Convalo is a Needed ServiceThis is an excerpt from a Vancouver Sun article.....
Children have become victims in an opioid epidemic ravaging the nation —watching their parents shoot up, and sometimes, overdose and die.
In September, a chilling photograph captured the innocence lost on a four-year-old’s face in East Liverpool, Ohio. A man and woman were slumped over after overdosing in a vehicle; the boy was still strapped into his car seat in the back.
A week later and 600 miles away at a Family Dollar store in Lawrence, Mass., a hysterical toddler trying to wake her mother after an apparent drug overdose was captured on a cellphone video.
Then last month, a seven-year-old girl in McKeesport, Pa., told her school bus driver that she hadn’t been able to wake the adults in her house for days and that their bodies were beginning to change colours; she had been caring for three other children in the home, five years, three years and nine months old, and had gotten herself to school, police said.
A new study suggests that children in the midst of the nation’s drug war are battling more than psychological consequences.
The findings, published earlier this week in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics, show that from 1997 to 2012, 13,052 children were hospitalized for poisonings from opioid prescriptions, such as Oxycodone, Percocet and codeine.