By Gary Dickson
Two cases in the national news recently have me wondering just how many children in this country start out their life with the deck stacked against their chances of ever succeeding. I know the two stories I”m going to mention are somewhat extreme, but I see similar types of news items make the papers, television and Internet on a semi-regular basis.
In Marietta, Georgia the mother of a 3-year-old was arrested after her drug deal went south. The deal didn”t happen because the woman”s toddler, who was in the back of a minivan that was being driven by a friend of his mother, blasted a hole through the roof of the vehicle with a 12-gauge shotgun. Of course, it was an accident. The child just happened to be playing with the loaded shotgun. But, it scared the drug dealer away. It also caused someone, thank goodness, to call the police. The mother, minivan driver and drug dealer were all arrested. State welfare investigators are deciding the future of the child.
In Missouri the kindergartners at an elementary school were asked to bring “pictures of their family for show and tell.” One student, perhaps he couldn”t find any pictures, took his mother”s meth pipe and a few baggies full of crystal meth. According to police the drugs tested positive for methamphetamine and were worth approximately $3,700. The mother was charged with possession of a controlled substance and first-degree child endangerment. She had no trouble posting her $7,500 bail.
Throughout history there have always been cases in which children have grown up dealing with an alcoholic parent who might have been abusive and difficult to live with. But, over the last 30 to 40 years, the spread of a number of kinds of illegal drugs, in addition to the alcohol, have made life for lots of children less idyllic than it seemed for those of us who watched “Leave it to Beaver,” and had stay-at-home moms who cooked dinner every night and baked pies on the weekends.
They say art mirrors society. A number of current television series deal openly with drugs. A few weeks ago my daughter was watching an episode of the TV series called “Weeds” she had downloaded from Netflix. It actually premiered back in 2005. It”s a comedy about a widow with two children. She gets into the marijuana business to support the children. Things have definitely changed. “Breaking Bad” deals with meth and “Sons of Anarchy” revolves around a motorcycle gang and its illegal activities, including drugs.
The U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Threat Assessment 2010 reported on the impact of illicit drugs in the United States. The report stated, “The economic cost alone is immense, estimated at nearly $215 billion. The damage caused by drug abuse and addiction is reflected in an overburdened justice system, a strained healthcare system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction.”
Health care and health insurance in America has been a hot topic for years. While it isn”t always possible to point a finger of blame specifically at drug abuse as the primary cause of the physical ailment that has caused someone to land in the hospital, it certainly is known by many health care providers to be an underlying factor. The dollar cost of care that has its origin in illegal drug usage is impossible to measure, but it is certainly huge.
The judicial system is overloaded because of the burden of illegal drug crime. The 2010 report cites 2008 FBI statistics that point out that 12.2 percent of more than 14 million national arrests were drug related. In 1987 only 7.4 percent of American arrests involved drug related crimes, so in a 20-year period the country has suffered a 65 percent climb in arrests due to drugs.
Drug usage in America has run the country off the rails and it doesn”t appear that its influence will wane anytime soon.
Gary Dickson is the publisher of the Record-Bee. Call him at 263-5636, ext. 24. Email him at gdickson@record-bee.com.
