A Georgia mother battles opioids to win back her kids
ELLIJAY, Georgia — The First Baptist Church auditorium was filling with an expectant crowd, friends and family who had been through so much. Kim Silvers’ three young daughters were there, all dressed up and eager for the graduation, hoping to mark the end of years of heartache visited on them all by their mother’s addiction.
They had begged her to stop using opioids and heard her promise to do so, only to break that vow over and over. They’d cried when she abandoned them, and again when they were split apart and sent to three different foster homes. Then their mother signed on for a rigorous court-run treatment program — her best, last chance to avoid the permanent loss of her children.
On this Tuesday evening, the program’s culmination was at hand. The would-be graduates just had one final duty: providing another batch of urine samples to be drug-tested. “We hold them accountable to the end,” case manager Jackie Bramlett said.
Across the United States, the opioid epidemic has caused tragedies too numerous to count. One bitter way to quantify the scourge is the documented spike in the number of children removed from the custody of addicted parents. One of the most dramatic increases has been in Georgia, where the foster care population soared from about 7,600 in September 2013 to more than 13,700 as of August. Parental substance abuse of all kinds, the state says, now accounts for about 40 per cent of foster care entries.