Dentistry,  Methamphetamine

Methamphetamine: Another Meth Mouth Story

Methamphetamine ravages the mouth. The Chico, California Enterprise Record has this story about the effect of methamphetamine on California prison inmates and the prison budget:

“Meth mouth” has taken a bite out of the Butte County Jail medical budget. A big one.

Inmates with the condition, common among users of the manufactured drug methamphetamine, are being diagnosed by dentist Larry Kyle at nearly twice the rate of just a year ago.

The drug is known to cause users to constantly grind their teeth, abandon brushing and consume large quantities of sugary drinks to combat dry mouth.

Kyle said he sees two or three inmates a day with meth mouth in the jail, where he visits two days a week. As a comparison, the dentist said, he spends two days a week at the Solano County Jail in Fairfield and encounters only two or three inmates a month with the condition.

Last year the Butte Interagency Narcotics Task Force, just one of several departments making drug busts in the county, arrested 298 people for methamphetamine.

Nearly all of them wound up in the jail – and many of them wound up in the dentist’s chair.

Flap has noticed that the California Prison System has been aggressively advertising for dentists in the Los Angeles Times.

“We’ve had to double our dental hours,” said Linda Russell, an administrator with Monterey-based California Forensic Medical Group, which contracts with health care providers at Butte and 26 other county lockups.

Where he could once handle the dental load in five hours, Kyle now spends 10. And doubling the hours actually means more than double the cost, since meth mouth sufferers usually require more procedures than patient’s who’ve simply neglected their teeth.

One wonders what the financial impact will eventually be since there is already a shortage of dentists in California and, unfortunately, there appears to be plenty of inmate patients who require treatment.

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