Drug Orphans : Parents Who Can’t Say ‘No’ Are Creating a Generation of Misery

Before he witnessed the final proof, the boy found the circumstantial evidence. There was the blowtorch under the bed and the fire-blackened “king-size” spoon he had seen around the motel room--both essentials in preparing illegal drugs for injection.

But the clincher, he says, was the day he discovered his mother actually sticking a needle into her arm.

“I knew what was going on,” the 17-year-old recalls. “But until I caught her red-handed shooting it, I thought she was just rocking it,” he adds, referring to his mother’s use of rock or crack cocaine, which is usually smoked but can be injected.

In the argument that followed, his mother told him of her drug use, “If you don’t like it, get the (blank) out.”

He did.

“She was my mother,” he says, describing the finality of the break three years ago.

Another 17-year-old whose life centers around the Los Angeles Youth Network in Hollywood also left home three years ago. His story is less dramatic but the break seems equally permanent. His mother was a cocaine user, he says, and she began selling household appliances, including a television she had given him as a present, to buy drugs.

Ultimately, the unpaid bills, the lack of food and the general chaos of home became too much.

“To tell you the truth when I left I didn’t even know I was running away,” he says. “I thought I was just gone for a couple of days.” After a pause, he adds, “But after I got up here I found I could make a life for myself.”

In the latest furor over drugs in American society, the lives of these two juveniles are exercises in irony. Because their mothers could not say no to drugs, both high school dropouts--whose peer group is typically the focus of anti-drug campaigns--are homeless.

They aren’t alone. Social service agencies, hospitals and child care facilities in Los Angeles and around the country report that children--ranging from infants to adolescents--are being forced into the homes of grandparents and other relatives, foster care, psychiatric wards, even the streets by their parents’ drug use.

Locally, these drug orphans encompass a broad spectrum of misery, ranging from the two 17-year-olds, whose outlook is relatively hopeful, to a 1-year-old girl--apparently blinded and suffering other brain damage from abuse she received in the home of a drug-using parent. For the past three months the girl has lived in a house operated by the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles, a private, nonprofit group. She and the five other infants and children in the home require 24-hour-care and most have physical and mental problems linked to parental drug abuse. The blind girl, for instance, only recently emerged from a nearly constant cocoon of sleep or semi-consciousness to make her first attempts at crawling and walking, according to the bureau’s Pat Darroch.

Care of the blind girl and the others in the home costs $4,200 to $4,500 a month with about half subsidized by Los Angeles County, Darroch says. Children generally stay at the house six to nine months--until they are ready to be reunited with their parents, who must be drug free and submit to random testing, or to a foster home, she adds.

The children’s bureau home is an extreme example of the care required by drug children. By far the greatest number are placed with foster parents, who may care for these children for years, even decades.

But despite such intervention, often at very early ages, those who work with drug orphans often fear they are doing too little, too late. Although their perspective may be skewed by close association with the children, there is a striking unanimity of opinion that the next generation will be a troubled one.

Sounding a Warning

Darroch’s comment is typical. “The school system is going to be flooded with these kids in a couple of years,” she says, sounding a warning that already has become a reality in many school districts, including Los Angeles.

Avon Dawdy, president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Foster Parents Assn. and a foster parent for more than 25 years, has concerns that are more far-reaching. “If we don’t do something to curb the drug use of these people who are having babies, we’re going to have an entire generation that can’t take care of themselves,” she declares.

Will Devers, who specializes in “high-risk” drug-child cases at the Los Angeles Department of Children’s Services, says that an infant turned over to the care of his department often has siblings who also must be found and cared for. His current case load totals 48 drug babies, he says, all but two with cocaine-using parents.

Drug Horror Stories

Social workers seem to have an inexhaustible fund of horror stories about the children of drug-abusing parents. Darroch, Devers and others tell tales of parents living in cars with their children because they could not both pay the rent and buy drugs, of squalor that repels hardened policemen and refrigerators so empty “there wasn’t even a cockroach that had died of starvation.”

Children born in such circumstances start life with biological as well as environmental handicaps. Research by Dr. Ira Chasnoff, a pediatrician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, and others indicates that babies born of addicted mothers are more likely to have lower birth weights and smaller brains, indications that later on they may have learning disabilities as well as behavioral abnormalities.

