Keep heroin’s destruction out of the reach of children

Heroin and opiate abuse is not child’s play. Unfortunately, however, a distressing case out of Warren this month and others like it across the nation prove otherwise.

They illustrate that the toxic tentacles of opioids know no bounds of decency in their destructive life-sucking reach. They also cry out to marshal more resources to attack the insidious regional and national epidemic on yet another battlefront.

In Warren last week, the mother of two toddlers who were revived with an opiate-reversal drug earlier this month was arraigned in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court on two child-endangering charges. Carlissa V. Davis, 18, pleaded not guilty, and Judge Ronald Rice set bond at $50,000. The children’s grandmother, Lisa Davis, pleaded not guilty to a charge of permitting drug abuse.

Authorities believe Carlissa’s daughter, 21 months old, and son, 9 months old, had opiates in their systems. They were revived with naloxone at ValleyCare Trumbull Memorial Hospital and later at Akron Children’s Hospital. Fortunately, the heroin-antidote drug worked effectively on both children. They were released from the hospital in good condition and wisely placed in the protective custody of Trumbull County Children Services.

Not all such cases, however, have happy endings. In Provo, Utah, 1-year-old Penny Cormani died from an apparent overdose of heroin while under her mother’s care, The Deseret News reported last month. An autopsy found a lethal amount of heroin in her system, and both of her parents have a long history of drug abuse, The News reported.

SCOPE OF PROBLEM

Disturbingly, such cases are not isolated. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, at least 2.2 million children in this country live in constant danger with a parent who is dependent on or abuses illicit drugs. What’s worse, it reports, in cases where help is requested, addiction-treatment systems are frequently unprepared to meet the needs of families in which substance abuse has reared its ugly head. Many families simply fly far under the radar.

That’s a risk that this nation can ill afford to accept as the ruinous impact of substance-abusive parents on their children widens. Child-welfare authorities argue that in addition to a heightened risk of mistreatment, drug-dependent parents too often raise children who exhibit poor cognitive skills, delayed social and emotional development, depression, anxiety, and other mental-health symptoms, physical health maladies and substance-use problems.

To prevent such disastrous consequences, clearly more must be done. Toward that end, the Child Welfare Information Gateway has assembled a list of promising and innovative prevention and treatment strategies that community groups and institutions on the front lines of the epidemic would be wise to embrace. They include:

Early identification of at-risk families in substance-abuse treatment programs and through expanded prenatal screening initiatives.

Priority and timely access to substance- abuse treatment slots for mothers.

Recovery coaches for mentoring mothers and fathers to support treatment, recovery and parenting.

One concrete building block to achieving those ends would be to launch awareness programs and seminars targeted squarely at addictive parents to ensure their households are child-proofed from access to opioids or other destructive drugs and drug paraphernalia.

LEGISLATIVE PRIORITY

In the lawmaking arena, state and federal legislators should work to guarantee that such services receive the funding needed to make a difference. To our credit, both of Ohio’s U.S. senators currently have bills pending in Congress designed to attack the heroin plague comprehensively.

In fact, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Cleveland, was scheduled today to lead a program in Warren to discuss his legislation that would boost heroin-prevention efforts, improve tools for crisis response, expand access to treatment and provide ongoing support for lifelong recovery.

We hope the final form of that legislation and other bills like it give adequate attention to the growing epidemic of heroin and opioid risks of substance-abusive parents on their children. In so doing, the tragedies that have played out in Warren, Provo and elsewhere can produce some constructive long-lasting change in lessening the scourge of opioid destruction on all population groups, especially its youngest, most innocent and vulnerable victims.