Combating a Menacing Drug

Charities fear not enough is being spent to fight meth abuse

Last spring, grant makers at the Community Health Endowment, in Lincoln, Neb., gathered

small groups of the city’s residents and asked them what the foundation’s priorities should be for the coming year.

Lori Seibel, the foundation’s director, says the issue foremost on citizens’ minds came through resoundingly: “What are you going to do about meth?”

Residents, she says, were incensed by local news accounts of methamphetamine abuse, including a tragic case in which a young Lincoln mother locked her 22-month-old son in a room while she smoked the drug with friends. The child was found dead 36 hours later, electrocuted after he stuck a staple in an outlet.

The foundation had no immediate answer to the residents’ question, says Ms. Seibel.

“We found that there were so many different directions from which you can address the meth problem, but still didn’t know what the right action was.”

Bingeing and Crashing

Grant makers across the country face similar quandaries.

While meth brings a spate of problems also caused in varying degrees by other illegal drugs — including increased criminal activity, domestic abuse, and child neglect — it also poses a special set of challenges for law enforcement, social-service agencies, and ordinary citizens.

Habitual users may alternate between bingeing and crashing for several days, not only neglecting children and other personal responsibilities, but also forgoing sleep, food, and personal hygiene — leading to the startling before-and-after “faces of meth” shown in numerous public-service announcements.

But the damage doesn’t end there. The “cooks” who manufacture the drug in small, makeshift meth labs use ingredients that include hazardous and often highly explosive substances. They then pour the byproducts down the drain or directly into the ground or water sources, contaminating them indefinitely and requiring expensive cleanup efforts by counties and small towns ill-equipped to foot the bill.

In the most high-profile philanthropic effort to date, Thomas M. Siebel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, has committed roughly $17-million to the Montana Meth Project, in Missoula. But some say that that effort and similar campaigns rely on scare tactics and do not deal with the reasons why demand for meth remains high in some areas and why the drug is increasingly used by people of all socioeconomic classes.

A window of opportunity exists to curb the drug’s impact before its use becomes more widespread, say some charity leaders.

Nationwide, about half a million people have said they used meth in the preceding month, according to the most recent studies. That number that has been declining slightly in recent years, according to the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

But without money to support anti-meth efforts — including resources to link groups together to share ideas for fighting the problem and pay for research to test results — the situation will worsen, substance-abuse experts say.

“Part of the whole methamphetamine story is that you have yet again another drug that’s come onto the scene and is becoming more and more popular — particularly among kids and women — and there’s just very little money being directed to deal with it,” says Winnie Wechsler, executive director of Phoenix Houses of California, in Lake View Terrace, a nonprofit group that helps people recover from addictions.

Private support to charities that fight meth has come largely from foundations that operate on the West Coast and in the Midwest, regions where the drug has been entrenched for several years.

Community foundations in Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, and elsewhere have been making grants to combat meth use and helping form local coalitions to focus on the problems that meth abuse causes. And private and family foundations with ties to Wyoming, Colorado, and other affected areas have stepped forward, underwriting anti-meth documentaries, financing statewide organizations to deal with the drug, and taking other steps.

Scarce Dollars

Nobody knows exactly how much grant makers spend on meth activities, but foundations awarded $85.6-million in 2005, or 0.5 percent of all dollars given away, to projects that prevent the use of meth and other drugs and treat addicts, according to the latest study of big grant makers by the Foundation Center, in New York.

Other challenges to Americans’ health and health care — including childhood obesity, diabetes, and lack of access to health insurance — tend to get a larger share of money from health-conversion foundations and other grant makers.

Gen. Arthur T. Dean, chief executive officer of Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, in Alexandria, Va., says that most of the foundation world has given short shrift to the meth problem — and to substance-abuse education and treatment in general.

“We have a huge public-health problem that’s affecting all facets of our society, and the foundation world is beginning to walk away from it, the federal government isn’t providing enough dollars,” says General Dean, who joined the nonprofit group after retiring from the Army. “Are we as a country going to allow this substance-abuse problem to fester and not address it in the holistic way that we should?”

