Last month I wrote about some news stories about kids being mixed up with drugs with the complicity of adults - or more accurately people of a legal age - and this Sunday about a substitute teacher who shared cocaine with two of her 14-year-old students.
As carelessness, negligence and stupidity have been with us since time immemorial, there are always going to be such cases. I thought I’d mention a couple more:
* Jennifer Leeming, the coroner investigating the death of three-year-old Cameron Concannon from northern England, who drank five teaspoon’s worth of his mother’s methadone and died from complications resulting from its ingestion, has declared it an accidental death. Cameron had found the container in a paper bag in his mother’s - Kelly Sale’s - handbag after Sale had returned from the pharmacy with her heroin replacement dosage. He had managed to open it, despite its child-resistant cap; the pharmacy in question said they checked it was closed properly before Sale returned home.
After drinking the contents he ran into his lounge room and told his mother what he had done. She tried to make him sick before he got to the hospital. It took him an “extremely unusual” amount of time to respond to the methadone. He suffered both a heart attack and massive brain damage.
Leeming traced what she said was a “catalogue of catastrophes” from the failure of the cap on the container to keep out a child, to the National Poisons Information Service not passing enough information on methadone to the hospital, the infirmary staff making inadequate notes on his condition and the nurses being distracted by New Year’s celebrations.
Surely though it started with Cameron’s mother not complying with the simple practice of keeping her methadone away from her young child’s reach?
* Police in Florida came to the apartment of 42-year-old Stanley Rollins very early one morning after complaints by neighbours of noise coming from his house. They found him outside with his four-year-old nephew and five-year-old niece, shouting. Inside they saw a crack pipe and smelled marijuana. Asking his niece about drug use by her uncle she took them to her uncle’s closet where a bag full of drugs was found. She also mentioned that he sometimes smoked dope in a cigar. The two kids were returned to their father.