Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

This is an important topic, because people spend time and money pushing for social policies based on their belief that all opioid users are the homeless, dysfunctional people they see living on the street. Washington state has had republicans pushing for laws that would allow CPS to remove kids from a parent based entirely on the information that the parent uses illegal opioids [0]. If you think all of those parents are living in tents and motels and begging for food while spending the day high, this might sound reasonable. Putting kids in foster care is better than letting them die, is the argument.

But it isn’t reasonable, partly because there are so many opioid addicts that don’t show up in measures of homelessness etc. These laws would involve putting 10,000 kids into foster care so that maybe 10 deaths are prevented - and this would overwhelm the foster system entirely, tripling the size in an instant, so you’d almost certainly see ten children die because they were put into the system.

[0] As an example of the level of thought and knowledge going into these attempts, one legislator wrote a bill that said any opioid use meant CPS should remove your child. Don’t know if they didn’t know it could be a prescribed medication or what.

I would assume CPS in the context of drug addicts are not just worried about basic living conditions, but also about neglect by the parents.

I would be worried about the child of an alcohol addict, let alone an opioid addict.

But this is just an assumption; I don't actually know of any statistics correlating addiction with neglect.

I would wonder though how many opioid addicts are more addicted for literal pain relief reasons, to give a bad comparison someone like House on the TV show. In that case I could see it working out fine, that's much more like buying pain medication illegally because you can't afford or can't see a doctor for some reason.

CPS doesn’t draw a distinction between living conditions and neglect. They are only supposed to look for neglect and abuse, including placing children in unsafe situations. Their guidance documents are full of statements like “it is not neglect for children to share a bedroom.”

Living conditions here was just shorthand for the existence of "they could be your neighbor and you just don't know about their drug habit". Addiction of any kind does increase the likelihood of neglect, but my point is that it is not intrinsically harmful to the child and absolutely is not enough reason to remove a child from the home.

That proposal is meant to punish the parents and make it easier to take kids off non-addicts that dont conform to this and that. It would just be a question of time till they try to extend it to weed or whatever they associate with hated groups.

It is not like republicans would care what happens with kids themselves. If they get harmed by foster system (which they will) that will just allow them to cut fundings to foster system.

Yeah 100%. CPS has in their manuals repeated the phrase “it is not considered neglect for a family to be poor.” That suggests they’ve been weaponized often against “people we don’t like.”

The other thing of note is that that same group of people are more interested in fostering and adopting and that it’s also a way to indoctrinate the children of “people we don’t like.”

Pretty much all their "it's not neglect to be black" type crap that you'd think doesn't need to be said but fills their policies makes sense when you realize that CPS is staffed in large part by the kind of people who should never have that power (the good ones wash out, just like with cops) and it's administrated by people who need to keep the agency looking decent enough that the public doesn't have the politicians defunded (and leave them out of a job).

Remember dukie from the wire. He would be one such example. Functional parents, addicts, but functional. Not living on the streets.

Why use fictional examples when JD Vance's own mother is one such case.

Is she? When JD proposed to his wife, his wife made it clear that she was opposed to JD's mother's ever having unsupervised time with the children they planned to have. (Source: JD's interview with Rogan right before the election.)

Although she dropped her opposition years later after his mother improved, I still wouldn't hold his mother out as an example of a functional addict.

(Also when he was a child, didn't his mother send him to live with his grandparents because she was too dysfunctional to care for him? Or did I get that wrong?)

I wonder if they would've felt the same if his mother was predisposed to having too many glasses of wine with dinner. It feels like a third of Boomer couples I know are functional alcoholics. Way too much enthusiasm for wine, wineries, wine tasting, etc. for it to be healthy.

just stop all the programs, let the parents self-medicate, and let the kids do what they will. the problem will be solved in 12 months if the governments stays out of it. any solution has a cost in lost lives. some solutions don't keep killing people year after year.

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