Last month, a 1 year-old boy died after being exposed to fentanyl at his New York City daycare. The owner of the Bronx facility has since been charged with murder, assault, and child endangerment. The boy is believed to have died after fentanyl was circulating in the air as it was being cut for dealing within the facility. Three other children were sent to hospital following exposure, but survived.
What is alleged to be the case, according to neighbours quoted in news reports, is that the daycare was set up as a front for drug dealing. There were periods where they had no children enrolled and instead an endless stream of grown men came and went from the facility.
It was clear to the community that something wasn’t right about this place. Yet apparently city inspectors didn’t see things the same way, because the facility passed a daycare inspection just days before the tragic incident occurred.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has been defensive of city staff. “The team did their job,” he said, noting that background checks were done on the daycare employees. “Who did not do their job were the people who were there to protect the children. That is what was the most frightening aspect of this, because everything appeared normal based on the standards we put in place.”
This story should be bigger news. Sure, it’s received a bit of international attention. But what it hasn’t generated is shock and outrage and demands for change.
That this even happened is a sign that things have gone horribly wrong. That it hasn’t caused widespread outrage suggests that part of what’s wrong is our way of looking at the drug crisis.
After backing away from the “war on drugs” over 20 years ago, we have gone in the opposite direction. The system now pushes a judgment-free approach to the normalization of hard drug use and culture.
The people running the drug site at the daycare should be judged as moral failures, as the worst of lowlifes, and that anyone doing likewise should feel deep shame. Instead, we as a society are sending the message that no one involved in the current crisis has any moral agency. The only solutions are less judgment, less policing, more normalization, more government injection sites, and very little pressure for addicts to enter treatment.
During the recent Toronto mayoral race, I campaigned on phasing out drug-injection sites and replacing them with treatment centres. It’s a compassionate vision that places treatment of addicts ahead of policing, but even that light approach was criticized as too tough by the activist networks in my city.
Since the election, Toronto residents have learned just how bad things have become. A young mother was killed by a stray bullet as dealers battled it out in front of a drug site located in a family neighbourhood.
One of the drug site employees has since been charged with helping the alleged shooter escape and police are investigating the site for hosting dealing inside the facility. It’s basically a government-run drug den, yet it still operates with impunity.
Parents in the area have found fentanyl lying around the neighbourhood in little baggies, presented like candy. We’re lucky that a repeat of the Bronx tragedy hasn’t yet happened in Toronto.
Thankfully, the conversation is starting to shift. People are seeking a better way, one that treats drug addicts with compassion but also acknowledges that we can’t tolerate this urban decay anymore.
Recently, a dozen leading addiction experts in Canada sent an open letter to the federal health minister criticizing so-called “safe supply” programs that provide free drugs to addicts. They say the distribution programs are leading to addicts selling these drugs for money to in turn purchase harder drugs. They add that the product is getting in the hands of first-time users, creating new addicts. The signatories have also spoken out against the bullying that drug culture activists are using to silence concerned experts.
The drug approach throughout North American states and provinces all differ in their specifics, but what they have in common is that for the past decade they’ve all drifted towards more liberal policies. We now see those policies are failing and people fear their community will be the next San Francisco, which has rapidly declined in recent years.
A toddler shouldn’t die from fentanyl in the air at a daycare. Full stop. There is no rationalizing what happened. And there’s also no denying that our current drug culture makes such tragedies more likely to happen.