Chasnoff, who is president of a perinatal research group involved in long-term study of cocaine-addicted infants, cautions, however, that researchers are only beginning to track the children of cocaine users so that the long-term impact, while potentially enormous, is unknown. “We’ve never had a drug like cocaine before that has affected such a large number of families,” he says, noting that heroin, alcohol and other addictive drugs don’t seem to have the “chaotic” impact of cocaine on the family.

Unknown Scope

Despite these emerging concerns, the overall dimensions of the problem--nationally and regionally--are unclear, largely because no single agency or group tracks all such cases. There are indicators of its scope, though, ranging from figures supplied by local agencies to the anecdotal testimony of social workers, foster parents and doctors.

Most widely publicized are the so-called “crack babies,” infants born with their mother’s addiction to that cheap, highly addictive and easily obtainable form of cocaine.

And there are new, startling bits of evidence that this earliest form of child abuse may cut across economic and racial lines. A study released over the weekend by Chasnoff and other researchers found no significant difference in the rate of drug use during pregnancy by middle- and upper-income women compared with indigent women who most often have been blamed for the surge in addicted babies.

“People have always assumed that it (drug abuse during pregnancy) is only a problem in urban minority populations,” said Chasnoff.

Testing Positive

The study of 715 pregnant women in Pinellas County, Fla., during the first six months of this year found that 15.4% of white patients tested positive for drugs while 14.1% of black patients tested positive. But it also found that minority women who use drugs or alcohol during pregnancy are almost 10 times more likely to be reported to child-abuse authorities than white woman who do so, because many attend public clinics that are required by law to report suspected perinatal substance abuse.

Nationwide, it is estimated that as many as 375,000 children are born annually with some form of drug addiction. Estimates for cocaine-addicted babies run as high as 200,000 per year--with the rate doubling each year in major cities.

Locally, the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services reports that 2,284 infants suffering from some form of maternal drug abuse--usually cocaine--were referred to the department from August, 1988 to July, 1989. That’s an average of 190 infants per month.

“Nearly all of our babies that are coming into the (foster care) system are drug babies,” says foster parent Dawdy. Like others, Dawdy cares for infants and children referred by the county’s children’s services department. Another foster parent, Jeanette Lohnes says, “I get at least five calls a day (to care) for drug babies. That’s all we’re getting these days is drug babies.” Dawdy, Lohnes and others agree that a dramatic rise in drug-afflicted infants began three to four years ago.

Difficult Count

Beyond infancy the counting of drug orphans becomes more difficult.

At the Los Angeles Youth Network’s drop-in center in Hollywood, social worker Charles Hoeker estimates that roughly half of the 20 to 30 homeless teen-agers who stop by daily left home partly because of parental drug and alcohol abuse. Dr. Thomas Hicklin, psychiatrist in charge of the 15-bed children’s ward at Los Angeles County Medical Center, says that perhaps a quarter of his patients have problems related to drug abuse by parents. It’s not a large number, he says, but then the ward is the end-of-the-line for many children from drug-abuse homes. “The ones that we see can’t make it in foster homes,” he explains.

Elsewhere, a study by the National Committee on the Prevention of Child Abuse found that last year in the Washington, D.C. area--one of the few areas where such figures are available--90 percent of “caretakers” reported for child abuse were active substance abusers.

Requests for Care

In the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, requests for foster care increased 71% from 1985 to 1987, according to a regional government study. Though dated, the latter finding supports the widely held opinion among social workers and foster parents that they are being deluged with infants and children whose lives have been deformed by drug abuse in the womb and in life.

“If there’s physical abuse or sexual abuse, it’s probably related to drug abuse,” says Darroch of the children’s bureau. “. . . I guess I haven’t had the experience of having a stone sober person who sexually abused their child.”

By current standards, then, older drug orphans such as the two 17-year-olds may be lucky. The first, for instance, recounts only one example of attempted abuse by his mother and one severe beating by assailants on the street. Although he admits to using cocaine heavily himself, he maintains that he has largely stayed away from drugs for the past two years. “I despise drugs now,” he says with apparent conviction. Moreover, social worker Hoeker credits him with a quick mind, honesty and a willingness to try to get off the streets, currently by trying to join the Navy.

Nonetheless, during a conversation it becomes clear that his mother’s use of drugs has marked him for life in sad and peculiar ways.

“I was told I was born in Hawaii. I’ve been told I was born in L.A.,” he says. “ . . . I don’t even know where I was born.”