Kids Are the Collateral Damage in Meth Epidemic

SALEM, Ore. May 30, 2006 — -- When police bust a methamphetamine lab in Salem, Ore., they often find children, the smallest victims of a drug epidemic that has incapacitated parents and has flooded the child welfare system.

Authorities estimate there has been a 45 percent increase in the number of children in foster care in Oregon in the past four years due to a huge increase in drug- and alcohol-related arrests. And that has put enormous strain on the overburdened Oregon system.

Watch ABC News' and "Primetime's" special series on foster care, "A Call to Action: Saving Our Children," beginning Thursday, June 1.

"Meth has emerged as nothing short of a weapon of mass destruction in our community, leaving in its wake its greatest casualty, and that is our children, one child at a time, by the hundreds," said Walt Beglau, district attorney of Marion County, Ore.

With meth emerging as the drug of choice among more and more parents in Oregon and across the West and Midwest, children have become the collateral damage. Crackdowns on methamphetamine labs have created unintended consequences -- a spike in the number of foster children in Salem and surrounding Marion County.

In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up from 4,946 the year before, and officials say the problem would be half what it is now if it were not for meth. The number of children entering foster care has doubled in the past three years, officials say.

"The number of calls we started getting in child welfare around meth-using parents ... shot through the roof," said Jason Walling, head of Child Protective Services in Marion County. "We've seen a rise on average of 35 to 38 children coming in to foster care a month, till now we have well over a hundred children a month coming into foster care. And in March of last year we saw approximately 165 children come in, just in that one month."

Walling said the impact has been immense. "It has led to the most devastating crisis that our community has ever seen, in my opinion," he said.

Nationally, like crack in the 1980s, meth has had a devastating impact on the child welfare system across the country. Some 17,000 meth labs were raided by law enforcement last year, 400 of them in Oregon.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said that over the last five years, 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. The National Association of Counties said that 40 percent of child welfare officials surveyed nationwide said that meth had caused a rise in the number of children removed from homes. The percentage was far higher on the West Coast, the Midwest and in rural areas, where the drug has hit the hardest.