Children suffer from
parental meth addiction

updated 1:25 p.m. ET March 30, 2005

OTTUMWA, Iowa - Jittery babies, mistreated toddlers, strung-out mothers: Cheryll Jones’ pediatric nursing practice is far from what it was when she started out 30 years ago — long before methamphetamine invaded this riverside Corn Belt town.

“If anybody told me my primary caseload would be kids exposed to illicit drugs, I’d have said they were crazy,” said Jones, who now runs a local task force helping the most helpless victims of the nation’s meth epidemic — small children whose parents make and use the highly addictive drug.

The scars are inflicted in myriad ways: Exposure to the drug in the womb, contamination from toxic chemicals used in home-based meth manufacture, explosions and fires, long-term neglect from parents obsessed with their drug habits, physical abuse and sexual abuse. Many of the meth-lab homes are filthy, often strewn with drug paraphernalia and pornography; meth-making chemicals have been found in diaper bags and toy chests.

“I’ve been in homes where you’d find jars of meth oil in the refrigerator, but no milk, no bread for the kids,” said Marvin Van Haaften, a former country sheriff who is now Iowa’s drug policy coordinator.

The meth epidemic took root on the West Coast, and is now worsening in many big cities nationwide. But nowhere is its heartbreaking toll on young children more evident than in the towns and small cities of America’s heartland — notably Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Indiana.

Nationally, authorities have dismantled more than 50,000 clandestine meth labs since 2001, including some 4,000 in Iowa. Roughly 30 percent were “mom and pop” labs in homes where children live.

Long-lasting problems
Thousands of children across the country have been taken away from their meth-abusing parents in recent years, placed with relatives or shifted into already overloaded foster care systems. Scores have been injured, a dozen or more killed; thousands have been born with traces of meth in their bodies.

Dr. Rizwan Shah, a pediatrician at Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines, encountered her first meth-exposed child in 1993 and has studied more than 500 of them since, becoming a respected expert on the phenomenon.

She stresses that the prognosis for meth-exposed kids varies widely, and strives to prevent them from being stereotyped. Some suffer serious brain damage and others experience long-lasting development problems, while many will grow into adults without serious health consequences, she said.

But what’s beyond doubt, Shah says, is that pregnant women using meth are harming their babies.

“The brain gets hijacked by the drug,” she said, describing patterns of overstimulation and disrupted sleep cycles among infants, as well as hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder among meth-exposed school children.

One 2-year-old boy Shah treats must be fed through a tube to his stomach because meth exposure left him unable to swallow properly.

The mothers Shah meets often evoke meth’s powerful lure — an initial burst of energy, a sudden and welcome ability to lose weight.

“Some of these women are trying to be good mothers,” she added. “But when you’re high on meth, you don’t take of yourself or your family. The older kids are parenting the younger ones and also parenting the parent. They lose their childhood to become caretakers.”

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