth and crack cocaine on 
children, tells New Times. "That statement comes from some early, 
early research done on animals. Nothing in any human tests shows 
anything like that."

And the attorney general's other claims?

"There are no published studies of children in meth-lab homes," he 
says. "The jump from meth to general research on abuse and neglect? 
None of that is valid.

"It's just like what we saw in the 1980s with crack cocaine," he 
says. "It's not science. It's politics."

Lester, the director of Brown University's Center for the Study of 
Children at Risk, who heads a massive National Institute of Health 
study on drug-addicted parents and children, knows the science better 
than anyone.

In the course of his research, though, he's also had to learn the 
politics of addiction, of which there are two basic camps.

The liberal persuasion looks at drug use as a public-health problem 
requiring compassion and understanding. From this perspective, he 
says, drug use during pregnancy, or in the presence of young 
children, must be treated in the same manner as depression or mental illness.

The conservative view of drug use during pregnancy is that the mother 
is committing a voluntary and illegal act against the rights of the 
fetus. From this view, women who use drugs when pregnant are 
willfully hurting their children, a crime that deserves significant 
punishment. The same goes for a parent who uses or manufactures the 
drug in the presence of their children.

Throughout history, American voters have generally liked the idea of 
punishing drug users better than the idea of treating them.

And to be honest, punishment is just about as effective at changing 
behavior as the average short-term outpatient treatment program.

The problem is, in meth-afflicted families, punishment of the parents 
usually ends up punishing the children while doing nothing to solve 
the core problem.

Especially damaging was the political response in the late 1980s to 
the rise in the use of crack cocaine, particularly among women with children.

"So many lives were ruined during that time based on bad science or 
no science," Lester says. "We can't let that repeat itself with the 
response to methamphetamine."

Lester conducted the nation's most comprehensive long-term study on 
the effects of crack cocaine on mothers and their children.

"For cocaine, we now know that early scientific reports were 
exaggerated and portrayed children who were exposed to cocaine in 
utero as irreparably doomed and damaged."

In fact, Lester's research showed that crack-cocaine-exposed children 
did have deficits in intelligence and language skills, but those 
deficits were minor and often easily overcome in special-educational 
settings. Also, crack-exposed children did show increased difficulty 
paying attention and handling abstract thinking problems. Again, 
though, the problems were minor and conquerable.

They were nothing close to problems experienced by children with 
fetal alcohol syndrome.

In addition, University of Florida researchers studied two groups of 
infants born with cocaine in their systems. One group was placed in 
foster care, the other with birth mothers able to care for them. 
After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures 
of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.

Consistently, the children placed with their birth mothers did better.

"For the foster children, being taken from their mothers was more 
toxic than the cocaine," says Richard Wexler, executive director of 
the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

But that was exactly what most policymakers in the 1980s and early 
1990s wanted to do: Immediately separate mother from child. Also, 
throughout the crack scare, increasingly popular across the country 
were laws greatly increasing prison time for crack-addicted mothers.

At the same time, Lester says, children exposed to crack as babies 
were stigmatized within the educational system. Often, these children 
were "expected to fail," he says, "and when you're expected to fail, 
you usually do."

While everyone focused on crack cocaine, Lester says, they ignored 
the reality of the average substance-abusing household. Typically, in 
such a family setting, more than one drug was getting abused. And 
beyond those drugs, there were often myriad other forms of neglect 
and abuse coming from directions other than the crack-addicted mother.

Now, Lester says he is seeing the same sort of political storm 
brewing around methamphetamine, creating the same sort of erroneous 
information and damaging legislation.

And so far, Lester's research on in utero methamphetamine use shows 
it has nearly identical long-term effects as its first cousin, crack cocaine.

"If the meth effect is anything like the cocaine effect, which in the 
early stages it appears to be, it is mild and treatable," Lester 
says. "I just don't want us to make the same mistake with meth that 
we made with crack."

Which is why Lester and 90 other physicians, scientists and treatment 
experts released a statement in July imploring the nation's 
policymakers to address the methamphetamine problem with great care.

"We are concerned that policies based on false assumptions will 
result in punitive civil and child-welfare interventions that are 
harmful to women, children and families," the group's statement read.

The physicians called for policymakers to base their decisions on 
"the best research" and to focus on promoting the proven solutions -- 
"ongoing research and improvement and provision of treatment services."

Whether that will happen -- especially in regions of the country like 
Arizona, where law-and-order demagoguery wins elections -- is anyone's guess.