But neither private nor federal aid to fight meth and other illegal drugs is likely to grow anytime soon.

In September the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., announced that it was phasing out grants to prevent drug and alcohol addiction. The foundation has spent more than most grant makers to prevent substance abuse, pouring $380-million into such efforts over the past 20 years. Officials say that the foundation’s new perspective is to look at addiction as one of multiple factors that disadvantaged people face and to focus on expanding the use of proven strategies for treating addiction.

And another cutback could be coming if Congress approves the Bush administration’s plan to slice $159-million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s budget for the 2008 fiscal year.

Personal Tales

Most groups dedicated to curbing meth use and production were formed by people whose lives were changed by the drug — and many of them operate on shoestring budgets.

In 2002, Mary F. Holley, an obstetrician and gynecologist, created Mothers Against Methamphetamine, in Arab, Ala., to distribute public-education materials she had written on the drug and its effects on the brain.

Dr. Holley began studying the drug when her brother, Jim, committed suicide after using meth for two years.

She has since expanded her work, which infuses Christian teachings into its approach to fighting abuse, to dozens of informal chapters nationwide. Dr. Holley estimates she has spent $400,000 in personal savings on the venture.

Shirley Morgan founded the Mt. Hood Coalition Against Drug Crime, in Welches, Ore., nearly a decade ago after she lived 300 feet away from what she charitably calls a “problem property.”

In 1995 her home was burglarized, she says, and she had begun to notice the smell of burning chemicals nearby and witnessed neighbors dumping mixtures into the ground. Ms. Morgan contacted the sheriff’s office for help, but was told the office had just four surveillance officers to cover all of largely rural Clackamas County.

“And this little internal thing in me said, Well, you have a surveillance team now, because I’m not going to tolerate this on my street,” says Ms. Morgan. “These guys were intimidating me, and it made me mad.”

She ultimately formed a network of law-enforcement officers and more than 100 concerned citizens, resulting in the bust of 22 houses suspected of meth production or distribution in the county.

The coalition, which has received a grant from the federal Drug-Free Communities program, has no paid staff members. And Ms. Morgan says she specifically chose not to incorporate so that she could spend her time pursuing legislative activities, including helping propose new ordinances and laws that can aid residents and police in their anti-meth work.

“My fiscal agents know how to handle these dollars better than I do, and that’s not how I want to spend my time,” says Ms. Morgan. “I want to clean up the community.”

Making Small Grants

Some of the nonprofit groups that deal with meth operate under the aegis of government agencies, including law enforcement and state health departments.

For instance, the Kansas Methamphetamine Prevention Project, in Topeka, works under the umbrella of Shawnee Regional Prevention and Recovery Services. The project provides training and other assistance to Kansas organizations dealing with meth abuse, and since 2003 has provided $189,000 in small grants to ad hoc coalitions in 76 counties.

Cristi Cain, the project’s coordinator, says that her group’s budget is contingent on money from government and other sources. One year the charity was unable to make any grants, struggling just to get by on its own.

But the organization has been able to make a big difference in dealing with the impact the drug has on neighborhoods and children, in part by attracting foundation attention and forming new coalitions.

The Topeka Community Foundation gave her organization a $17,500 grant to deal with problems caused when anhydrous ammonia, a potentially lethal substance, has been released during attempted thefts by meth producers. Ms. Cain’s coalition used the foundation money to place special locks on tanks that contain the ammonia, which is used legitimately by farmers as an agricultural fertilizer.

The organization also took action to deal with the problems that face children who live in homes where methamphetamine is used or produced. Such youngsters are at high risk for health and developmental problems, including malnourishment and respiratory illnesses from breathing toxic fumes. In 2003, Ms. Cain’s group helped found the Kansas Alliance for Drug Endangered Children, which mobilizes police officers, medical personnel, child-welfare workers, and others to arrange appropriate care for youngsters at risk of harm.

