Losing children can break addiction

The ice epidemic has touched tens of thousands of lives in Hawai'i. It has an impact on our families, our children, our schools, our crime rate, our prisons, our businesses. Our community has never faced a problem quite like this, and we are still searching for the right responses.

Gov. Linda Lingle's administration will host the Hawai'i Drug Control Strategy Summit, with about 350 people gathering in Waikiki today, tomorrow and Wednesday to draft plans to cope with the drug problem.

During the next year, The Advertiser will probe different aspects of the problem, and our responses to it. This week, our focus is on our children growing up with crystal methamphetamine in the neighborhood, in the house and in the family.

By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau

HILO, Hawai'i — Gyllien Tamura isn't certain she is supposed to talk about what happened. She is perched on her father's lap and speaking in that quiet, off-hand manner children sometimes use to describe things that are truly, piercingly important but they are still trying to process.

Wayne and Dina Tamura are upset that Child Protective Service took away their children, from left, Shyann, Shylee and Gyllien, three times because of their addiction to ice. But they also realized they needed help. Tim Wright photo

"I was scared because I like my mommy and my daddy," said Gyllien, 5, staring at her bare feet. "My mommy was crying, and I was crying for my mommy and my dad."

Her father, stocky, tattooed Wayne Tamura, recalled in a husky voice how Gyllien ran and hid from the authorities. He holds a daughter who has suddenly grown quiet, listening to the adults.

Gyllien doesn't explain the background of the crisis, and it isn't clear how much she understands. Her mom and dad were crystal methamphetamine dealers, and were deeply addicted to ice themselves.

When families collapse into ice addiction, it is often the children who hold out the hope. And though many parents chose drugs over their children, it is the fear of losing the children that sometimes is the only way to finally break free of addiction.

In the case of the Tamuras, who are in treatment, it worked.

"Day in and day out, I am telling people, 'If you love your kids, you've got to do something about your ice problem,' " Big Island Family Court Judge Ben Gaddis said. " 'You've got to decide which you love more, your kids or ice.' I do that, literally, every single day.

"Sometimes they choose their kids, and sometimes they choose ice."

Pressuring parents

Yesterday While the state increasingly focuses on the thefts, burglaries and violent crime associated with methamphetamine addiction, experts say the harm to children of addicts is often overlooked.
•	Drug's youngest victims see families torn apart
•	Trauma of ice both physical, emotional
•	Crystal meth Q&A
•	Chart: The crystal methamphetamine crisis
•	Chart: Indicators of a worsening ice problem in Hawai'i
•	Chart: How methamphetamine works in the body
Today When state Child Protective Service removes children from a home because of drug use, it becomes a powerful tool to pressure the parents into treatment.
•	Tragedy leads to change
•	Mother reflects on heavy price of her addiction to meth
Tomorrow Doctors desperately need information about babies born each year with ice in their systems, but drug-addicted mothers who take part in such research could have their children taken away.

Peggy Hilton, section administrator for East Hawai'i Child Welfare Services, makes it clear her primary mission is not to get parents off drugs.

"We remove children to protect them from very dangerous, volatile environments, and we offer services to the parents to address their issues and ameliorate any kind of situation that contributed to the harm," she said.

But in doing so, CPS very often becomes the stick that prods parents into getting help.

Treatment providers say a critical challenge is finding ways to get addicts to commit to treatment, and to stay with it. Treatment works, they say, if the addicts stay engaged. But with ice in particular, it is often difficult to get them engaged and keep them there.

"If there's a way for coercion, coercion works," said Dr. Kevin Kunz, a Kona physician who specializes in treating addicts. "If they've got children and CPS says, 'You don't get your children,' that might motivate them."

Kunz estimated that five people a week come into his office seeking help with ice addiction. Many are driven to his door because of family problems or upcoming court dates. Many others are afraid of losing their children to CPS.