"You get these 'tough-on-crime' guys who have no idea how to actually 
be tough on crime," Lester says. "What they end up doing is just 
ruining lives and perpetuating crime over generations."

- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Detective Tim Ahumada is tough on crime. Has been for a quarter of a century.

He's still working on being smarter on crime, though. That is a 
lifelong process. And that is the only way you ever win any ground in 
the drug war.

"I know we need to do something more as a community, but I'm still 
not exactly sure what it is," admits Ahumada, who works with the 
Phoenix Police Department's Crimes Against Children Detail, a job 
that increasingly takes him into the homes of meth abusers with young children.

"As a police officer, I'm the intervention. I'm the quick fix. But 
I'm not the answer."

Ahumada, like a lot of veteran cops in the drug wars, is a dichotomy 
of hope and cynicism. He doesn't see that his 25 years have put a 
dent in drug use. In fact, he has plugged away as a new and bigger 
scourge has grown exponentially around him.

"Meth is the worst drug I've seen on the family." he says. "If you're 
on it, all you want is the drug -- period. The idea of taking care of 
kids goes right out the window."

He has charged into the worst of houses, babies lying in days' worth 
of their own feces next to explosive meth-lab chemicals, 5-year-olds 
running households because mom has been in bed for three days. In a 
recent home, the child's main chore was to get the meth pipes for the adults.

And Ahumada doesn't mind stacking charges on parents. In the chain of 
law enforcement, judicial and health-care officials involved in the 
attorney general's Drug Endangered Children program, it is his job to 
give those down the road in the system the biggest stick possible.

So he's tough on crime.

But his great hope, he says, is that the case he builds on parents 
ultimately leads to the rebuilding of that family. No doubt, some of 
the people he busts are just plain scumbags. But very often, he says, 
he finds hope for the future in the oddest places.

For example, he often comes across parents who say they only smoke 
meth once their kids are in bed. One dad would only cook when his 
children were at school. If they came home and the batch wasn't 
cooked, "mom would take the kids to the mall."

Maggie Voss insists she never let her kids go into the room in which 
"the hard-core users" were shooting meth into their veins.

While it's true, Ahumada says, "that tweakers don't parent their kids 
at all, it's also true that many of these people, if you can get the 
drug out of the house, have a good chance at rebuilding the home."

"This may sound weird, but I can often see the parenting values still 
there buried under the horrors of the addiction," he says. "What that 
is is a glimmer of hope. If we can do the job right after I'm done, 
there's a chance I won't have to come back."

And the children?

Yes, there's damage, but kids are also resilient, and "in some cases, 
they've learned to take care of themselves in ways most kids of today 
can't even imagine," he says. "If you can just get the drug out of 
the family setting, there's hope. And in many cases I've seen, 
there's plenty of hope not just that these kids can get by, but that 
they can thrive."

What that means for a community, Ahumada says, is providing the 
proper carrot to go along with the stick provided by police.

- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was 7 a.m., and here was this rough-looking guy cruising around on 
a motorcycle with a rough-looking woman hanging on. You can see why 
the cop pulled over Maggie Voss and her boyfriend. They screamed 
methamphetamine.

When the cop ran Maggie's name through the system, it came back that 
she had an outstanding warrant for failure to appear.

Well, of course she didn't get to court that day. Her previous 
boyfriend had locked her up in a bedroom of his house. He boarded the 
door and told Maggie that if she and her daughter tried to leave, he 
would kill them.

But she did leave. And the guy did stalk her. And then she found this 
new guy. And he was pretty nice to her, and he did not lock her up 
for days on end and did not beat her and threaten to kill her every day.

"You know, he didn't pulverize me," Voss says. "So I was hooked."

Unbeknown to her, in her belly that morning was her fourth child by 
the third different guy.

Her other three kids were with her parents and sister.

She had taken them to her sister's years before. Voss told her sister 
she was hard up for money and needed a few weeks to get back on her feet.

The weeks turned to months, the months to years, and pretty soon, her 
sister and other family members stopped bringing the kids by for visits.

Her family wasn't exactly sure what was happening -- they did not 
know about meth. Voss had been raised in a healthy, happy home -- "no 
cycle perpetuating itself there," she says. "But that meant they 
weren't exactly sure what I was up to. They just knew it was bad."

Throughout the late 1990s, she bounced from meth house to meth house. 
Back then, it was pretty much only a white-trash drug, lots of biker 
dudes, lots of tattoos, a few Aryan Brotherhood members.

