Make Tamika a Battle Cry in War on Drugs

For those with the stomach to get through it, last week’s series in The Times on the tragedy of little children living with substance-abusing parents took readers into an unforgettable dark corner of America.

The drama played out in The Times’ narrative and recounted below is not a pretty one and should shame a society that tolerates it.

Tamika Triggs is a 3-year-old girl, “her sweet faced framed by golden ringlets of hair.” And that’s where the fairy tale stops. Tamika lived in at least nine different places this past year with her 34-year-old HIV-positive, drug-addicted mother. Her “homes” included a garage, crack den and a druggie’s apartment.

Until rescued last week by social workers who read The Times’ story, Tamika often went 24 hours without eating. Her weight dropped a full 10% in one week. Her teeth were brushed with her mother’s presumably HIV-infected toothbrush.

Tamika’s father is in prison, and her mother frequently left her alone for a day or a week at a time with virtual strangers while she prowled for drugs. Tamika was once left with a prostitute who took her along onto streets “so police wouldn’t suspect she was looking for tricks.”

The Times described one instance where Tamika laid in her mother’s arms as mother and friend smoked crack and shot up heroin in a ramshackle shed. Here is the reporter’s gruesome description: “ . . . intent on smoking the last crumbs of crack, she gently lowers [Tamika] onto a mattress moist with urine and semen. As mom inhales, Tamika sleeps, her pink and white sundress absorbing the fluids of unknown grown-ups.”

The Times’ series also describes the nightmare existence of 10-year-old Ashley Bryan and her 8-year-old brother, Kevin. These children go for weeks without a bath, eat only once a day (usually rice), and dodge punches from a drug- and alcohol-addicted father.

Kevin fishes in filthy dumpsters in search of clothes for his sister. Ashley, who fantasizes about buying a Bugs Bunny T-shirt and having a stomach full of candy, says the same prayer each night: “Just once, give me something good. Please, make my life better.’

Reading these horrid scenes, one concludes that for all the apparent effort, America’s commitment to eradicating drugs is faux--and worse, failing. The United States has a higher rate of drug abuse than any other industrialized nation.

Our president, vice president and assorted attorneys general are ruthless in their seek-and-destroy mission against tobacco. Would that they were as relentlessly hostile to Joe Cocaine as they are to Joe Camel.

We have bureaucrats who zealously chase down operators of leaf blowers, and outlaw paints are branded as the enemy by clean air commissars. East of the Los Angeles Basin, there are mandates to commit literally tens of millions of dollars to create habitat (read, homes) for rats and sand flies.

You’d think that the Tamikas and Ashleys and Kevins of this country deserve at least a few crumbs off this table of social conscience. If we can save a rat, why can’t we save a kid?

But these priorities are not going to change unless we rage against our national lack of determination to confront this war against our culture. This sickening scourge is a switchblade at America’s heart, and drug czars, treatment programs and outgunned social workers aren’t enough.

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Pulling punches and philosophizing loftily in tony salons won’t cut it any more. The fashionable tolerance for “recreational drug use” and claims that drug abuse is a “victimless crime” have to be rejected. The ACLU-driven “rights” of drug thugs and death peddlers deserve the contempt their consequences invite.

The way to begin--and it is merely a beginning--is for Congress and state legislatures to commit every conceivable law enforcement and military resource to end this national disgrace. If we have the will, we will find the way. And because this enemy knows no limits, the way should not be limited.

Lacking resources is not our failure, nor is it the wit and creativity of our citizenry. At the moment our failure is one of resolve.

An outraged nation confronted child molesting with Megan’s law. Given all the strengths America possesses, surely we could write “Tamika’s Law.”