Of those who walk into the office, Kunz estimated only about one out of a dozen stays engaged in treatment for the year that Kunz believes is necessary for recovery. That often requires tireless efforts by the drug users' families and loved ones, "but if someone stays engaged and we can keep them from using, then they will get better," he said.

Once CPS intervenes to remove a child from a dangerous home environment, federal guidelines generally allow the parents only about a year to demonstrate they can provide a safe environment for their kids, Gaddis said.

After that, the state attempts to permanently place the children with a family that will adopt them, which puts pressure on ice addicts to clean up, or lose their children for good.

That huge power CPS holds is competing with an enormously powerful addiction.

Gaddis said his sense is that parents addicted to ice are more likely to abandon their children than addicts on other drugs.

"We have seen parents brought to court in Child Protective Service cases with two or three kids, ages 10, 8 and 6, and we have seen those parents walk away from those kids and never look back, and to me that's just astonishing," said Gaddis, who has served for 15 years as a family court judge.

Wes Margheim, director of operations for the Big Island Substance Abuse Council, said the special power of ice is that it stimulates every reward system known in the brain. The drug trumps all of the other pleasures and drives that motivate normal people. That includes food, sex and love of family members, he said.

"The addiction becomes so powerful and so overwhelming of a priority that decisions that make sense to you and me — choose the kid over the drug — are no longer even options for the person that's in the late stages of addiction with methamphetamine," Margheim said. "The turmoil and the damage being done to the family I think is being seen on a daily basis."

'I can just smoke now'

"If there's a way for coercion, coercion works," Dr. Kevin Kunz said.

"The turmoil and the damage being done to the family I think is being seen on a daily basis," Wes Margheim said. Tim Wright photos

Wayne Tamura recalled that even after his children were taken from him for a second time, "I went out for get some more dope and smoke it, thinking, 'Now I no more my kids, I can just smoke now, and I no need worry.' "

"It seemed normal to me," he said.

CPS returned the children to the Tamuras two weeks later and put the family on a service plan that required they clean up.

The parents didn't follow the plan, and when CPS returned for a third time, the Tamuras were living in a battered Wai'ohinu house with no electricity and no hot water. Their money went to buy ice, and they hadn't paid the bill.

Dina Tamura has a harsh view of CPS. She is in treatment, and acknowledges CPS forced a positive change in her life, but she is bitter about what was taken from her.

The Tamuras' only son was taken at birth in 1997 when he tested positive for methamphetamine exposure in the womb, which prompted the couple to clean up for more than two years.

They followed the required service plan, passed dozens of drug tests and repaired their lives, at least for a time.

But when CPS finally agreed to return the boy, who had been living with his grandfather for more than two years, he felt no connection to his parents, Dina Tamura said.

"I ended up sending him back to my dad's house 2 1/2 months later because he stopped eating, and he stopped talking," she said. "He stopped eating and talking because he was missing my dad. CPS traumatized both of us, in a way.

"That's the only thing I really hate CPS for," she said. "I'm thankful for them taking the kids and waking us up, but I really, really hate the fact that they kept him away for so long, and they never increased visits even though we were working towards getting him back."

CPS officials do not discuss specific cases, which are confidential. But Hilton said in general CPS strives to "preserve the integrity of the family if at all possible, without jeopardizing the safety of the children."

"We try to reunify the children as soon as possible, but in other situations it's too dangerous, and we have to remove children," she said. "We've removed children only to find out later that there was a shootout at the house because of drugs the next day or the next week, and parents are arrested for something and we read it in the paper right after that."

Wayne Tamura, 28, is now in a Hilo drug treatment program run by the Big Island Substance Abuse Council that allows fathers to live with their children in a supervised setting while they undergo treatment and prepare for clean and sober lives.

He has no love for Child Protective Service, but he displays a grudging respect for them.

"I went hate CPS, those times I was just thinking about smoking," he said. "But now I look back, that was the only thing that kind of helped me, because they went take my kids from me, and put my kids in a good environment, and told me I was going to lose my kids, and it made me think: What am I doing?"

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.