In time, Voss was dealing. At first she was bad at it. Her volume was 
not only too low to support her habit, but she lost her house and 
everything else.

So she took her kids to her sister's and moved in with a new guy. She 
started dealing more and getting ripped off less. She always carried 
a pistol and was known around town as a ferocious bitch to cross.

"If you met me then," she says in the cafeteria of the hospital where 
she now works as an administrator, "you would not have seen hope. You 
would have wanted to put me away for life."

But the judge in her case, with the help of her family, did see hope. 
He gave her a choice -- long-term residential treatment that she had 
to complete successfully, or prison. If she succeeded at treatment, 
she could be reunited with her children. If not, they were gone.

A giant stick. A giant carrot.

She went into the Harbor Light program of the Salvation Army, a 
yearlong inpatient drug treatment program that most closely modeled 
what national meth-abuse experts say is the most effective treatment 
protocol for meth-addicted parents.

Voss was one of the last to graduate from the program, which -- as is 
common with treatment programs in Arizona -- was shut down in 2000 
because of lack of funding.

Also, when her baby was born, she was allowed to keep the infant with 
her at Harbor Light. The center had its own child-care facility.

It takes months for meth to clear the system and for brain chemicals 
to begin flowing normally again. During the first stages of 
withdrawal, addicts are alternately lethargic and jittery, their 
brains craving the drug that, as addiction set in, provided equilibrium.

After a few months, Voss began learning how to function in the real 
world again. The whole time, too, she was learning to mother again.

Any time she considered getting high, she had to consider losing the 
baby in her arms.

"You don't know how powerful a deterrent that is until you've been 
there," she says. "It's hell fighting this addiction. But it was 
worth it because I could see the rewards. These beautiful children. I 
had to be there for them."

Once the overwhelming mothering instinct could again be discerned, 
meth addiction was beatable.

After 12 months essentially locked up at the Salvation Army, Voss 
began her return to society. But again, as the top research shows, 
this foray into the real world needs to be supervised. Voss was in a 
halfway-house setting, with constant counseling at hand, for six more months.

The trick here, treatment experts say, is to help the recovering 
addict build new friendships and life patterns free of chemicals.

Voss began working again. In time, her older children returned to 
her. She cleaned up her credit. She bought a car, she bought a house.

Now it's Voss and her four kids taking on the world.

She has her two oldest boys, Brandon, who has graduated high school, 
and Donnie, who is excelling in high school, both of whom spent much 
of their childhood living with Maggie's sister.

She has Megan, who is a star student despite spending her early years 
catering to Maggie's drug friends, and later, running for her life 
from her mother's violent boyfriend.

And, of course, Ryan, conceived in a meth haze but born drug-free, a 
born leader at school who has only known his mother as the rock of the family.

"We're a team," she says. "I'm so proud of them, it's crazy. And 
we're proof that it can be done and that a little extra work from the 
community is worth it.

"What scares me is the thought of how many women there are who won't 
get the kind of help I got," she says. "What, thousands of mothers, 
thousands of children? They can be saved. The community just has to 
come together to do it the right way."

- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

In their February assessment of Arizona Families F.I.R.S.T., the 
statewide program for families entering the child-welfare system with 
substance-abuse problems, University of Arizona researchers made 
several recommendations for making the program more effective.

They were heartened by the fact that 48 percent of the parents 
entering the program received at least six months of treatment, 
mostly on an outpatient basis, an improvement over past years.

"The patterns are promising," researchers said, "given that research 
on substance-abuse treatment emphasizes that the longer a client 
remains in treatment, the more likely it is that treatment will 
result in long-term behavior change."

But that six months of outpatient care is far from reaching a 
standard of treatment proven effective in households in which meth 
has taken hold.

In 2004, Dr. Lester's team at Brown finished the most comprehensive 
analysis yet of drug treatment programs for pregnant women and women 
with children.

Their first discovery: that women are underserved by treatment 
programs compared to men, and that pregnant women are grossly underserved.

They also discovered that scarcely little analysis has been done of 
the effectiveness of the treatment programs that do exist.

That said, though, in limited studies of comprehensive female 
treatment programs in Hawaii and Los Angeles, it became clear that 
inpatient programs that allowed mothers to remain in contact with 
their children provided the greatest chances for success.

"Mothers admitted to the programs with their children had better 
treatment retention and higher rates of successful treatment 
completion than women admitted without their children," Lester wrote.

"The authors also suggest that the inclusion of children could 
strengthen mother self-esteem and mother-child bonds while also 
improving post-treatment outcomes."