Spreading to New Regions

While overall rates of meth use are declining, nonprofit leaders in some parts of the country have just started to see signs of the drug’s incursion, due in part to a shift in the way it is produced and distributed.

Law-enforcement officials have achieved growing success in shutting down many domestic “mom and pop” labs that produce small amounts of the drug, and a new federal law that took effect in September requires cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine — the essential ingredient in meth — to be placed behind pharmacy counters.

But the drug is still widely available, as Mexican drug cartels have started distributing it in great quantities.

In northwestern New Mexico’s San Juan County, for example, where some 40 percent of residents are American Indian, Reena Szczepanski, director of Drug Policy Alliance New Mexico, in Santa Fe, has worked for the past two years with an anti-meth coalition.

From the beginning, Ms. Szczepanski says, monthly coalition meetings were crowded with people frustrated that there was no regional facility that could treat meth-addicted family members. The options were bleak: “They felt that the only real shot was [for addicts] to get arrested, and even then there was no guarantee of treatment,” she says.

Although overall rates of meth use among young people in New Mexico were declining, Ms. Szczepanski says that the meetings gave her insight into the kinds of problems and concerns the drug was raising in afflicted neighborhoods.

“I can recount the data until the cows come home, but that doesn’t mean that all these mothers sitting in that room crying over their children don’t exist,” she says.

General Dean, of Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, agrees. In a 2006 survey in which 731 of his group’s member coalitions participated, only 38 — or 5.2 percent — listed methamphetamine as the top substance-abuse problem plaguing their neighborhoods. But General Dean says those figures are deceptive.

“Depending on where you are, you could be totally devastated by meth or not even understand that it’s a serious problem,” he says. “Meth has just about touched every state, but not in a uniform way.”

Sharing Information

While many charities have come up with approaches that could work elsewhere, nonprofit leaders say they are frustrated that few outlets exist for towns, counties, and states facing an influx of meth, or anticipating problems, to share information and successful strategies.

Chris van Berkeijk, vice president for programs at the Hawaii Community Foundation, in Honolulu, contrasts this situation with the way in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention serve as a national clearinghouse for groups that work to reduce smoking.

“If you want to, say, know what’s a best practice that works with getting teenage girls not to smoke, you can go to the CDC and they will share all kinds of information, evaluation strategies, ways to disseminate your programs,” says Ms. van Berkeijk. “We don’t have anything like that with meth.”

To help counter that problem, the Harm Reduction Project, in Salt Lake City, at the beginning of February held its second national conference on the connections among methamphetamine use, HIV, and hepatitis. (The first was held two years ago.)

Sessions included discussions on meth use among Latinas, using social marketing to reach gay and bisexual users, the use of “drug courts” as alternatives to prison, and other workshops designed to present what conference organizers called “the spectrum of response to methamphetamine use.”

Luciano Colonna, the Harm Reduction Project’s executive director, says his group’s event drew 750 people from around the country.

And in Nebraska, Ms. Seibel of the Community Health Endowment ultimately made collaboration and sharing ideas central to the group’s response to the plea from local residents to deal with meth abuse. It issued a request for proposals restricted to local groups willing to collaborate.

Ms. Seibel says her foundation made a $78,515 grant to the Lincoln Action Program, the Substance Abuse Action Coalition, and 10 other local groups to gather data and help craft comprehensive recommendations that can guide her group’s work to combat meth use in Lincoln and adjoining Lancaster County.

She says that her board is considering a “fairly substantial investment” in the future, and encourages other grant makers and groups to be bold.

“Don’t shy away from thinking outside the box,” says Ms. Seibel. “You have to be pretty brave on some level to go to war with meth.”

Yet raising money for substance abuse — and meth in particular — will continue to be a hard sell, says Jay Laudato, executive director of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, in New York, who has seen increases in meth use over the past few years among the gay and bisexual men his clinic serves.

“Substance use still remains an incredibly taboo area for private giving and also for government funding,” he says.

“People are complex,” he adds. “Funders don’t want to be associated with messy things, and few things are messier than meth.”