Toxic brew: UM researcher unlocks harm done to children from poisons in meth
By TRISTAN SCOTT of the Missoulian
 |
Sandra Wells, a post-doctorate fellow at the
University of
Montana, holds the remains of smoked methamphetamine used in her
research on the effects of a meth-saturated environment on laboratory
mice. Wells' research is intended to help determine the health dangers
children might face as a result of exposure to meth. Photo by LINDA THOMPSON/Missoulian |
The
dope is cooked over a backpacking stove instead of on a putrid hot
plate, and the woman in a white lab coat and latex gloves is a
post-doctorate fellow, not a seedy drug manufacturer.
Her
office
is neither a converted motor home nor a backwoods trailer, but a
chemistry lab at the University of Montana, where batches of acrid
chemicals are stored neatly on steel shelving units or in lockers,
rather than on a living room floor amid a young child's play toys.
Even in its infancy, Wells' research is the only study of its kind to try and identify the health effects related to meth exposure, positioning UM as a national leader.
Already, her activism and involvement with the Montana Alliance for Drug Endangered Children, an offshoot of the federal program established to protect children who've been exposed to methamphetamine, has led to proposed legislation seeking to expand the offense of child endangerment in Montana. Passage of the bill would make exposing children to meth a felony under any circumstance, even if they weren't present at the time of a bust.
“The fact that there is no good data out there, nothing to record any of the dangers these children are facing, that's concerning,” Wells said. “We should be able to tell (state officials) with certainty what constitutes child endangerment.”
To be fair, Montana lawmakers have taken steps to create an increasingly unfriendly environment for meth cooks and distributors, but there is no concrete evidence to show how children are being impaired, or even if there are long-term health effects associated with exposure to methamphetamine.
Not surprisingly, horrifying bits of anecdotal information abound as social workers, law enforcement officials and pediatricians come into contact with a steady stream of children who have been exposed to meth, pulling them from squalid homes and placing them into protective custody. Matted or missing hair, dental decay, dirty diapers, lice, rashes, scabies, signs of neglect, sexualized behavior are all standard fare.
But there are no data to show that a child will experience long-term lung problems, like asthma or pulmonary fibrosis, if he or she lives at a residence where meth is cooked, Wells said.
“It's not like secondhand cigarette smoke where we know for a fact that exposure is harmful,” Wells said. “We treat meth as though it's radioactive, but in fact it's been approved for medicinal use at lower levels. I expect there probably is a safe level of exposure to meth, we're just not sure what it is.”
And that's the trouble. Without sound data, it's impossible to convey with any measure of certainty just how endangered these children have become, or how urgent their care should be.
Certainly, lawmakers recognize the obvious dangers associated with raising a child in an environment where meth is used and manufactured. Fires and explosions are a constant hazard, as are the presence of firearms, booby traps and toxic chemicals.
Inhaling or ingesting contaminated foods can result in death, and chemical burns can permanently disfigure. Physical and sexual abuse are all too common in families where meth is present, as is the overwhelming presence of pornography, though neglect is most predominant.
A 2005 state statute created stiffer penalties for anyone convicted of selling drugs near a school, while other changes in Montana law have allowed harsher sentences for people who operate an illegal drug lab in the presence of someone under the age of 18.
The new laws doubled the maximum prison sentence for criminal distribution from 25 years up to 50 years. But there's little protocol for how to treat drug-endangered children, or even where they stand as a priority in the struggle against methamphetamine.
“As we understand more about the health effects, we can serve as a guide to legislators and prosecutors,” Wells said.
But Wells is also confident the research will raise awareness of the problem's significance, and reconstruct protocol for health professionals, law enforcement and social workers.
“For example, if law enforcement officers go into a drug bust where a child is present, they previously didn't think about whether that child is a victim in a dangerous environment,” said Wells. “I think that paradigm is really shifting.”
Helena police officer Craig Campbell spent seven years as a narcotics officer, and has been training law enforcement and first responders through Montana's Alliance for Drug Endangered Children since its inception two years ago.
Campbell recalls raiding a meth lab in Helena just a few days after Christmas in 2004. Inside the residence, he found two children lying sick in their beds, less than 20 feet from where their parents had been cooking and storing batches of methamphetamine. Each child had a bottle of Kaopectate and a vomit bucket beside them.
