Parents charged after injecting children with heroin as 'feel-good medicine'

Inside a house of squalor, US officials found three young children amongst the rat droppings and drug needles.

To their horror, police discovered it wasn't just their parents who were using drugs. The Washington state couple also allegedly injected their three young children with heroin - referring to it as a "feel-good medicine".

Ashlee Hutt, 24, and Mac Leroy McIver, 25, are now facing hefty charges.

"The kids lived in deplorable conditions," Pierce County Sheriff's Department spokesman Detective Ed Troyer told The Washington Post on Tuesday. "It wasn't a good living situation, even without the issue of heroin."

"We unfortunately find kids living in deplorable conditions all too often, but we don't see parents intentionally putting drugs into kids," he added.

The three children have been placed into protective custody, Troyer said.

It was last November, when social workers removed the children - ages 2, 4 and 6 - from the home outside Tacoma, the children were living in squalour, according to the court documents.

"Aluminum foil rolls and cooker heroin were observed in the bedroom on the dresser next to the bed," according to the probable cause affidavit. Child protective services reported "multiple individuals lived at the resident and everyone was using heroin".

Social workers discovered bruises on the 2-year-old's body that appeared to be from drug injections, according to the court documents.

The 6-year-old told social workers that McIver had choked him and his siblings and that the couple gave them "feel-good medicine".

"He described the 'feel-good medicine' as a white powder which was mixed with water," according to the probable cause affidavit. "His parents then used a needle to inject the 'feel-good medicine' into him and his sisters."

He said he and his sisters would fall asleep after the injections.

Two months after the children were taken into protective custody, authorities performed hair follicle tests on the children, according to the court documents. The 6-year-old tested negative for heroin; the 4-year-old had heroin in her system but not enough to result in a positive test; the 2-year-old tested positive for the drug.

Both Hutt and McIver admitted to being heroin users, though McIver told authorities he believed the babysitter was responsible for injecting the children with heroin, according to the court documents.

Children have become victims in an opioid epidemic ravaging the nation - watching their parents shoot up, and sometimes, overdose and die.

In September, a chilling photograph captured the innocence lost on a 4-year-old's face in East Liverpool, Ohio. A man and woman were slumped over after overdosing in a vehicle; the boy was still strapped into his car seat in the back.

A week later and 960km away at a Family Dollar store in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a hysterical toddler trying to wake her mother after an apparent drug overdose was captured on a cellphone video.

Then last month, a 7-year-old girl in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, told her school bus driver that she hadn't been able to wake the adults in her house for days and that their bodies were beginning to change colours; she had been caring for three other children in the home, 5 years, 3 years and 9 months old, and had gotten herself to school, police said.

A new study suggests that children in the midst of the nation's drug war are battling more than psychological consequences.

The findings, published earlier this week in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics, show that from 1997 to 2012, there were 13,052 children hospitalised for poisonings from opioid prescriptions, such as Oxycodone, Percocet and codeine.

And 176 of them died.

In Washington state, Hutt appeared in court Monday for her arraignment, according to the News Tribune. Booking records show that she is being held on US$100,000 ($138,570) bail.

Both she and McIver have been charged with unlawful delivery of a controlled substance to a person under 18, criminal mistreatment in the second degree and assault of a child in the second degree, according to a probable cause affidavit filed in September in Pierce County Superior Court.

McIver, who was arraigned in September, is also being held on US$100,000 bail.

Troyer said both Hutt and McIver have pleaded not guilty. It's unclear whether the two have attorneys.

Hutt and McIver are due back in court November 18, according to the Pierce County prosecutor's office. Hutt's trial begins December 20, and McIver's starts February 16.

The Washington Post