The White Horse Rides Again

This story is just awful. A 7 year old girl gets on the school bus, goes through her school day, and mentions to her bus driver while heading home that she was not able to wake her parents that morning. The bus driver reports this to the police. They respond, and find the both parents – Christopher Dilly and Jessica Lally – dead of suspected overdoses, with three children, ages 5, 3 and 9 months, unattended in the home. Parents Overdose

The above story is becoming all too common with the rise of heroin usage and addiction across the US. According to the CDC, heroin deaths have nearly quadrupled in the decade from 2002 to 2013.

A goodly part of the reason or the increasing deaths is that synthetic opiates such as fentanyl and carfentanil are used to cut the heroin.

Fentanyl can be 50 times stronger than heroin, and carfentanil as much as 100 times more potent than fentanyl [5,000 times more potent than heroin]. Experts said an amount smaller than a snowflake could kill a person.

Adding to the danger of heroin cut with these drugs, is that the anti-narcotic Narcan, which can quickly counteract a heroin overdose, does not work on either fentanyl or carfentanil.

My heart goes out to the poor 7 year old girl who couldn’t wake her parents. Fortunately, the mother’s sister, who had been desperately trying for months to get officials to take some action to help, and begging her sister to let her take custody of the 4 children, is available to give these children a home.

Stories like this are not hard to find. And there seem to be more and more of them as time passes. I suspect all of our families have been touched by this scourge. Personally I have a cousin who fought her way out of heroin addiction. And I know of two other families with children who fought through addiction as well. And lastly, I have a good friend who lost his daughter to heroin. She was in her early 20s, and a talented artist with all of life before her. He is heartbroken.

The damage that drug dealers cause is exponential in nature and hard to believe unless you have seen it. I don’t know what the answer is to reign this in, but I have to wonder if the Philippine President isn’t onto something, because due to his hard stance against drug dealers his popularity is soaring and Philippine prisons overflowing from drug arrests.