Last Thursday, in Paris, a father was sentenced to three months in prison suspended after her baby was hospitalized for accidentally ingesting cocaine. An astonishing but less and less exceptional case for Professor Isabelle Claudet, head of pediatric emergencies at the Toulouse University Hospital. It was precisely because she was alarmed to see more and more children admitted for white powder poisoning, “especially in the last three years”, that she embarked on the study called “CocaKid” to appear in the scientific journal Clinical Toxicology.
Beyond a young “mule”, a few unaccompanied minors who voluntarily took drugs or babies under coke by diffusion in mother’s milk, she lists dozens of cases of accidental ingestion by children under fifteen. years over the period 2010-2020 that ended in a pediatric emergency department. “Children are collateral victims of their parents’ addictions. They find cocaine at home that they will inhale or lick, thinking it’s sugar or something else, ”underlines the specialist.
More cases in Occitania and Ile-de-France
According to the study, “annual admissions have increased eightfold in eleven years”, and more than half of the cases have occurred in the last two years. The pediatrician makes the link with the increase in the circulation of cocaine in France. “It’s purer for a price that hasn’t budged or even gone down,” she says. And there has been since confinement a form of uberization in the modes of purchase and delivery which makes it arrive more easily in homes ”. 46% of the cases identified, admitted to the emergency room with mainly neurological symptoms such as seizures or cardiovascular disease, were under five years old. And, even more amazing, 66% of them were not only positive for cocaine but also for other narcotics. “It is therefore a real public health problem”, warns Isabelle Claudet, whose study shows that Occitania, close to Spain where Colombian traffickers dock, and Île-de-France, with its airports and its roads to the Netherlands and Belgium, are more permeable to this disturbing phenomenon.
The Toulouse pediatrician pleads for awareness by health workers of parents known for their addictions. « In PMI hotlines [Protection maternelle infantile]at the level of the doctors who follow the children, without judging, it is absolutely necessary to warn the parents of the dangers incurred, ”she warns.