Lori Falce: Treat addicts to save children

Keeping kids safe from medicine is something that is taken pretty seriously. Anyone who has tried to unscrew a childproof prescription bottle with arthritic hands or hack their way into the hermetically sealed bubble pack of some over-the-counter cold pills can testify to that.

When my husband was taking nitroglycerin cream for his heart, I went to all lengths to scrub every trace of it from any area that could come in contact with our son’s skin because it could cause a drop in blood pressure. For my 6-foot-tall husband with a cardiac condition, that was a good thing. For a preschooler, not so much.

My mom friends and I obsessed over the right dosage of medication for a fever. We debated the schedule for staggering ibuprofen and acetaminophen to best treat teething pain. There were discussions about vaccines and antibiotics and what was safe for a mom to take while breastfeeding.

And so it astounds me when a child is lost to a drug death. Not just a minor because, as the mother of a 13-year-old now, I realize how much is out of my control. No, we are frequently assailed with the entirely avoidable deaths of our youngest and most vulnerable.

In October, a Beaver County mother begged police to give her baby Narcan after she found her stamp bags of heroin in the 10-month-old girl’s mouth. Van Marcus Redding of Carnegie pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the May death of his 4-year-old son, Avant, who just wanted to eat his Happy Meal on the coffee table — the same table where Redding was packaging fentanyl he was selling. Avant was dead by morning.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They are all too common. In 2019, the American Academy of Family Physicians found that the number of children and adolescents dying from opioids had increased steadily from 1999 to 2008 before dropping through 2014. It then spiked through 2016.

Were many of these older, high school-aged kids? Yes, but the second-largest group was the youngest — the kids Avant Redding’s age and younger.

These are the stories that can make a parent shake with terror and rage. We see all the reasons we hover and obsess. We want to rail at the casual carelessness that let these little lives be lost. It would almost be easier to deal with deliberate evil than such haphazard negligence.

Evil is easy to judge. Easy to condemn. Easy to fight. Lock up someone who deliberately hurts a child and you remove the problem.

But we can’t lock up a thoughtlessly forgotten danger. It’s harder to combat addiction than it is abuse because it spreads like a contagion and settles in like a deep depression. If addiction were easy to root out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wouldn’t have reported 100,300 drug deaths between May 2020 and April 2021.

Because it’s not an easy fix, it becomes more than an addict’s problem. It’s an addict’s family’s problem. It affects parents and spouses. Most tragically, it affects children — sometimes when they watch Mom go in and out of rehab or when Dad goes to jail for possession or when they are taken away and put in foster care. It destroys them when they die because of someone else’s need for a fix.

We do not have enough treatment for all of the people suffering from opioid addiction. That has to change. As long as we don’t have enough beds for rehab or enough transitional housing for those coming out of rehab or enough support for the families, more kids will die because they picked up a tiny plastic bag or ate chicken nuggets off a table they didn’t know was salted with fentanyl.

And if we don’t find a solution, we are all part of the problem.