"I'd say most dentists in the state are familiar with it," said Monte Thompson, director of Utah Dental Association. He plans to include an article about it in the organization's newsletter.

Jail dentists are on the front lines of this problem. And they don't do cosmetic or restorative dentistry. They don't cap teeth or do aesthetic work. Dentists behind bars basically do two things: They put temporary fillings in cavities, and they yank teeth.

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"About 2,000."

— Number of teeth pulled each year by dentists at the Salt Lake County Jail, according to Mark Ellsworth, Health Services administrator.

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On a recent afternoon, dentist Richard Johnson peered into the mouth of a patient and found an all-too-familiar sight: teeth rotten from methamphetamine abuse.

The man lay handcuffed and chained to the dental chair inside the Utah County Jail as Johnson wrenched a forceps into his lower jaw. With considerable effort, he extracted the remnants of the inmate's badly decayed tooth. Piece by piece, he removed bits of a broken bicuspid.

"There are 28 teeth," said Johnson, a veteran dentist at both the Utah State Prison and the Utah County Jail. "There are 26 of them that need to be extracted sometimes, and sometimes you just have to dig 'em out."

Johnson joins other dentists who say the meth mouth problem is growing.

A few weeks ago, Johnson pulled seven soft, black teeth out of another inmate's mouth. A week later, he pulled out four more from the same inmate's mouth. That patient, too, abused methamphetamine.

Dentists in private practice and public health clinics also see people whose meth addiction has eaten away their choppers. Men and women in their 20s are having to wear dentures.

"They look like someone shot a gun through their mouths," said Dr. Richard G. Ellis, who volunteers at Salt Lake Donated Dental Services. "It just destroys them."

To each of his patients, he asks: "Are you a meth user?"

"The answer is 'yes,' 75 percent to 80 percent of the time," Ellis said. "It's just classic destruction."

Ellis has peered into thousands of mouths in his 45 years as a dentist, including some in Peru and Bolivia. Patients he sees at the Salt Lake Donated Dental Services rival those he saw in South America where good oral hygiene isn't practiced.

"The meth people that we have coming in compare dentally to what we saw in Third World countries," he said.

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One of the many problems this drug produces is rampant tooth decay with the teeth literally falling apart."

— From "Meth mouth" article, at Web site www.dentistry.about.com.

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