“Even the family pet was dying,” Campbell said. “While processing these crime scenes, it struck us that we're wearing protective clothing and the children are not. And while we're there just long enough to process the crime scene and collect the evidence, in some cases they've been living in that situation for years.”
Based on these observations, the protocol for narcotics officers and first responders began to change, priorities were reshuffled and emphasis was shifted. It suddenly became less important for an officer to build an expansive, cartel-toppling case, putting as many dealers and manufacturers behind bars as possible, and increasingly urgent to remove drug-endangered children from the homes.
“We don't just look at building cases against adults suspected of manufacturing or distributing anymore,” Campbell said. “Now we're also trying to prove and gather evidence for the crime of child endangerment.”
“We're terminating cases and raiding labs earlier than we normally would have,” he said. “As soon as we learn that a child is present, it becomes a priority to gain access and get them out of that environment. We don't wait for the distributor to make another purchase or possibly identify a higher-up. We just get the child out of that situation.”
Campbell said changes started to occur once law enforcement began collaborating with other disciplines, like social workers, school resource officers and educators. By collaborating with a network of professionals, a strategy previously met with resistance from Montana's law enforcement, narcotics officers expanded their sources of information.
“By collaborating, we could speak with people who might have information that a child is having a difficult time at home, or coming to school smelling like chemicals,” Campbell said. “It's just a way to acquire more pieces to the puzzle.”
Scenes like the one described by Campbell are all too common for Montana police as meth use and production continue to land blow after blow on children who don't know any other way of life.
As of December 2006, an average of 32.6 percent of all cases in which children are pulled from families and into protective custody involve exposure to methamphetamine, while 65.9 percent are because the parents or caregivers are involved with drugs in some way, according to Dave Thorson, fiscal bureau chief for Montana's Child Protective Services.
“That's been fairly consistent over the years,” Thorson said. “About two-thirds of our total placements involved drugs or alcohol of some kind, and a full one-third involved methamphetamine.”
Since 1999, nearly 300 clandestine meth labs have been seized in Montana. Of those, between 30 percent and
35 percent were in residences where children lived.
Nationwide, figures show that children are dangerously close to hazardous substances in
35 percent to 50 percent of labs busted. And while data show that use of the drug has declined since 2002, particularly among teenagers, the rates at which children are growing up in environments where meth is cooked or manufactured remain alarming.
At least two reports have demonstrated that between
35 percent and 70 percent of children removed from labs have a urine drug screen that is positive for methamphetamine.
According to the El Paso Intelligence Center's National Clandestine Laboratory Seizure System, there were 1,660 children residing in methamphetamine labs in 2005.
But even after a meth manufacturing lab has been raided, its toxic waste cleared away and the cooks prosecuted, the residence can continue to offend.
In 2005, the Montana Legislature created the Methamphetamine Cleanup Program, a decontamination standard for indoor property contaminated by clandestine meth labs. The Department of Environmental Quality even maintains a meth-contaminated property list on its Web site, and logs every known site out of which a meth lab has operated since 1998.
“We've gone into properties from 1998 and are still finding meth residue,” said Deb Grimm of the DEQ. “Meth is not biodegradable. If you turn on the furnace, it can go airborne.”
Once cleanup of such properties was mandated by the 2005 Legislature, cases began turning up around Montana in which the carpeting had not been cleaned and the walls were coated with residue. Even though other states have passed similar laws, Montana was the first state to identify and begin looking at historical sites where meth was manufactured.
The Meth Cleanup Program works with property owners, contractors and local health officials to remediate the labs and certifies contractors to conduct methamphetamine lab assessments.
Kara Richardson, a community counselor for Montana's Child Protective Services in Butte, said the physical trauma a meth-exposed child can experience has led to extreme vigilance in some cases. Social workers removing children from a home where meth has been manufactured are told not to bring any belongings.
“If there is meth in a home right now, we're being told not to take anything with us - clothes, teddy bears, favorite objects - we're told not to take any of that. If there is a lab, if kids are crawling around in it, then they've been affected. Our job is to keep them safe, so we're not taking any chances.”
