NEWS: A Little Too Comfortably Numb

CULTURE: A Little Too Comfortably Numb

Two British parents who used their prescribed methadone to keep their infant from crying were told yesterday that only one of them will face prosecution.

Given her plea the court decided no action would be taken against the father, despite blood samples proving Mitchell's sedation was not a unique event and had been happening "regularly over a protracted period."

The case rather raises the question as to why two recovering heroin addicts, both on a prescribed heroin substitute, were allowed to remain caring for a young child.

Gemma Fennelly will be sentenced on May 3rd.

Reminds me of one of my favourite jokes.

"I was brought up in Glasgow, but I was never smacked as a child.

Well, maybe a gram or two to get me to sleep at night..."

Life imitates Art once again. Not to mention the fact that they lived in Edinburgh Grove.

The case rather raises the question as to why two recovering heroin addicts, both on a prescribed heroin substitute, were allowed to remain caring for a young child.

Um, because they were in recovery? And were taking legal medication?

It worked really well.

Obviously not, and that's a tragedy. But as far as I know, we haven't yet arrived at the point where we arrest people or take their children away before they commit a crime.

heroin's still illegal in the uk, right?

Only if you get caught.

Minority Report...

The point of this being . . . ?

That they had committed a crime.

And I'm sure since the mother was in recovery, and that giving her son drugs only "accidentally" killed him, she'll get a slap on the wrist for it.

So this is pretty much the logical conclusion of your pet meth mommies. How bout that.

nm

It doesn't say why they were at liberty in the article, but it may presumed that since they were being prescribed methadone, they were ostensibly in recovery.

Or do you just want everybody to have their children confiscated by the state and arrested and arrested if they've ever done a crime?

Because that's what you seem to be getting at.

Obviously, whatever program they were in didn't work. Equally obviously, they were not competent parents. And that's a breakdown of whatever monitoring system was supposed to have been in place. And hopefully, controls will be tightened.

But it's either idiotic or fascist to advocate disallowing parents to take care of their own children simply on the basis of their past mistakes, especially when they're manifestly attempting to reform.

First, I'm NOT defending the parents. Second, heroin IS still illegal, which one would assume is exactly why they were taking the LEGAL methadone INSTEAD of heroin, thereby breaking no laws, and in fact, doing the RIGHT THING (at least up to that point). Methadone, while still psychoactive, is a synthetic (opioid) reather than an actual opiate, and had a much longer half-life (3 days), which means it stays in the system a lot longer, thus lengthening the time serious withdrawal can set in. SA heroin user ma need to ingest more heroin in a few hours(some less), and spend all their lives trying to score it , oftencommitting other, often violent, crimes to obtain it; methadone can be taken once daily, legally. Locally, it's 15 bucks a day regardless of the strength they issue you. You show up at 5 AM and they give it to you and you then can more or less fuction as a law-abiding citizen.

What is NOT legal is drugging your child. Tragically, there wasno way to know they'd do that. Prior to that they seem to have followed the law - get legally prescribed methadone instead of illegal heroin.

So here I must agree with Bitch_PhD and Zarth. There was no way to know that the parents, who as far as the story reads were living upstanding lawful lies, were going to break laws and kill their baby. Without the slightest reason to suspect them, why would their kids get taken away? The government is not psychic (sometimes borderline psychO, perhaps) and could not possibly have foreseen this awful thing. I doubt they announced to the whatever child protection services are there that they were going to drug their baby, so how could the child have beenremoved from the home. By that logic, anybody taking potentially harmful prescription meds should have their offspring taken from them.

some people seem to think the odds of recovery are slim

stats seem hard to find online, that one comes from a heroin treatment centre though.

This is exactly my point, they weren't competent, the prosecutor claimed t hey had been giving this baby methadone for as long as 5 months, and traces of both heroin and cocaine were also found in his hair samples.
I'd hope whomever was prescribing them methadone had a responsibility to alert social services that there was a potential risk to their child, and i'd say that 2 drug addicts looking after a baby is at the very least a massive red flag that should put them at the top of the monitoring list. more than a third of neglect cases involve drug addicted parents, how many does it take before it's considered a big enough risk that the child should be taken into care until the parents have made it through recovery?

geez not this again..

those parents sucked, but there is no reason to take the child away from people who are in recovery. there is no making it "through" recovery...you are in recovery forever.

and this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methadone_maintenance is something many people, including parents, need to do for their entire lives. some people have pain issues and some people have addiction issues. but lots of people on methadone maintenance also have children, and do a perfectly fine job raising their children.

you guys can be so bossy. once again you can't take people's kids away because of their past, nor can you decide who should or shouldn't have kids. lots of stupid idiots have kids every second of every day. 14 year olds have kids. crack addicts have kids. psycho child molesters have kids. nazi skinheads have kids. etc.

We should stop putting assholes like this in jail. It doesnt work. Five lashes with a whip would work wonders however. Anyone who would commit a crime like this against a child does not deserve our sypathy. These people are no better than rapeists or child molesters. Any crime against children should carry severe conseqenses.

if everyone would just stop fucking we wouldn't have these problems.

i think rapists and child molesters are worser.

And angels are totally betterer.

edited because i don't even feel like gettting into it today. it's a tragedy.

We agree on that.

That's a good question, and it involves much thornier issues. Nor am I an expert on those issues. In a very real sense, anyway, every case is unique. I'm just pretty leery of any kind of preemptive invasion by state authority in general, so I'd want to be careful about setting the bar for state action high enough while remaining consistent with protecting the welfare of the child.

- you most certainly can take away people's kids if (like this couple in question) they have heroin and cocaine in their possession (not to mention are feeding a heroin substitue to their toddler)


And, uh, just because you've taken a trip to the methadone clinic and have some in your house does not automatically mean that you're in "recovery".
Doesn't work like that. Sorry

Not necessarily. It's possible to get it on prescription, in certain cases. But this is about methadone.