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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 in the 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.”