Drug Addiction Causing More Children to Be Placed in Foster Care
National Public Radio — our taxpayer subsidized state media — reports government is still separating children from their parents. These separations continue to come as a result of bad decisions by the parents, but unlike the border separations, today’s instance is affecting U.S. citizens.
Between the years 2000 to 2017, there were a staggering 1.2 million instances of children being placed in foster care because their parents were too drug-addled to properly care for their own children. At the turn of the century, 15 percent of the children placed in foster care were due to parental drug addiction. By 2017 the percentage had more than doubled. Over one-third (36 percent) of the removals were due to drugs.
These enforced separations are bad for children of any age, but the drug-induced instances are particularly harmful because the children “were more likely to be 5 years old or younger than children removed for other reasons.”
These appalling figures come to us courtesy of Angelica Meinhofer of Weill Cornell Medicine, “A lot of the work out there [on the opioid epidemic] has focused on mortality and overdoses and how it affects adults. [It’s] less known how the epidemic might spill over to children. And that’s something I’m trying to shed light on.”
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