At a small dinner party just recently a friend told us about
her brother, a psychiatrist and addiction specialist in the Midwest. Things have gotten so out of hand there
that children requiring care because substance use renders their parents
incompetent aren’t being placed directly into foster care. A clogged, sluggish system only reviews
placement options once a week. In
the meantime the children are given “shelter” in psychiatric wards. Your guess is as good as mine as to
which environment is safer: at home with addicted parents incapable of properly
caring for them or in a ward amidst minds awry from causes other than
drugs. To compound this lose/lose
situation, the children in temporary placement occupy beds needed for children
who genuinely require treatment in a psychiatric ward.
Lose/lose/lose.
I’ve been mulling this situation over ever since I first
heard about it. Today I saw an
editorial in The New York Times - Children
of the Opioid Epidemic. You
can find it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/opinion/young-victims-of-the-opioid-epidemic.html
While going online to locate the Times editorial I came
across an earlier Wall Street Journal article, “The Children of the Opioid
Crisis,” written by Jeanne Whalen on December 15th. That reporting brought me full circle
back to the Midwest. You can find
that excellent reporting here: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-children-of-the-opioid-crisis-1481816178
The Journal article told, yet again, the
story of police apprehending overdosed parents in Ohio parked in their car
while their young boy was in the back seat. My friend Jessica Nickel, the awe-inspiring leader of the
Addiction Policy Forum, had written an essay about that boy. For her the story was too close to
home. http://www.addictionpolicy.org/single-post/2016/10/05/The-Boy-in-the-Back-Seat
Today there is one small, tragic, change of fact in Jessica’s story. Back in October when she wrote, the
statistic was 129 deaths a day due to drug overdoses. More current figures show
that the number has risen to 144 a day! Worse, that number is likely to continue
to rise before we see a decline.
As the addiction epidemic mounts it is clear that we not
only have to act on prevention, first responders, treatment,
recovery, law enforcement and the judicial process. We have to pay prompt and dedicated attention to the
recovery of children affected by this crisis. A compelling component of our recovery as a society is
staring us in the face. The Times
reminds us, “There was a big spike in foster care cases during the
crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. The government was far too slow to act then, and it is in
danger of being dangerously behind the curve again.”