Surge in Meth Use Takes Toll on Rural Children

There was the baby left in the trash bag. The little girl raped after her first birthday. And the tortured 7-month-old, her tiny face pocked by cockroach and rat bites, and her body riddled with bedsores so infected that doctors had to remove part of her leg.

All the incidents happened in the desert. All the parents used meth.

Much like crack cocaine fueled urban violence in the 1980s, methamphetamine is behind a surge in rural child abuse. It has overwhelmed social service and law enforcement agencies already spread thin over vast expanses and unequipped to cope with the problem, experts say.

Social workers, sometimes wearing bulletproof vests, spend their days rescuing children from reeking meth labs and hollow-eyed parents.

California produces 85% of the nation’s methamphetamine. And seven of its counties--Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Butte and Shasta--are targets of state legislation aimed at addressing meth-related child abuse.

The most recent state study found more than 1,200 children in clandestine laboratories around the state in 1999, with Los Angeles County accounting for a quarter of the cases. Children lived in about 20% of the 310 labs uncovered in the county, a proportion that is expected to double when 2000 figures are released. The problem is most severe on the county’s fringes, where treatment centers are scarce, officials say.

“At least with the urban crack epidemic in the ‘80s they developed an infrastructure that responded to it,” said Dr. Alex Stalcup, who runs a federally funded meth research center in Concord, Calif. “Out in rural areas you can go miles before there’s a treatment option of any kind.”

With horrific tales of abuse emerging from wind-blown motels, ranches and mobile home parks, police, nurses and social workers in the Antelope and Yucca valleys say they need help.

That help is in the form of a $10-million bill before the Legislature that would establish a five-year, multi-agency task force to place children exposed to meth in decent homes. Until recently, children found in meth labs and the homes of addicts were placed in the care of relatives or friends of users with little regard to their background.

“We used to call an uncle, aunt, grandpa or friend to collect the child,” said Sgt. Tony Hollins, head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s meth lab section in Lancaster. “What we found, though, is that they were continuing to be a victim. All we’d done was put them back in a worse situation than they were already in.”

Antelope Valley Targeted for Funds

If the bill becomes law, its first disbursement in Los Angeles County would go to the Antelope Valley, officials said.

Jean McCandless, a veteran of the county’s Children and Family Services Department, said the money is long overdue in sparsely populated areas where meth surfaced more than a decade ago.

It was in the mid-’80s when the drug, which can be smoked, injected or swallowed, began creeping into the Antelope Valley from Mexico, she said. The high desert community, where neighbors live far apart, was ideal for meth labs, which emit a vile mix of fecal and ether odors. And as desert dwellers saw how it was easy to produce meth in as little as 24 hours, the drug became a home-grown product.

“It just kind of started slipping in,” McCandless said. “In the mid-’80s or so, we started noticing that suddenly meth was playing a bigger role in cases.”

The cheap stimulant produces a powerful euphoria and sense of acuity that last much longer than cocaine or crack. Because “tweakers” can stay awake for days, meth is popular with truckers, students and the bleary workers who make the long-haul drives to Los Angeles from the desert. From 1985 to 1994, hospital admissions for meth addicts increased by more than 450% across the state.

Despite that surge, there is not a single meth treatment center in the Antelope Valley, said Paul Gaeta, an assistant administrator for Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services. The nearest inpatient program is 20 miles away in Acton.

Janet, 39, who asked that her last name not be published, is receiving treatment for meth use at the Acton clinic.

“I got four kids and meth let me get a lot done,” said Janet, whose deeply lined face makes her appear much older. “At some point, you cross over and you stop getting anything done. You open a drawer to clean and next thing you know you’re picking dirt out of the corners . . .

“You sit in front of a mirror and pick at your face until it’s one giant scab,” she added. “I taught my kids to be self-sufficient at 3 years old and open a can of soup for themselves.”

Meth’s initial high plunges into paranoia and rage, fed by a lack of sleep. Users become single-minded in their need to get more of the drug, losing any ability to empathize, even with their own children. The situation can spiral into grotesque acts of abuse or neglect on children desperately seeking attention.

