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The children of addiction

On a Sunday at the unofficial start of summer, somewhere between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, many Mid-Ohio Valley parents are likely contemplating how they will spend the next three months with their children, who are free from the constraints of the school year. These parents might be thinking about family vacations, outdoor activities, family members with whom the kids will get to spend some extra time … and most of them cannot begin to comprehend how a mother nursing a 5-week-old infant could allegedly declare to police that she smoked marijuana “all day, every day,” while doing so.

Nor can they fathom parents who would allow that infant to lose 2.06 pounds (because the child was “starving,” not because of a medical condition, according to police) in its first five weeks. It would be beyond them to think about allowing an infant to live in a home that also allegedly contained cocaine, hydrocodone, oxycodone and 6-monoacetylmorphone.

But here in the Mid-Ohio Valley — and beyond — we have a generation of children being born into homes where there is a chance they will be strapped into a car seat and trapped in a moving vehicle while two adults overdose and pass out in the front seat. They might find themselves walking down the street to a neighbor’s home to report that they cannot wake up their father; they might call 911 to report they believe one of their parents is selling drugs again. They might be abused and neglected. They might die — maybe even at the hands of someone who was supposed to be taking care of them.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the number of babies born addicted to opioids has tripled since 2002. The number of babies born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (withdrawal from any drug) has increased five-fold since 2000. There are nearly 5,000 children in state custody in West Virginia, and those numbers are also rising.

“Worst case scenarios are when the children are sexually abused. Terrible, terrible situations and quite frankly, there are times when some of the things that go on with children, we would probably think of those as torture,” said Nancy Exline, commissioner of children and families at the Bureau of Children and Families in Charleston.

Many families are essentially losing two generations to this plague.

Some law enforcement agencies find themselves trying to get the magnitude of this tragedy to sink in to the general public by releasing information and photos about the worst cases involving kids. They are desperate to break the head-in-the-sand cycle of far too many who continue to ignore — or enable — the situation.

And while law enforcement and other first responders fight with everything they have, the state Department of Health and Human Resources, says substance abuse was a factor in 80 percent of 9,116 cases in which petitions were filed to remove children from their homes between 2011 and 2015, according to a report in the Times West Virginian. There are not enough foster homes for all of those children.

West Virginia’s Bureau of Children and Families would probably welcome a few more qualified allies on that front; though the ability to be a warrior in this fight requires resources, love, patience and resilience not every family possesses.

There is a generation of children, particularly here in Appalachia, but across the country, that will grow up grateful for those who were able to open their homes and hearts. As we struggle to stop the poison creating that need, the rest of us should be grateful, too.

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