Counter-Currents
With Audio Version
How Do Babies Get Their Hands On Fentanyl?
Jim Goad
1,151 words
In a world that seems more nightmarish when I open my eyes every new dawn, the news stories that really rip my guts from my stomach and string them along a clothesline to dry are the ones about babies and toddlers overdosing from accidental exposure to fentanyl that their junkie parents had carelessly left within their reach.
In late July, a Pennsylvania man was found guilty of murdering his two-year-old son, who’d died of fentanyl exposure by apparently licking residue off one of “thousands of empty stamp bags…mixed in with donuts, cookies, and [his] three children’s toys” in their cluttered apartment.
Also in late July, a California couple pled no contest to manslaughter in the death of their 15-month-old daughter, who likely died of fentanyl exposure “by touching it and then possibly putting her hands in her mouth or touching her eyes” in an apartment where investigators found 2.7 grams of fentanyl—enough to kill about 900 adults.
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Yet again in late July, a bedraggled-looking North Carolina couple was charged with felony neglect and child abuse that caused serious bodily injury after their 11-month-old son OD’d on fentanyl: “Deputies said a search of the camper revealed unsanitary conditions along with various items of drug paraphernalia, drug residue, and uncapped syringes.” Police say the couple admitted that while lying with the infant in bed, they’d both injected fentanyl before falling asleep.
In early July, an Arizona mother was convicted of second-degree murder after her 13-month-old son—who’d been found with a fentanyl pill under his tongue—stopped breathing and died.
In June, a Nashville mother was charged with aggravated child neglect after her one-month-old daughter “started vomiting and changing colors” before overdosing on fentanyl.
In April, a Texas father was charged in the fentanyl-poisoning death of his two-year-old daughter “Neveah”—“Heaven” spelled backwards. Police say that before the child died, the man had allegedly run internet searches for “how to make a 2-year-old throw up” and how to get an “opioid-reversal drug” delivered via Door Dash.
In San Jose last year, a three-month-old girl died of a fentanyl overdose in a home that a DA described as “littered with opioids” and where “a baby bottle was found next to glass pipes.”
According to an article originally published in the LA Times this summer titled “In the fentanyl crisis, infants and toddlers become unsuspecting victims”:
America’s Poison Centers, which represents 55 accredited poison control centers in the U.S., reports a dramatic increase in fentanyl exposure in young children nationwide. In 2016, the centers received 10 reports of fentanyl exposure in children under age 6. That number was 539 in 2023.
The article quotes Dr. Emily Rose, who coauthored a study about treating pediatric opioid overdoses:
“If you have these children that are left in chaotic homes, in homes that have…drugs around, that just increases the risk exponentially, particularly for these little vulnerable kids that explore their world by putting everything in their mouths.”
In 91.3% of the 905 cases scrutinized in a 2024 report titled “Characteristics of Fentanyl Exposure in Infants and Toddlers Among U.S Children under 6 Years Old Reported to Poison Centers, 2012-2021,” the exposure was determined to be “unintentional.”
Short answer: In most cases, babies get their hands on fentanyl because their parents were too high and unconcerned to hide the violently deadly drug from their kids.
How deadly is it? According to the DEA:
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Just two milligrams of fentanyl, which is equal to 10-15 grains of table salt, is considered a lethal dose.
And that’s a lethal dose for adults. One would assume that it’d only take a couple grains to kill an infant. So, if a speck or two of the dirty black-market pill you’re smoking on tinfoil accidentally falls into your baby’s crib and the curious tot puts it in their mouth, baby go night-night forever.
In practical terms, if you accidentally kill a baby by carelessly leaving fentanyl residue all over your cramped and moldy apartment, the baby is every bit as dead as if you’d jabbed a needle in its arm and pressed down on the plunger.
