Opioid crisis increasingly killing kids
In some places, ODs outstrip gun injuries among youth
When Penny Mae Cormani died in Utah, her family sang Mormon hymns — “Be Still My Soul” — and lowered her small coffin into the earth. The latest victim of a drug epidemic that is now taking 60,000 lives a year, Penny was just 1.
Increasingly, parents and police are encountering toddlers and young children unconscious or dead after consuming an adult’s opioids.
At the children’s hospital in Dayton, Ohio, accidental ingestions have more than doubled, to some 200 intoxications a year, with tiny bodies found laced by drugs like fentanyl. In Milwaukee, eight children have died of opioid poisoning since late 2015, all from legal substances like methadone and oxycodone. In Salt Lake City, one emergency doctor recently revived four overdosing toddlers in a night, a phenomenon she called both new and alarming.
While these deaths represent a small fraction of the epidemic’s toll, they are an indication of how deeply the American addiction crisis has cut. And communities from Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains and beyond are feeling its effects at all ages. In August, in the latest sign of the direness of the situation, President Donald Trump said he would declare the opioid crisis a national emergency, a move that could allow cities and states to access federal disaster relief funds.
Eighty-seven children died of opioid intoxication in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up from just 16 in 1999. By comparison, gunshot wounds kill four or five times as many children each year.
But at hospitals like Primary Children’s in Utah, drug overdoses now outstrip gun injuries among young people.
“There are no pill parties happening in preschools,” said Dr. Jennifer Plumb, the emergency doctor who recently treated four opioid-sick toddlers in a night. “The pills are everywhere.”
In Philadelphia this summer, a 9-month-old rolled onto a needle while in bed with her father. Kyleeh Isabella Mazaba, 20 months, died after drinking methadone left in a water bottle in the family van. James Lionel Vessell Jr., 2, swallowed oxycodone pills he found in a purse on his mother’s bed. And in early August, Kentucky officials treated an infant and three emergency responders believed to have been sickened by carfentanil-laced heroin that traveled through the air.
Often, emergency responders attempt to revive children with Narcan, an overdose reversal drug that works on small bodies as well as large ones. Then come the questions for investigators. How did the substance get there? Sometimes officials charge caretakers with neglect or manslaughter.
In Utah, most opioid overdoses at the state’s only children’s hospital involve buprenorphine, oxycodone, methadone and hydrocodone.
In Montgomery County, Ohio, which includes Dayton, the story is different. Drug peddlers have flooded the community with fentanyl, a legal synthetic used for extreme pain, and powerful analogues like carfentanil, a substance 5,000 times stronger than heroin.
Inhaling, touching or ingesting a carfentanil dose smaller than a few grains of salt can be lethal. In September of last year, Lee L. Hayes, 2, died in Montgomery County of fentanyl intoxication. In April, Nathan L. Wylie, 13, died of similar poisoning. And in May, Mari’onna Allen, 1, fatally overdosed in her grandmother’s home on Dayton’s East Fifth Street.
“It’s a disgrace that kids have to be subject to this,” said Mari’onna’s greatgrandmother, who declined to give her name. “They’re innocent and they don’t know drugs from candy.”