The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:
Last year, 56 children who were on the state’s radar as victims of maltreatment died, or came perilously close to it, because they had swallowed their parents’ drugs. Many were infants or toddlers, and fentanyl was to blame in most cases. But there are a lot of ways to look at blame.
Some people will point an accusatory finger at the parents for failing to keep those drugs locked away. Others will say that Child Protective Services, well aware that fentanyl poses myriad risks, should have taken the children into foster care.
But a new law, sponsored by Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, D-Mukilteo, called the Keeping Families Together Act, which went into effect in July, prohibits caseworkers from using addiction alone as a reason to split up families — even when it’s a drug as lethal as the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Instead, families get counseled about the danger, while caseworkers provide them with safety plans and lockboxes to keep their pills secure.
Wishful thinking.
The legislation has a commendable rationale: Foster care is damaging to many children — even though it is intended to keep them from harm — and Washington has long been an outlier, taking infants away from drug-using parents more than other states.
Yet when the Keeping Families Together law sailed through the Legislature, it did not trigger more money for helping parents with addiction.
Calling that an oversight would be too gentle. In the face of abundant data, it is willful ignorance: The number of synthetic opioid deaths nearly doubled statewide from 672 in 2020 to 1,214 in 2021, just as lawmakers were hammering out details for the bill.
According to the Department of Children, Youth and Families, there are zero publicly funded beds for moms who need drug treatment in King County. The same goes for Pierce County, where caseworkers investigating child maltreatment now leave kids with their parents 43 percent more often than they did a year ago.
In that sense, the law is working. But it is clearly leaving more kids at risk.
In Everett, there is a model that could auger a better way. Evergreen Recovery Centers opened an 18-unit facility where moms can live with their infants and toddlers while getting treatment — no shattering of families, no putting kids into foster care. But it is funded almost entirely with county money and private donations.
Meanwhile, critical incidents involving fentanyl leave a dire conundrum: Continue to counsel families and beg the Legislature for more drug treatment beds, or remove potentially thousands of children from homes where adults are addicted to opioids.
The next round of data, arriving just as legislators gear up for their 2024 session, should help answer that question. But every digit on those reports will represent a child, and some of them won’t be alive as the debate unfolds.
