Heroin Found in Toddler’s Trick or Treat Bag Instead of Candy
Most kids love Halloween. They get to go around the neighborhood dressed as their favorite character and knock on the neighbor’s doors and stockpile as much candy as they can. It’s a pretty innocent time as a kid and most people have fond memories of Halloween. However, some treats are trickier than others these days. The opiate epidemic has been going full-steam ahead and it seems like no one, not even children, are immune to its effects. You know that the world is completely crazy when heroin is found in a 3-year-old’s bag of candy.
In Oak Hill, West Virginia, police were called when a 3-year-old’s parents found heroin in their child’s candy bag after trick-or-treating. The local police chief said the child’s parents found a dark substance wrapped in a rubber glove, which field tested positive for heroin. Luckily, no one was hurt, and the family found the heroin before it wound up in their baby’s mouth. The Oak Hill police say the heroin most likely came from an area called Hidden Valley, where lots of kids go trick-or-treating every year.
Am I the only one who’s sick of stories like this? Could you imagine if someone’s child actually ate heroin thinking it was candy? Imagine a family watching in horror as their child is trying to be revived with Narcan after eating heroin. But that’s where our society is at these days. Unfortunately, it’s not out of the realm of reality for something like this to happen with the amount of people who use, buy, and sell drugs. Fortunately, a possibly fatal mistake was caught before a child got hurt.
When are we really going to do something about this epic problem? Not only do we have toddlers mistakenly getting their hands on hardcore drugs, but we also have ex-DEA agents blowing the whistle on Big Pharma and the drug distributors who caused this whole problem to begin with. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get rid of the opiate problem for good but for now, we’ve got a huge problem.
Drug rehabilitation is one of the biggest tools we have in fighting this problem. While preventing addiction is one of the best ways to slow down the epidemic’s progress, helping those already struggling with addiction is of the utmost importance. If more people had access to proper, long-term treatment, we might not have problems like 3-year-old’s winding up with heroin mixed in with their candy. Do I think someone did that on purpose? No. But I do believe the effects of drugs make some people completely oblivious to what’s going on in the world around them. If more drug rehab programs were available, maybe we could get ourselves out of this mess.
