A terrible story out of Baltimore this week seems to encapsulate one of the great tragedies in a modern era that now has more than its fair share of crises and tragedies plaguing the nation. In Baltimore, Maryland, where crime, addiction, gang violence, and political corruption have gutted a once-great city, a vigil of mourning is being held for Journey Sharp. She was only two years old, but she is gone from this world without ever having set foot in a school. Her death has been ruled a homicide, but not of any “normal” variety. Journey Sharp died of an overdose of fentanyl. Charges have been brought against a suspect, but thus far the police are refusing to name the person. Yet in every practical sense of the word, Journey was murdered. (CBS Baltimore)
The death of a 2-year-old girl who had fentanyl in her system has been ruled to be a homicide.
Police said Journey Sharp died in a home on Parkton Street in Southwest Baltimore in January. The child had no obvious signs of trauma to her body.
Police say that charges are now pending. However, they have not said who is being charged.
Though some types of evil behavior are too monstrous for most of us to imagine, it’s conceivable that someone could have intentionally given two-year-old Journey Sharp those drugs intentionally. Or perhaps the fentanyl was carelessly left out where she could find it and she mistook it for candy. It doesn’t really matter at this point because nothing is going to bring her back.
What should be quite obvious, however, is that the little girl did not die of “natural causes.” She was murdered. Whether it was intentional or accidental, she was killed through the actions of adults. And she is tragically not even close to being the only victim in this crisis. Even before fentanyl began flooding the United States via our porous southern border, children were dying. From 1999 to 2016, more than 9,000 children under the age of 12 died from opioid overdoses. But in the past few years, the numbers have skyrocketed. Between 2019 and 2021, fentanyl deaths of infants aged 1 to 4 more than doubled. Fentanyl deaths of children aged 5 to 14 quadrupled.
None of those children asked for this. There are no two-year-olds out there trying to get high. Every one of those children was murdered. If you bring those drugs into the environment where a child lives and they wind up accessing them, you are the one who made that happen. It wasn’t an “accidental death.” It was preventable. All you had to do was keep the drugs away from anywhere a child could reach them.
But the real killers aren’t even the irresponsible adults who allowed that to happen. This is probably a harsh thing to say, but we no longer live in a time when the worst drugs out on the streets were skunkweed marijuana, magic mushrooms or even bathtub blotter acid. (People don’t overdose on LSD, by the way.) The stuff flooding our country these days is pure poison, plain and simple. And it’s killing people in droves.
Obviously, many bad actors are involved in the chain of custody, starting with those who ship the component chemicals out of China to Mexico. Then we have the people who assemble those components into fentanyl in a variety of forms from powder to pills to colorful “candy.” Next, we have the cartel mules who traffic the drugs across to border, leading us to those who transport it all across the country and distribute it on the streets for a profit.
We also can’t leave out the other culprits. The deterioration of the nuclear family and the number of single-parent homes has opened the door to this sort of poisonous trouble. And then there are the people whose policies have opened the border to this flood and failed to provide sufficient resources to the border authorities who might stop it or at least slow it down significantly. Each and every one of them from Beijing to Juarez to Washington had a part to play and every last one of them has blood on their hands. But what are we to do if those tasked with holding the bad guys accountable are part of the problem rather than part of the solution?
Returning to the story of Journey Sharp, when news of her death became public, Maryland Senator Jill P Carter put out a statement. She said that more had to be done to “heal, treat, and restore broken, hopeless, defeated, addicted, people.” She spoke of “too much unaddressed trauma.” And, of course, she declared “for the record, systemic racism is the greatest culprit.”
This is an unserious person repeating the mistakes of those who came before her and placing people’s lives in danger with nonsensical talking points. More substance abuse services should obviously be made available, but you can’t help people who are not yet ready to seek help. And people of all racial profiles are dying, many of whom aren’t old enough to write their own names, to say nothing of harboring racial biases. The solution to this tragedy won’t be found in any of that political showmanship. The flow of these poisons into our country must be shut down. And if those responsible for doing that refuse to act, they must be replaced, the sooner the better.
