New US drug scourge is a kick in the teeth

New US drug scourge is a kick in the teeth

Mon Aug 1, 1:10 PM ET

SIKESTON, United States (AFP) - A drug scourge that is sweeping through rural America is hitting users in the teeth. Literally.

Rural dentists are seeing an increasing number of cases of "meth mouth," a disturbing dental decay within rots teeth so quickly that some patients require full-mouth extractions.

"There's never been a drug that's had such an extreme dental impact as crystal meth," said Dr. Nancy Williams, a dental hygiene professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, who lectures around the country on drug abuse.

Little is known about what causes the condition, but the decay is striking. Teeth become brittle and break as black cavities form along the gum lines.

"It looks like you told the person to stand up and took a sledgehammer to their mouth, the destruction is so complete," said Dr. Jeffrey Paskar, a Springfield, Missouri dentist who works in a clinic and at the county jail.

Methamphetamine resurfaced in rural parts of the US in the 1990's when a new recipe was developed that made the drug easy to manufacture out of readily available products like ammonia and cold medicine. Home-brew instructions were passed from addict to addict and eventually found their way onto the internet.

It has now supplanted cocaine as the top drug-related law enforcement problem, according to a survey released July 5 of some 500 local officials.

Fifty-eight percent of police, sheriff's department and related agencies polled by the National Association of Counties said that methamphetamine was their top drug problem.

The problem is particularly acute in the western United States: Some 76 percent of law enforcement agencies in the US Southwest said that meth was their biggest drug problem, as did 75 percent in the Pacific Northwest states.

Law enforcement officers have often used "meth mouth" to spot users and target them for drug busts.

The condition is now so widespread that dental schools are beginning to add it to the curriculum.

A number of factors are believed to contribute to "meth mouth". The drug dries up saliva, a natural defense against cavities. It also causes users to crave sugary sodas while the corrosive chemicals used to make the synthetic drug are thought to lead to teeth decay. And stoned people rarely remember to brush their teeth.

Dentists are increasingly coming up against the ethical question of what to do when they spot the condition. Reporting it to police would violate doctor-patient confidentiality. But some dentists have decided to cross that line in order to protect patients from themselves.

Like Dr. John Sauer, who was shocked to see that a 16-year-old patient had developed 18 cavities along her gum line when just 18 months earlier she'd only had one cavity in her entire mouth.

"I went to the mom and I asked her if she'd noticed anything unusual about her daughter," he said.

The daughter, who had become difficult to control, eventually confessed.

Several states have moved to make it harder for meth users to find the ingredients they need to make the drug. On Thursday, the federal government stepped in after a Senate panel approved legislation that would restrict the sale of cold and allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in meth.

The bill, which must be approved by the full Senate before it can be signed into law, would remove products containing pseudoephedrine from store shelves and require that they be sold only from behind the pharmacy counter.