Another day and another graphic image of a mother overdosed on heroin with her child emerges, laying bare the grim reality of America’s opiate addiction crisis.
This time it was 25-year-old Erika Hurt who was found slumped at the wheel of her car with her ten-month-old child crying in the back seat, according to the Indy Star.
Indiana police found her passed out in the front seat of her car from a drug overdose with the syringe still in her hand in the small town of Hope.
Officers have shared the shocking image of the woman to highlight America’s spiralling addiction problem to heroin, prescription painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin and deadly Chinese Fentanyl.
Mrs Hurt’s mother said her daughter had only just left rehab earlier this month, according to the paper.
“Parents are doing this more often with children in the car because they are doing it away from someone who is going to disapprove,” said Matthew Tallent, a police marshal. “This is becoming a new norm for drug users.
“We’re finding a lot of needles right now,” adding that the country’s drug addiction problem was “leaking into small town USA”.
Image credit Town of Hope Police Department
“It’s not that they don’t love their kid,” drug counsellor Scott Watson added. “The need to get high is so strong that it overrides the love we have for our parents, the love we have for our kids and the love we have for ourselves.”
It tool two shots of heroin antidote naxolone to revive Hurt, who was taken to hospital. But hundreds of addicts in Indiana alone aren’t so lucky.
Around 450 people died of opioid drug overdoses in 2014, a figure which rose to 595 last year.
The image of Hurt unconscious in the car with her screaming child in the back is a haunting one.
But sadly it’s not the first.
Just weeks ago, police in East Liverpool, Ohio, shared similar images of a grandmother and her friend overdosed on opiates as her grandson watched on from the back seat of the car.
Image credit City of East Liverpool
