From Deseret News archives:
Meth emergency: Use soaring among Utah females
The series will flesh out unsettling factors about female meth users and the system that is supposed to curb them. Among these factors:
• Salt Lake City is now the third highest in the country for women arrestees testing positive for meth.
• The Utah child welfare system is not set up to handle the current tide of meth use — and children are falling through the cracks.
• Police are increasingly pessimistic about the problem.
• DCFS recorded 11,000 substantiated reports of child abuse in 2003, up from 9,800 in 2002 and 9,500 in 2001. In custody cases, drug and alcohol abuse by parents is the top reason for removing children younger than 11 from their homes. Most of these cases are meth-related, officials say.
• The process by which children are reunited with their parents after state intervention in meth cases is not long enough for meth addicts. At most, the system allows 15 months for a parent to win back a child. By all accounts, it takes 12 to 24 months to get clean from meth.
"Meth is an epidemic in this state, but some people are still refusing to acknowledge that there is any kind of a real problem," said Lana Taylor, deputy district attorney for Salt Lake County and member of the Salt Lake Meth Initiative.
"These are the kinds of things that are going on in this community."
"One of the most tragic cases I know is a mother who had been on a meth 'run' for many days. Her body finally had to shut down for some rest, and she fell asleep on the couch with her infant daughter. When the body crashes off meth, you go into a dead sleep, and this woman slept on top of her baby and suffocated her." — Salt Lake City drug treatment counselor
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Deseret Morning News graphic
2 comments
Recent commentsIt isn't about the meth user when they take the children away, it is... Leslie | Aug. 19, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. I know for a fact that being a mother on meth has to be the most... Denita | Sept. 20, 2007 at 3:46 p.m. Related content
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