And, he wrote, "results suggest that an intensive day treatment model 
is more effective than a standard outpatient treatment model for a 
variety of reasons."

Some other findings:

The more intense the penalties for drug-addicted mothers, the less 
likely they are to enter themselves into intensive treatment for fear 
of losing their children.

It is imperative that programs are modeled specifically to meet the 
needs of females, and especially, females with babies or young children.

That the best programs offer comprehensive care in one location -- 
"one-stop shopping," as Lester called it. This, research shows, 
allows mothers to develop a relationship with a consistent team of 
providers, which has shown to reduce dropout rates.

Offering parenting classes is a must.

Family members should be included in treatment whenever possible.

"Most professionals agree that a comprehensive program is best for 
mothers," Lester wrote. "Services should be family-centered, 
community-based, multi-disciplinary, individually tailored and 
promote competency of the individual."

Again, while Arizona has succeeded at creating a multi-disciplinary, 
cross-jurisdictional approach to getting drug-addicted parents into 
the system and drug-affected children to safety, the state's leaders 
have generally failed at building the infrastructure needed to get 
the drug out of the household and get the family functioning again.

"I'm definitely the exception right now," Maggie Voss says. "The vast 
majority of women in Arizona aren't given a realistic shot at 
recovering from this drug."

- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is hard to argue against Governor Napolitano's "children first" 
mandate to the child-welfare system. The basic idea: Get children 
away from dangerous situations.

The mandate was a response to a sickening litany of stories about 
children who had been returned by CPS to dysfunctional homes and 
later died at the hands of their abusers.

"It was the right thing to do," says Jeff Taylor, a counselor and 
program advocate for the Phoenix Rescue Mission. "But there is 
fallout. It's a policy that goes against the ideas that work best in 
treating mothers and reuniting families once the drugs are gone."

Taylor came over to the Phoenix Rescue Mission when the Harbor Light 
program was shut down at the Salvation Army. The closing of Harbor 
Light, Taylor and several other counselors say, was a sad day for Arizona.

"It just plain worked," he says. "It breaks my heart to think how 
many mothers have been denied the help they need since it closed."

The only statistics regarding the Harbor Light program are by no 
means of scientific quality. But they are intriguing.

In the last three years of the program, when Harbor Light offered 
full-time child care and full-scale residential treatment for 
pregnant meth-addicted mothers, 27 of the 28 women who came into the 
program pregnant delivered a drug-free baby.

Also, 60 percent of mothers who went through the intensive yearlong 
program returned two years later for an annual reunion picnic held 
for patients.

"Nothing scientific," Taylor says, "but you don't come back and 
celebrate with your counselors if you're actively using. You just stay away."

Compared with all men or women with or without children who went 
through the program, the mothers had the highest return rate at the 
reunions, he says.

Taylor also ran the Harbor Light child-care facility. There, he says, 
he saw as much hope as in the treatment facility for mothers.

"I don't know where this idea of 'meth kids' comes from," he says. 
"These kids were bright, engaged, full of love. The child with real 
emotional or developmental problems was very much the exception."

Once Harbor Light closed, Taylor says, only one program remained in 
the Valley for long-term residential treatment for indigent mothers 
in which their children can stay at the facility with them. That 
program, run by the Center for Hope, has 24 beds available.

"We know there are thousands of mothers out there addicted to meth," 
Taylor says. "So right now, we're giving about one-tenth of 1 percent 
the kind of treatment known to work. That's not good at all."

The Phoenix Rescue Mission is in the planning stages of a new 
facility for residential treatment of drug-addicted mothers, he says.

When that's completed, perhaps 100 women per year will have a shot at 
the kind of treatment that gave Maggie Voss and her four children 
their lives back.

Taylor and other advocates around the state will be asking the 
governor and legislators to work toward expanding these sorts of 
treatment programs for drug-addicted parents.

"Right now, the direction has been away from getting treatment for 
the family," Taylor says. "The governor was right to run with the 
idea of a child's safety first. But now, we need to look at the idea 
of putting foster care at the end of the line. If the parents fail, 
then it's foster care. If they succeed, the family is saved."

Support for this sort of reform isn't just coming from the experts in 
treatment. It's also coming from the experts in incarceration.

"We're still falling short on the treatment end," says Phoenix police 
Detective Ahumada. "Everything we do is a waste if the cycle 
continues. I know we can do better. And considering how important 
this is to so many lives, we absolutely must do better."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake