Indiana’s battle against drug abuse has is leading the Department of Child Services to remove children from their homes at an increasing rate.
DCS officials reported a 61-percent increase in children being removed from their homes between 2012 and 2016.
Spokesman James Wide says the jump is an unintended consequence of Indiana’s growing opioid painkiller addiction.
“Some places heroin, some places meth, some places cocaine, some places prescription pills," Wide says. "So it really just depends where you are in the state, but you could definitely direct it to increased drugs for sure.”
Wide says initiatives such as Governor Pence’s Drug Task Force, are helping, but he says more collaboration between different state agencies, including DCS, is essential to curbing the problem.
“We can get our heads together and we can probably try to prevent some of these things before they come to a boil,” he says.
About 10,000 kids were removed from Indiana homes in 2014. In 2015, that number ballooned to more than 12-thousand-500 – a 25-percent, year-over-year increase.
