As soon as the child was born, she was taken from her mother. Both were addicted to heroin, Clermont County officials said.
The girl weighed 6 pounds, 8 ounces that day in 2009, but her weight dropped as she coped with tremors while withdrawing from the drug over the next couple weeks.
"I spent several days with her while she was still in the hospital," said Denise Strimple, 60, of Tate Township, the child's foster mother for the last 16 months. "I held her and cuddled her and let her know somebody loved her."
Known as Baby H to protect her identity, she is among an increasing number of children being removed from parents accused of using drugs in the Greater Cincinnati area.
Baby H was part of a 78 percent rise in two years of children taken from parents in Clermont County because of abuse or neglect, up from 132 in 2008 to 235 last year, said Tim Dick, deputy director of Clermont County Children's Protective Services.
About 41 percent of last year's cases involved drug abuse by parents. Of those 97 cases, 71 involved opiates such as heroin, Dick said. Marijuana was the second-most problematic drug. "Four years ago, cocaine was the drug of choice," Dick said. "Opiates have overtaken that. Heroin is cheap, and it's readily available."
In Butler County, the number of children removed because of drug or alcohol abuse by a parent increased by 68 percent in two years, said Jeff Centers, director of Children Services. Last year, 264 kids were removed for such reasons, up from 219 in 2009 and 157 the year before.
You know what's missing from this article?
The prevalence of welfare in these families.
Let's face reality for a second. When your food, clothing and housing are supported by the state what does that leave you?
TIME.
TIME.
And more TIME.
See, if these people were out looking for employment, they wouldn't have TIME to sit around all day getting high.
But if you are a family, Here's a partial list of all the governmental programs you have access to.
ADC
Food stamps
Unemployment
Subsidized housing
Medicaid
Earned income credit
General welfare
Free school lunches and breakfasts for the children.
When you add all that up, you can spend your whole day not doing shit.......... except getting high and screwing, which provides us with the derelicts of the future.
The conventional wisdom is that democrats are the party of compassion.
Exactly what's so compassionate about a newborn shaking from withdrawal tremors?
2 comments:
We watched the "Wild & Wonderful White Family of West Virginia" this weekend on Netflix. It's a documentary which mirrors this article and how to they get by without jobs? Social Security payments for being "crazy"--however there is only 60 seconds of the entire movie devoted to the entitlement system enabling these people. It's disgusting.
One gigantic hole in the logic of entitlements system is their failure to account for human nature. ECON101 teaches that rational people at any education level make life choices based on opportunity cost, not total opportunity. That means that before a rational person pursues income, they will take into account income loss from the alternative they can no longer pursue as a result.
What does this mean regarding entitlements? It means that when given the choice between welfare that might effectively pay $5 an hour vs. a labor job that pays $7 an hour, a rational person will view the labor job in terms of the difference: $2 an hour. Most rational people will not envision it being worth while to flip burgers for $2 an hour.
There's probably not a single Ivy League sociology textbook that recognizes this dynamic and the psychological death trap it creates.
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