Coating the bottom of a beaker in the Chem Stores building at UM are the charred, caramel-colored remains of smoked methamphetamine, although this particular high was spent on a group of lab mice. Fire up the pressurized camping stove and smoke curls into a length of tubing that runs from the mouth of the beaker into an aerated chamber, where mice are forced to breathe the smoke and toxic phosphine gases that circulate through the cage. The sessions are brief, less than a few minutes, but it's enough time to guarantee exposure.
During an earlier phase of her research, Dr. Sandra Wells exposed animal models to the process of manufacturing methamphetamine - the most common form of this involves heating and boiling sulphuric acid and Coleman lantern fuel - but she explains that, scientifically, it's more straightforward to focus on exposures to smoking pure meth.
The drug is purchased from Sigma Chemicals, a company that specializes in manufacturing laboratory chemicals and equipment. Street crank is almost never pure, but has been cut with a host of chemicals. However, for controlled research purposes, Wells said it's best to know exactly what you're getting, though she also acknowledges it could be helpful to understand what effects meth's impurities have on children as well. But that's a whole other study.
Wells' biomedical research at UM focuses on asthma and pulmonary diseases, so the meth research she and her colleagues are performing, while related to their fields, is really only a pilot project.
“We all have our day jobs,” she says.
And even though Wells is seeking a grant from the National Institutes of Health that would allow researchers to focus entirely on the study, the side experiment has yet to receive any major funding. Even so, she expects to publish the first batch of results very soon.
“I can say we have some very promising preliminary data that indicates acute respiratory distress, and we're moving forward based on those results,” she said. “This will be the first information available out there to address pulmonary injuries in children related to these exposures.”
Wells said she expects the results could position UM as a national center for meth-related research. But Wells is just one part of a collaborative network that includes medical doctors, pediatricians, social workers, educators and law enforcement officials.
“Clinical research will allow us to get information to initial care providers who might not be aware of what these children have actually been through,” Wells said.
Here again, the need for collaboration is made a reality through the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children, which helps develop a coordinated response involving law enforcement, child protective services, prosecutors, health experts and medical personnel from across the country.
Wells became involved locally with the Montana Alliance for Drug Endangered Children more than a year ago, and has been collaborating with her sister, Dr. Kathryn Wells, on the research at UM. It's what the Wellses call a “translational science.” Because there's no medical school in Missoula, Sandra researches the academic side while Kathryn researches the clinical side as a co-principal investigator on the project.
Medical director of the Denver Family Crisis Center, Kathryn Wells is a leading expert on child abuse and neglect, especially in drug-related situations. She also serves as the child abuse and neglect consultant for the Denver Health and Hospital Authority, the Denver Department of Human Services, the Denver Police Department and the Denver District Attorney's Office.
Wells has seen firsthand the dangers, emotional and physical, that children are exposed to in meth-saturated environments.
“Just last week, we had a girl taken from a home where meth was present. Her diaper was duct-taped onto her waist,” Wells said. “Two-and-a-half years old and she was found just wandering around outside the house. She was despondent, she couldn't interact. She just sat in the middle of the room and rocked. Those are the kinds of kids we see every day.”
But drug-endangered children like the little girl Wells described are difficult to track over time. The journey from the beginning of a criminal investigation to aftercare counseling and beyond can be unpredictable. After a pediatrician assesses the children and provides the initial medical care, they're whisked away to a foster home or protective custody.
“We are able to identify the children as drug-endangered, which is critical, but they need ongoing, consistent care from a medical provider,” Wells said. “I've seen children who have had literally no medical care. Sometimes I've asked them and they don't even own a toothbrush.”
Wells hopes to find a “medical home” for each meth child, some place where they can be treated and monitored by doctors and counselors who know their history.
“The biggest thing a drug-endangered child needs is a medical home so we can track them over time,” Wells said. “The only way to break the cycle is to follow these kids clinically, and that also helps translate controlled experiments into clinical research.”
The Wellses have each made substantial contributions to their respective fields, both standing on the front line and pushing for more. More knowledge, more information and more heads working together to combat the problems of methamphetamine.
“This isn't just something we're dabbling in,” said Sandra Wells. “There will be a lot more to come.”
Article originally hosted at: http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2006/12/30/news/top/news01.txt
Rescue. Defend. Shelter. Support.