Fighting drug addiction requires urgency, innovation

The number of babies born dependent on drugs at Beebe Healthcare in Lewes has risen sharply in the last three years, from 19 in 2013, to 50 babies in 2015. That means about one baby every week is born dependent on drugs.

“It's an epidemic,” Beebe's director of Women's Health Services said.

Those are the births.

In a four-month period, roughly coinciding with the the Cape Region's summer season, three Sussex County babies died. Privacy laws are invoked to withhold details, but child welfare officials have confirmed all three were heroin-related.

If these children had died of a communicable disease, health officials would convene task forces to identify an effective antibiotic and start work on a new vaccine.

Hospital and state welfare officials did, in fact, convene a task force, but it was not working on a way to stop drug addiction. The task force worked for months to refine procedures for when a hospital should release a baby born drug-dependent to its parents. Just weeks after the parents of a baby born drug-dependent were charged with his murder, new guidelines were adopted.

Could the new guidelines have protected any of the children who died? They would have at least created a safety net to surround these children and improve their chances. But an effective safety net requires caseworkers, counselors and medical supervision. None of that comes free.

What's more, the epidemic is not limited to drug-dependent babies. It takes weeks to get into drug treatment, but many addicts are aware that if a woman is pregnant, federal law requires that she go to the front of the line.

Her treatment will likely involve methadone; her baby will likely be born drug-dependent. The epidemic of drug-dependent babies will not end. It will continue.

Faced with Ebola, our nation raced to find better treatments and build emergency hospitals in Africa.

The epidemic we face at home is heroin and opioid addiction. Defeating it will require more than amended protocols; it will take a new sense of urgency and every ounce of innovation that America is so well known for.

Our families and our babies deserve no less.