Source: The New York Times
It was a horrific video — a young mother who had overdosed was lying unconscious on the floor of a Family Dollar store in Lawrence, Mass.
Adding a gut-wrenching kick to the scene was that the woman’s 2-year-old daughter, wearing purple footie pajamas, was tugging at her mother’s limp arm, trying to wake her up. The girl was wailing. The mother looked lifeless.
A store employee recorded the scene while waiting for medics. When they arrived, they revived the mother and took her and her daughter to a hospital. The video, which became public two days later, spread across the internet.
Sadly, the police said, the opioid epidemic in New England and elsewhere has reached such proportions that it is no longer a shock to see drug users collapse in public. In Massachusetts, more than four people a day die from drug overdoses.
What is new, they said, is that addicts are increasingly buying drugs, getting high and passing out with their children in tow.
The Lawrence police estimate that children are now present in perhaps 10 percent of the drug calls to which they respond.
“It’s just a horrifying byproduct of this opiate crisis,” said Thomas Cuddy, a special assistant to Police Chief James Fitzpatrick of Lawrence.
In New Hampshire, heroin was identified as a risk factor in 7.62 percent of investigations of child neglect this year through April, according to the state Division for Children, Youth and Families; that is up from 4.8 percent from October to December 2014.
Marylou Sudders, the secretary of health and human services in Massachusetts, said more and more children were coming to the attention of the child welfare system as parents bought drugs or overdosed in front of them.
“Children are as much the victims of what we’re seeing in this epidemic,” she said. “It’s a poignant reminder that our interventions have to be broader than just treatment for the individual but have to include loved ones, especially children.”
Categories: Addiction, America, The Muslim Times, USA