Infants and toddlers are newest victims of Canada's deadly fentanyl crisis

National Post

5 days ago

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A toddler fell asleep in a bed shared with two older siblings. During the night, a sister noted the toddler's 'stiffening and eyes rolling back.' A parent and two other adults in the house had used heroin the night before.
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A caregiver woke from a nap with a baby and found the infant with 'cyanosis,' blue from lack of oxygen. There was vomit in the bed. Police found a bag of fentanyl outside the bedroom.
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In Amelia's case, a scrap of tinfoil with drug residue was found in her car seat cupholder.
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Her father had been arrested on drug charges days before her death. Her mother had stopped using and had stayed clean for several years after she became pregnant with Amelia, even contacting family services herself during her pregnancy for help to stay sober, but then relapsed into daily fentanyl use weeks before Amelia died. A family member had contacted local family and children's services, but both parents denied she was using again. 'Further attempts' to schedule visits became difficult when the mother failed to respond, court heard. Contact was eventually made, and a home visit scheduled for the day Amelia died, but her mother left a voice message at 5:50 a.m. that morning, cancelling the visit.
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Both fentanyl and carfentanil were found in Amelia's blood.
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The mother, who had been sexually abused by an uncle when she was a child, went into foster care at 12 and started using crack cocaine at 14, pleaded guilty to criminal negligence causing death. In December 2019, she was sentenced to four years less time served.
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'No sentence will bring Amelia back, but the sentence imposed must reflect that a young life has been lost in these tragic circumstances,' Justice Melanie Sopinka said in delivering her decision.
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Fentanyl alone, or in combination with other drugs, was the primary drug of toxicity in the Western study. In most cases, fentanyl was found in the child's play or sleeping area. A common narrative was that the child was found unresponsive after being put down for a nap.
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'With opioid overdose, you don't die right away — I think they put the baby down, thinking it was going to be OK, they went to sleep and woke up, and everything wasn't OK.'
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Historically, prescription meds caused most childhood opioid deaths, said the study's first author, Dr. Katrina Assen, a pediatrician at the Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary. 'Now we're switching to fentanyl.'
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Seven children in their study were white; three were Indigenous. The households were often small, cluttered, untidy and disorderly. There were often a lot of people living in them — five on average. The mean age of the children that died was just under two, an especially 'exploratory age,' the authors wrote. When kids transition from age two to four, they 'climb anywhere and eat everything,' Rieder said.
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As a former foster parent, Rieder said he knows from his own experience that child protection services are under-resourced, over-stressed and facing a scarcity of foster families. 'I think because of resource constraints children are often in situations in which they might be potentially in harm's way,' he said.
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Half the deaths his group found were classified as accidental; for the other half, the manner of death was deemed 'undetermined.'