Doctors See Spike as Drug's
Popularity Rises
June 23, 2000
By Joan Lippert
DES MOINES, Iowa (APBnews.com) -- With an increasing number of
methamphetamine-addicted babies in area hospitals, an Iowa doctor is
concentrating her clinic's efforts on treating babies suffering from
prenatal exposure to the drug.
Clinic founder Dr. Rizwan Shah made her first
methamphetamine-baby discovery several years ago when a routine lab
workup found the drug in the urine of an infant newly admitted to
the Child and Infant Recovery Effort program at Blank Children's
Hospital.
She said she had been seeing mostly "crack babies" since 1989,
when her clinic first opened its doors to drug-exposed infants.
Little did Dr. Shah suspect that this "meth baby" would be the first
of many. "About 80 percent of our patients here are
methamphetamine-exposed," Shah said.
Clinic doctors have now treated more than 300 meth babies, a
reflection of a growing national trend. Though still the signature
drug of the San Diego area, methamphetamine has become popular in
other parts of the country as well, especially the West, the
Southwest, the South and the Midwest.
"In the last three or four years, the Midwest has been
inundated," said Tim Condon, associate director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md. "We don't know if
methamphetamine was always a problem in rural America or if we're
just seeing more in rural America now."
Comparing drugs' effects
The question in the minds of many methamphetamine experts is:
Will meth babies follow in the tragic footsteps of their
drug-exposed predecessors? Shah is one of the few researchers in a
position to compare the effects of both crack and meth.
"A crack cocaine high can last three hours, while a
methamphetamine high can last for 12," Shah said. This is because
methamphetamine breaks down more slowly -- and it implies a longer
fetal exposure to its damaging effects.
Like crack babies, meth babies tend to be born prematurely and
are smaller than normal even when carried to term. Unlike crack
babies, who are jittery from the start, meth babies go through three
or four weeks of limpness, sleepiness and apparent depression.
"And they don't want to eat even though they were born small and
need the calories," Shah said.
Meth babies show late irritability
Crack babies and meth babies experience shaking and tremors.
Crack babies show this nervous irritability from birth, and it often
resolves at eight, nine or 10 months of age, Shah said.
Meth babies become irritable starting at three to four weeks of
age -- "and from what we have seen here -- the oldest meth children
we have followed are now 6 years old -- in some cases it is still
present at age 5," Shah said.
Though they have many differences, the behaviors of crack and
meth babies do parallel each other.
Dr. Ira Chasnoff, president and medical director of the National
Association for Families and Addiction Research and Education, at
first observed only a minimal impact on IQ from prenatal exposure to
crack, but he now reports that behavioral problems are beginning to
surface as the crack babies of the mid- to late '80s and '90s become
the adolescents and pre-adolescent of today.
Biology or environment?
Though there are no hard statistics, psychologists and officials
in treatment centers describe children with outbursts of screaming,
hitting, attacks and tantrums. Likewise, as meth babies become meth
children, they may show hyperactivity, attention disorders, learning
disabilities and fits of rage.
The unanswered question is whether the behavior is the result of
biology or environment. Most drug-exposed children come from
unstable environments that would undoubtedly affect any child's
mental state, officials said.
For example, about 68 percent of the children who enter the Child
and Infant Recovery Effort program at Blank Children's Hospital have
been taken from their parents and are already in foster care or with
adoptive parents, officials said. One Swedish study compared meth
kids in three different family situations: single foster placement,
multiple foster placement (moving from place to place) and staying
with the biological parents.
"The worst outcome for behavior was multiple placement, and the
best was a stable, substance-free environment," Shah said. "This is,
in effect, a treatment."
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