“You’re basically not a human being anymore,” said Jackie Long, a special agent with the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement in Sacramento. “Up in the Merced area, a long-term user who was not under the influence at the time, took a pitchfork and stabbed his two kids and killed them.”

The Antelope Valley’s wake-up call came in 1991 when five children died in the homes of meth users. Suddenly, caseloads skyrocketed for bewildered social workers, who were not trained to recognize the drug’s signs.

“It totally changed the nature of my job,” said McCandless, a supervisor at the time. “We had to do training for worker safety, so they could at least recognize when people are high. You’re going out there alone and have no clue what you’re walking into.”

Past cases still haunt her. There was the gaunt addict with missing teeth, who had five children by age 23. Her youngest died in a filthy trailer after the mother didn’t take the sick infant to the doctor. A woman who went on a meth binge at a friend’s trailer fell into a coma-like state and suffocated, crushing her infant to death on the couch. One man kept his girlfriend prisoner in the desert, repeatedly raping her and molesting her young daughters.

Violence Is a Side Effect

The explosion of meth in the Antelope Valley was like nothing McCandless had ever seen. She and others who worked in South-Central Los Angeles during the crack epidemic say that in terms of child abuse the drug is worse than cocaine, alcohol or heroin.

Said meth researcher Stalcup, who has seen users strung out for 30 days: “Violence is a built-in side effect. We’ve had alcohol and cannabis problems forever but never had a high-intensity drug that made people nuts and beat up on each other.”

Meth users can quickly become producers, buying most ingredients over the counter, said Kathleen West, a director at the Center for Child Protection in San Diego. One in six meth labs blows up, West and other experts said.

“Mom and dad don’t go to a crack house; they just do it at home,” added West, who also worked in the pediatric department at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center Medical Center during the height of the crack epidemic. “The violence isn’t on the streets. . . . Users beat up their wives and kids, and the violence becomes internalized in small units.”

Addicts can take years to kick the addiction. But state law requires them to get straight in six to 12 months to regain custody of their children. Health-care workers also are concerned that long-term use can permanently damage a person’s ability to care for a child.

Caseworkers have seen baby bottles stored next to poisonous chemicals, infants with meth powder on their clothes and bare feet, children fed the drug to keep them on the same waking cycle as their parents, and addicts as young as 12.

For McCandless, hope lies in the proposed California Drug Endangered Child Protection Act. Based on a pilot program launched in 1997, the bill would expand the area covered by task forces that respond to methamphetamine-related problems.

The program created teams of on-call sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors and children’s services workers who rush to lab sites to rescue youngsters. One team was centered in the “meth triangle” where Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties meet.

Program to Aid Children Lacks Funds

Before the program began, children who were found in squalid homes filled with the toxic makings of meth, syringes and loaded guns were not always considered victims. Social workers were later trained to handle children dusted in the drug as well as to recognize the signs of a lab: a Draino container, emptied foil sleeves of Actifed or Sudafed, denatured alcohol and beakers.

“What I’d see would make me want to get home as quickly as possible and hug my kids,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. John Allen Ramseyer, who was instrumental in bringing the task force to Los Angeles. “In a sentence, what this program does is save children’s lives.”

During the program’s 2 1/2-year run, 1,052 children were found living in meth labs in the seven counties targeted by the program. After the program ran out of funds in September, Gov. Gray Davis vetoed a bill that would have provided more money, saying he wanted an evaluation of the task force’s performance. The new bill is accompanied by a study, but supporters worry it will also be vetoed because of budget tightening caused by the energy crisis.

“We went through our period of crack babies and we’ve seen what happened to those little infants with learning disabilities and education problems,” said Gaeta, of county children’s services. “These children are going to be a real drain on the educational system, health-care and child-care system. We don’t know what’s going to happen with these meth babies . . .”

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Methamphetamine Labs

In 1999, more meth labs were seized in California than in any other state. During those seizures, children were present 20% of the time. The percentage is expected to double the next year.

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Source: Govenor’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning

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National Portrait

The total number of methamphetamine-related labs seized in 1999:

Source: California Department of Justice

Compiled by NOAKI SCHWARTZ/Los Angeles Times