Dr. Penny Grant tells a horror story about an Oklahoma woman, a mother ravaged by the exhausting effects of crystal methamphetamine addiction, who slept through her baby burning to death.

Grant, who now works at Montefiore Medical Center’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, spent years studying the effects of "crystal meth" on families in Oklahoma, where the cheap, versatile and potent drug swept through the state like sagebrush wildfire.

At a symposium on crystal meth at Montefiore last week, Grant and others warned an audience of community members that the drug and its devastating by-products are coming to the Bronx, probably sooner rather than later.

"I’m afraid to say there’s going to be more meth here, it’s just a matter of when," said Scott Adams, an agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

Right now, less than one half of one percent of drug cases in New York City are meth-related, Adams said, but recently they confiscated a huge shipment of the drug in New Jersey. It was packaged with cocaine.

When meth does start to hit home, Montefiore and its auxiliaries will be ready, says Dr. Sarah Church, a clinical psychologist who has established two care units here in the Bronx in anticipation of an outbreak. So far, the units have only treated a handful of meth patients, Church said.  

At the end of the symposium, Bronx District Attorney Nestor Ferreiro said the key to preventing or treating an outbreak of addiction would be communication. He said meth was like weeds in your lawn, and the problem, like weeds, would continue to grow without treatment. This symposium, he said, is the beginning of that treatment.