Substance abuse and child endangerment

Image by CBS Denver

Kirsten Wyatt of the Associated Press reports that

Colorado considers adult marijuana use legal, but pot is still treated like heroin and other Schedule I substances as they are under federal law. As a result, when it comes to defining a drug-endangered child, pot can’t legally be in a home where children reside.

Two Democratic lawmakers tried to update the law by saying that marijuana must also be shown to be a harm or risk to children to constitute abuse.

But the effort led to angry opposition from both sides — pot-using parents who feared the law could still be used to take their children, and marijuana-legalization opponents who argued that pot remains illegal under federal law and that its very presence in a home threatens kids.

After hours of emotional testimony, lawmakers abandoned the effort as too complicated.

“There are people who are very reckless with what they’re doing, leaving marijuana brownies on the coffee table or doing hash oil extraction that might blow the place up. Too often with law enforcement, they’re just looking at the legality of the behavior and not how it is affecting the children,” said Jim Gerhardt of the Colorado Drug Investigators Association, which supported the bill.

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When I was a child protection caseworker in a mountain community west of Denver, the majority of my cases involved substance abuse. The Sheriff's officers took pretty much of a hands off attitude toward pot, even though we did not then have the laws we have now about medicinal and recreational use of pot.

I remember one case involving a father hitting his four-year-old daughter in the eye when she climbed up on the couch he was sitting on, while he was smoking pot. I urged the deputy to allow me to take the daughter and her younger sibling out of the home. After a private conference in the bathroom of the family's home, the deputy reluctantly agreed. The next day the judge ordered the parents into drug treatment and parenting classes. It took the father a month and the mother two months to test negative for marijuana and the kids to be returned home, while continuing in drug treatment and parenting classes.