This leads to a queasy moral question: Would it be worse if these parents had intentionally administered fentanyl to their hapless and hopeless spawn? I’m not talking about the legal difference between murder in the first degree and negligent homicide; I’m asking whether a sudden burst of murderous anger is ethically worse than a sustained pattern of loving your drugs far more than you love your child.
You look at the faces of these parents arrested for exposing their children to fentanyl through passive negligence, and you don’t see seething malice. You see self-pity. Self-interest. Murderous levels of selfishness.
I have a friend in Portland who married a woman from a wealthy background. Around the time the whole COVID thing started, his spouse decided it’d be fun to disregard her marriage vows, run away to a homeless tent camp, get addicted to fentanyl, let a male junkie spurt his seed into her womb, pop out a baby boy with nonfunctioning lungs two months prematurely, and abandon the doomed infant to the state’s care. He says that although it’s not his biological child, Oregon laws are so twisted in favor of declaring addicts to be a protected victim class that the state tried sticking him rather than his wife with the million-dollar-plus bill of keeping the baby on life support.
He said his wife has only visited her baby once. He also says that every time she visits him, usually looking to either beg or steal money, “I don’t think I’ve had a conversation with her where she hasn’t been holding a piece of tinfoil trying to get scraps of the fentanyl pills she smoked before off of it.”
She loves her drugs more than she loves her husband or her child—if she even loves them at all. I wouldn’t even say that she hates them; it’s more like she doesn’t even think of them.
When I told him that in my experience, the people surrounding addicts suffer a lot more than the addicts do, he agreed without hesitation.
I’ve known girls who told me they’d rather be hit than cheated on, because at least there’s some emotional investment in hitting them. At least you’re paying them some attention. But if you cheat on them, it’s as if they don’t even exist.
Does it hurt more when someone actively hates you, or when they don’t even remember your name? When I once asked a notorious countercultural figure what the worst thing a person can do to their enemies, he said without blinking, “Ignore them.”
Or, as a character said in George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play The Devil’s Disciple, “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”
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26 comments
A NYC Day care center saw 4 kids overdose on fentanyl (1 died), all of em age 3 or younger. Men with names like Felix Garcia, Grei Mendez, Carlisto Brito, and Renny Paredes (‘El Gallo’) were storing it under the floor at the child care center, though a kilo was on top of a kids play mat.
While China was once a dominant supplier of fentanyl precursors, Mexico dominates now. India also has a role (hey Kamala).
A liberal talking point is that US Citizens make up 86% of convicted fentanyl smugglers (e.g. not illegal migrants). This same document opines that cracking down on asylum seekers during COVID caused an increase in fentanyl overdoses. They didn’t bother to consider whether all that free government cash led to ‘deaths of exuberance’.
As Ann Coulter pointed out, many of these citizens arrested have distinctly non-European sounding names, like Mr. “El Gallo”, above. The trend continues with more recent DEA arrests.
This sad article reinforces my core belief that any civilized society of the future will be a eugenic one. Let’s face it: a lot of people should not, nor be allowed to, have children. Having a child is not an individual, but rather, a communal act, and the larger community should have some say in who gets to add new persons to it.
Do you not think we live in such a system already but with an aim inimical to us? Those at the apex are preparing a new world in which their reign will be unchallenged and potential well-bred opposition has been eliminated. Witness Oregon’s attempt to destroy Jim’s friend through his sadly degraded wife’s miseries.
Although I tend to view junkies as more subhuman than White, I think it is very important to resist the idea that our social problems are somehow caused by Whiteness.
The wrong kind of Hillbilly is pretty much the drumbeat for everything portrayed in the media, from Deliverance to Winter’s Bone. Let me guess, in the new Ron Howard movie, J.D. Vance overcame his Appalachian priors and is one of those race-mixing Goodwhites.
In an ethnostate we can proactively solve our own problems because we won’t be saddled with Trayvon’s.
🙂
Has any prowhite or conservative ever said our social problems are caused by whiteness? I think only woke leftists would try to peddle such nonsense.
Yes, definitely.
