Epidemic keeps striking too close to home.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

From the courts to the clinics to the classroom, everyone agrees that methamphetamine is unhealthy for children and other living things.

Yet Oregon is the epicenter of a growing nationwide epidemic of meth addiction, and has been for a long time.

In 1992, Oregon had 72 admissions for meth addiction treatment per 100,000 population - the highest by far in the country and 50 percent more than the next worst state, California, with 48 per 100,000.

A decade later, that number grew more than fourfold. Today, 324 Oregonians out of every 100,000 are seeking treatment and the next worst state is Hawaii, with 217 per 100,000.

With meth use rampant and growing, the scourge falls increasingly on children - from birth to broken families, from first-time use to addiction. Meth use by parents is the cause for an estimated 71 percent of the children placed in foster care statewide.

A total of 984 children were in foster care in Lane County two weeks ago, according to the state Department of Human Services. In the first 6 months of this year, 63 babies were placed in foster care in Lane County - a 30 percent increase over the same period last year, according to DHS data.

Of that number, nine suffered moderate illness or injury with causes ranging from prematurity to severe domestic violence. Seven of the nine tested positive for meth in their bodies.

Ten other babies suffered extreme illness or injury. Four of them had such high methamphetamine levels in their blood at birth that they suffered severe drug withdrawal, the DHS report says.

Children were present at 20 percent of meth lab busts in 2004, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

But the meth epidemic strikes even closer to home for children born with the drug in their bodies because their mothers are addicts.

Meth use by a mother causes a higher rate of birth defects than cocaine use, according to Dr. Michael Sherman, a retired neonatologist and professor of pediatrics at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine who has treated thousands of newborns in intensive care and has studied the problem for two decades.

"There is very limited information about the long-term behavioral and cognitive effects on the infant and child," Sherman says. "We don't know the ultimate impact of the problem."

Adolescents are even more vulnerable to addiction than adults, due to the incomplete development of the part of their brains which weigh long-term consequences of behavior, according to Dr. Richard Restak, a preeminent neuropsychiatrist, clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and author of 10 books and dozens of articles on the human brain.

"While addiction is difficult to overcome at any time in a person's life, it's especially difficult during adolescence," Restak writes in his book, "The Secret Life of the Brain."

Once in treatment, meth addicts face other disadvantages.

Treatment programs have not yet evolved to embrace the more effective medical approach to the problem, according to psychologist A. Thomas McClellan, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Treatment Research Institute and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment.

Meth treatment, unlike alcohol and cocaine treatment, has no medication that reduces the craving or nullifies the effect of methamphetamine for people in treatment, he says.

The current meth epidemic is not the first widespread illegal drug binge in this country or elsewhere, McClellan says. In the 1970s, methamphetamine ran rampant among motorcycle gangs. It swept across Asia in the 1980s. Right after World War II, Sweden and Asia witnessed widespread amphetamine abuse, he says.

History tells us the current epidemic won't be the last, and that there is no easy answer for what to do about it, he says.