BELLA VISTA — It was a family affair.
A 30-year-old mother, her 4-year-old daughter and the child's grandmother rented a vacation house for the weekend in October 1997. Two males friends were with them.
It seemed innocent enough, although the desk clerk would later acknowledge some suspicion of the man who paid cash and, the clerk later learned, gave a fake identification.
The group unloaded the car, preparing to settle in. Once inside, one of the men taped a washcloth over the window in the front door and drew the shades. The dangerous process of making methamphetamine began in earnest.
The younger adults combined and heated toxic chemicals like red phosphorus and iodine on the stove, chemicals that most parents would lock away from their children. The chemicals are poison, and they create gaseous fumes as they cook that can scorch the skin and lungs.
The cooking continued into the night. The grandmother took the 4-year-old girl into another room while the other adults "fired up" or injected methamphetamine into their veins.
The adults rode their high for 12 hours or so. Then, the drug-induced paranoia began. A Benton County sheriff's car sat just a few doors down, making them nervous. A deputy lived there, but they didn't know that.
The group later bolted, leaving behind a mess of half-used chemicals that cost the federal Drug Enforcement Administration $7,000 to clean up.
Law enforcement officers in Northwest Arkansas say methamphetamine has become part of family life for some. Police and judges say they see parents choosing crank over their families regularly. Methamphetamine abuse is often a dynamic in troubled families handled by the Arkansas Department of Human Services, although the department does not track cases based on the type of drug involved.
Methamphetamine users make their choice, but that choice has ripple effects that envelop friends, parents, children and others.
Vince Morris, supervisor of the state Office of Adult Probation in Benton County, said his staff sees women choosing methamphetamine over their children every day.
"Methamphetamine is with us everywhere," Morris said. "It seems worse with females. We just see so many women using. When they first start, they lose weight. They feel good about that. But soon their decision-making process is purely on the pain and pleasure level. Everything else, even their kids, is secondary. They're just looking for that next high."
Women are the primary caretakers of children in the United States even when there is another parent living in the home, said Anita Hudson, clinical director at Gateway House in Fort Smith. It is one of five drug treatment centers in Arkansas where mothers and their children can live.
"[Women] usually have low incomes," Hudson said. "And when they use drugs, that income goes to support their addictions."
Agents from the 19th Judicial District Drug Task Force in Benton and Carroll counties say they encounter children on more than half their drug investigations. The children live with parents who are selling or using drugs. About 80 percent of the task force's drug investigations target methamphetamine sales or manufacturing.
"It's pretty bad when you have a 10-year-old who knows the difference between a crank pipe and a marijuana pipe," one undercover agent said. "And they do. They see it."
Rogers Police Chief Tim Keck, who coordinates the task force, said narcotics investigations are especially taxing when undercover agents make inroads with drug dealers who also are parents.
"You've got an undercover guy buying dope from a man whose little kids are sitting on the couch with him," Keck said. "That's tough."
Children and methamphetamine were so entwined in a major drug sweep earlier this year in Northwest Arkansas that the sting was named Operation Daycare. One man made it a habit of bringing his children to drug deals. Another even pulled a package of methamphetamine out of his baby's diaper and sold it .
Some parents farm their children out to relatives or friends while they use methamphetamine. Sometimes they'll prop up a mirror at the end of the hallway so they can stash their drugs and paraphernalia when they see the children coming, drug agents say. Sometimes the children just watch.
Most children whose parents are arrested on methamphetamine charges in Northwest Arkansas end up with relatives instead of in state custody, drug agents and state officials said.
Joe Quinn, spokesman for the Human Services Department in Little Rock, said the agency doesn't track how many children it interacts with because of parents with methamphetamine problems.
"Methamphetamine use is up across the state, and anecdotally we hear of hundreds of children who end up in foster care because of their parents' substance abuse," he said.
The department leans toward family placement as its first option.
"We don't take the children every time there is an arrest," Quinn said. "If we see there is a responsible grandmother or aunt, we'll go with family placement. That's in the best interest of the child. They've already been through so much."
Sometimes children are turned over to family members at the discretion of police at the time of a parent's arrest. The Human Services Department decides if asked by police.