But there is a huge body of work in various periodicals on “What is wrong with Appalachia” or “Let’s just let Appalachia go.”
Lots of it does come from Libtards, some of whom resent monies supposedly siphoned from Blue States to pour into Red States ─ and then those “pillbillies” don’t vote the way that they are supposed to. These Crackers cling to their guns and Bibles and go vote “against their own interests,” and for somebody like Trump.
Here is an article in National Review essentially saying that the obvious problem with Appalachia is White people ─ or at least a certain kind of White people ─ but that the welfare which is sent to them becomes groceries from food stamps that is then traded for meth and opiates.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/12/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson/
Lots of lower taxes, Libertarian types, who want to see more Neoliberalism and free-trade and plenty of Social Darwinism for the *right* people.
And these po’ people in question are White so we can just cut off their goodies without being called Rayciss.
I’m wondering why so many are incredibly obsessed about mountain folk “bootstrapping it” like J.D. Vance?
The Chamber of Commerce Conservatards are not going to do more than lip service on immigration and border control because they still want cheap labor for picking lettuce and lots of other stuff, so they don’t really care crocodile tears about fentanyl.
I do think that junkies need a swift kick in the britches, but these problems also tend to be complex ─ and it is usually a dose of systemic structural employment at the heart of matters. More and more of the most enterprising individuals just leave Dodge and then these once-vibrant White communites flounder. Coal mining needs to end outright, in my opinion.
🙂
That is the White working class you are talking about. With friends like you, who needs enemies.
Most of the street scumbags in my own community are white. You think these fenty-freaks care about preserving the white race (let alone respect the law, property, other people, etc)? Lots of whites are scum, whether criminals or communists. I am a prowhite (and conservative) nationalist. I wasn’t aware that being prowhite meant supporting whites who are objectively bad people. If I’m wrong, then count me as a conservative fellow-traveler of the prowhite movement.
It is the job of the elite to prevent powerful drugs from being freely distributed within a nation. Not to write the nation out of existence.
From my reading, the White people of West Virginia were decent before the opioids came.
It is the job of the elite to prevent powerful drugs from being freely distributed within a nation. Not to write the nation out of existence.
So true. “Our” elites are so depraved they’re letting gas stations sell knock-off junk now. You can’t judge a person by what they do while in active addiction. It’s like they’re possessed. Heroin (or crack or alcohol or whatever) appears as a demon in the great, prophetic Master of Puppets, and that’s pretty damned close to reality IMO.
https://youtu.be/mZqjCFsKgys?si=GSyyGLhOYo_6r6qm
Yes, the problem is that authorites are allowing fentanyl over the border ─ and they are allowing that because it is really an illegal immigration (race) problem that nobody wants to touch.
It is not hard to find examples in the news almost daily of law enforcement making busts where the smugglers and dealers have enough fentanyl to kill an entire metropolitan area if the dosages were so distributed.
Stories of kids getting exposed to some deadly dust in a motel room are not uncommon either.
But the idea that the the medicos are giving out opiates like candy is simply not true. It hasn’t been for at least two decades.
What happens today is that if you get run over by a steamroller and after getting the latest miracle procedure to fillet your shattered bones with titanium and stainless steel implants, the intrepid doctors will be literally afraid to give you anything stronger than Tylenol for the pain. They are in mortal fear of DEA investigations.
But be careful with the dosage ─ if you don’t want to be undergoing a liver transplant. Seriously. Tylenol/Paracetamol aka acetaminophen is a common method of committing suicide because it turns your liver into mush.
I never had any trouble being weaned from opioids to be honest. I could have stayed on fentanyl patches ad infinitum if I had wanted, but I did not want to be dependant on something so hard to get in case of SHTF. You might be able to get insulin from Bartertown during the Boogaloo but I doubt medical grade fentanyl is going to be available.
I was not too personally impressed with Oxycontin to be honest. It is nothing more than oxycodone, which was invented in Germany in 1913 and has been widely used in pain control for decades.
The (((Sacklers))) patented a time-release matrix for oxycodone suggesting (with sparse academic evidence) that this proprietary matrix mitigates the possibility of addiction.
Well, the FDA and the DEA readily went with that narrative, just like they go with the idea that taking SSRI antidepressants ─ which have weird side-effects and undesirable long-term effects on the brain ─ are safe because you can’t overdose on SSRIs, at least not like with opioids.
If I had a dollar for ever time a peach fuzz-faced doctor suggested an SSRI for when I actually needed a strong-ass opioid, I would be retired and living in an Arizona mountaintop castle like the late Polish-Jewish tycoon Leona Helmsley. “Only the little people pay taxes.” (She later went to prison.)
This is all very complicated, and I speak from considerable experience. The best results for me was from I.V. morphine adminstered by the RN on the dot, and then after going home to recover, fentanyl patches.
Fentanyl patches are very hard to abuse, although some junkies will put the patches in the microwave and boil them in acetone (fingernail polish remover) so that they can extract some potent liquid to shoot up their vein. It is hard for me not to imagine that death in such cases is not adding a little refreshing chlorine to the gene pool.
Fentanyl is a miracle drug. I have never heard of anyone overdosing on fentanyl patches unless they started chewing them. (This happened to my coworker’s mother, actually.) The used fentanyl patches also have to be disposed of properly because a toddler who finds one in the trash and starts chewing on it will likely die.
I am old enough to remember when amphetamine “diet pills” similar to the German Pervitin were sold in convenience stores and gas stations for truck drivers. This is no longer the case today.
Sometimes some gimmick chemical no-doze variant gets stocked over-the-counter, but it is usually just flim-flam. If it is a true concern, it gets banned right quick. Otherwise nobody cares.
I took in a shipment of pharmaceuticals at a store I worked at and asked a narcotics police officer that came in to buy her More Greens that day if this stuff was legit. She said it is supposed to be “Speed” and is chemically related but does not quite live up to the hype.
Nevertheles, the usual Booboisie that came into the store to get their Marlboro Reds and Ripple bought the “Speed” on display like hot cakes, and then we were out of stock.
Remember that some of these guys would take Grandma’s estrogen supplements if they thought it was getting them off somehow. And I am not sure how shooting fentanyl-laden acetone into your veins won’t kill you, but there you have it.
Pharmaceuticals are not what is causing the opioid crisis. It’s an immigration/smuggling thing.
Switching gears to Southern economics ─ this would be a long essay but the short answer is that Southern soil tends to be not so fertile and cash crops like tobacco and cotton were not as conducive to yeoman agricuture as Marse Jefferson envsioned when he ended the Slave trade in 1808. Like in a Third World country, the Peculiar Institution proved to be more resilient the more backwards the Southern economy became.
I am not an agronomist but my impression of the South is that the soils are not nearly as fertile as, for example, the volcanic soils of Idaho ─ which will grow anything as long as you have plenty of water and don’t get a hard freeze.
Plantation agriculture can be compared to rapacious corporate agriculture today. Sometimes it is necessary to have large economies-of-scale in order to survive. Otherwise, it is hard for some Hillbilly with a land grant for service with General Washington to eek out a living on a Tennesee hillside (one of my direct ancestors).
It is no surprise that cotton plantation slavery made White labor cheap because it drove wages to the bottom.
The genteel plantation owners, however, controlled the state legislatures in the South, and they didn’t want to change the cash cow.
Then the Civil War took its toll and it wasn’t until Federal projects like the cheap hydro-electricity from the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) that some economic progress was made.
For example, the TVA enabled a munitions industry to be born at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Aluminum smelting for aircraft and making explosives both use a lot of electricity.
And then Wernher von Braun of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency started designing things like the Redstone missile, which was used for the early Space program. Later, NASA put in Marshall Space Flight Center and von Braun’s team designed and built the Saturn rockets for Apollo which went to the Moon.