In those instances, the Human Services Department can open a family placement case, which means child-care workers will visit the home of the relatives to ensure the children are being properly cared for, Quinn said.
That was not the case with the children who saw their parents hauled off to jail on methamphetamine charges during Operation Daycare. Anticipating the need to take some of the many children they encountered during the investigation into custody, police had a state-employed child-care worker on hand as they served simultaneous arrest warrants at residences in Benton County and Springdale.
All children, however, were turned over to a parent or relative who wasn't arrested.
The Human Services Department did not open any family placement cases as a result of Operation Daycare, nor did it take any children into protective custody.
Only twice in the past year has the Human Services Department office in Benton County taken protective custody of children whose parents have been arrested for methamphetamine, said department supervisor Lisa Hawthorn.
In the two protective custody cases mentioned by Hawthorn, a judge determined the children would stay with their parents in their homes. That was likely after the parents committed to drug treatment, but Hawthorn said she couldn't discuss specifics of the cases.
A drug task force agent remembers one of the cases. Agents found a methamphetamine operation in a family's Siloam Springs trailer.
"The commodes wouldn't flush. They were crawling with maggots," said the agent, who asked his name not be used to protect his undercover status. "Fleas attacked your feet when you stepped inside. There was dog and cat crap on the floor. The smell knocked you down."
Agents found used hypodermic needles in a pile of dirty children's clothes.
In a high-profile case, there was some public sentiment that Benton County prosecutors should charge two mothers with child endangerment after their daughters died in a hot, closed car in April 1998. The mothers left the children in the care of Ricky Leon Crisp, who was convicted of second-degree murder for leaving the children inside the car for hours.
The girls, ages 16 months and 4 months, died of hyperthermia, or elevated body temperature.
The mothers, sisters Katie and Jane Fraley, acknowledged they knew Crisp had, in the past, used methamphetamine, but they needed to go to work and their plans for a baby sitter had fallen through.
Prosecutors tried to prove Crisp, the father of one of the babies, used methamphetamine in the hours before the children's deaths. Crisp denied it, but a friend who negotiated a manslaughter plea, Justin Avery Griffith, testified they drove around the night before searching for meth.
Bob Balfe, chief deputy prosecuting attorney in Benton County, said child endangerment charges can only be filed when it's evident a child's welfare is in direct danger. The charge can't be sustained solely on the basis that a parent uses methamphetamine or is making it in a home where a child lives.
"We have to prove that the children were present while they [parents] were cooking it," Balfe said.
Children often struggle to remain loyal to their methamphetamine-using parents.
Adella Gray, a counselor at George Elementary School in Springdale, has seen that loyalty in children as young as 10. One girl was in the care of grandparents because her mother was using methamphetamine. At one point, the mother tried to regain custody, and the Human Services Department helped, as its legal goal is to reunite families.
"It was a scary situation," Gray said. "The girl was very adept at covering up what had been going on with her mother. But in the end, she ended up telling everything. But she tried to be loyal."
Beverly Brown, supervisor of the Children and Family Services Division of the Human Services Department office in Searcy, has seen children struggle to stay devoted. In March, the department took into protective custody two girls living amid a meth lab being operated by their parents.
"The chemical fumes in the house were so strong that the children's eyes were burning," Brown said. "The 7-year-old was very graphic in her descriptions of what her parents had been doing. She could tell you 'Daddy put this in this bottle and did this to it.' The older girl denied everything her sister said. She stuck to trying to protect her parents."
Linda Spears of the Child Welfare League of America, a nonprofit child-advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., says the children of methamphetamine users have specific problems associated with their parents' drug addictions: medical, environmental and educational neglect, malnutrition and sometimes physical abuse.
Spears says many child welfare workers believe parents who use methamphetamine are more likely to physically abuse their children then parents who use other drugs.
Heroin and marijuana typically produce a mellow effect, Spears said. Parents who abuse those drugs tend to be neglectful and apathetic toward their children. But methamphetamine and other stimulants are known to produce aggressive and violent behavior.
Spears said criminal penalties for meth are getting tougher nationwide, but drug treatment geared toward rebuilding families is lacking.
"Most treatment services haven't even caught up to cocaine," Spears said of the illegal stimulant that reached its popularity peak in the late 1980s.