Today Hunstville is a technology powerhouse with lots of astronomers and aerospace engineers, and the city has the Von Braun Center for Science & Innovation where they hold events like the second most important Amateur Radio Convention annually. (The Number one location is near Dayton, Ohio where the Wright Brothers were from. And in Europe, the RF Engineers convene at Friedrichshafen, Germany where the Zeppelins were built.)
Now ─ like Las Vegas ─ Alabama is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. Paying the Negro toll is not to my liking. It is interesting, however, that BLM and Antifa have not yet been able to take von Braun’s name off the cultural features at Huntsville.
What natural resource does West Virginia have? Poor hardworking White people and Rockefeller coal.
So if you were to ask me what is the deal with West Virginia, I would say “chronic Structural Unemployment.”
If the coal mines are shut down because the black death company decides to, then the locals are just basically eating sawdust. No Piggley Wiggley groceries, no healthcare, no education, and the whole works.
I am in favor of eliminating coal mining not because of CO2 but because of pollution. We don’t need radioactive dust from smokestacks and mercury in our seawater. That is why pregnant women are not supposed to eat certain types of fish like mackerel. Sometimes even tuna fish can be a problem.
But the workers will need to be retrained to do something else ─ and we owe it to them ─ maybe running nuclear powerplants. Modern atom plants are much safer by light years than mining coal or any kind of energy industry including wind turbines. Cheap and clean energy is a huge economic stimulus package, just like the TVA dams in the day.
🙂
Well, if I were a child, I think I’d rather be neglected than beaten, but maybe, to quote K from Men In Black, I should “try it” before commenting.
On fentanyl, I knew a couple of beautiful young white people killed by that drug. It really is true that a pea-sized grain can kill if it gets mixed in with another drug (usually meth or cocaine) but sometimes unscrupulous dealers will include it in ersatz pharmaceutical-style pills. Fake oxycontin and xanax have been big killers.
“O brave new world.” If you’re a young person thinking about trying street drugs, don’t. The party’s over.
If opiate pushers were gassed, I wouldn’t be too sad about it. The same goes for crack dealers.
Agreed.
Are you sure the kids od’d or did the parents just kneel on the back of their necks?
Steely Danzig. I need to work up some Steely Dan and sing it like Danzig. Great name BTW
Extremely upsetting.
The essay reminds me of a gut-wrenching documentary Oxyana which narrates the devastation wrought by Oxycontin addiction in a once prosperous mining community in Wyoming County, Southern West Virginia.
When I once asked a notorious countercultural figure what the worst thing a person can do to their enemies, he said without blinking, “Ignore them.”
Okay, I’ll bite; who was it? Iceberg Slim? Tom Metzger?
Boyd Rice was my guess.
Definitely a classic Boydism.
Anton Lavey. Last I heard, Boyd married a Jewish woman who ordered him to sell all his Nazi memorabilia.
People . . .
A white liberal wife would’ve ordered Rice to throw his memorabilia into the trash but since she’s a Jewish princess she’s making him sell it for a profit.
What is this, Boyd’s second Jewish wife? I assume you don’t mean Lisa Carver (I don’t think they were ever married but they did make a baby)
Now, me, I will never counter-signal Boyd, because for fuck’s sake…
Your interview with Mr Levey in Answer Me! Was one of my favorites.
Scott: August 20, 2024 Fentanyl is a miracle drug…
Yes, it has gotten a bad rap because of the China/Mexico connection to illegality as street drugs.
But in controlled, correct dosages administered by a legitimate physician it is an effective pain remedy. When I was struck with the Chinese virus three years ago, I was lucky to get a bed and effective treatment from an all-White staff at a nearby Covid Clinic.
The ventilator probably saved my life but so did other procedures and the drugs I was administered by my excellent doctor. I asked him what drugs he’d been giving me, He listed 22 different ones, including steroids and fentanyl which surprised me.
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