To think this scumbag "mother" should have her child taken from her?

[HungryHelga]

Woman licks methadone from the pavement in Scotland as her child looks on.

This disgusts me. How can anyone have so little self-respect to do this, and with her child there as well?

Completely agree Wannabe.

Desperately - what I mean about 3/5 years is that any subsequent child they give birth to would be adopted if they have not been clean for that long. Upon reflection it sounds a bit too long and I got carried away, so yes I retract that bit. Maybe it should be a year or 2 years.

As for 'what happens to the children while they wait to see if the parents can overcome their addictions' well that was my point - there would be no waiting. The baby would be adopted immediately. If it was still young enough to be undamaged easily adoptable then it should be adopted immediately, for all the reasons Wannabe said.

For older children who would be emotionally damaged further by being moved from pillar to post, and for those too old/troubled to be easily adopted, then obviously it would be different.

And Lying I do believe I am an excellent parent yes. Possibly even fantastic, in some respects. Not perfect, not always right, but always well intentioned; always putting my children's wellbeing first. Do we thing this woman can say the same?

Do I think I am a superior example of a mother? Compared to some people, no, absolutely not. I am flawed. Compared to a heroin addict who has dragged an innocent child needlessly into her hellish, chaotic existence of choice? You betcha.

I can sit on the fence and be balanced and reasonable about most things. The ability to seeing both sides of an argument is one of my greatest attributes actually.

But not on this. Sorry.

And if you watched that Protecting our Children (or whatever it was called) different circumstances, I know, very very sad for all concerned, and the parents were not at all to blame, they were just intellectually incapable of caring for their children adequately. Which one do you think has the best chance of a good outcome? The adopted newborn, or the damaged, abused, neglected, developmentally delayed four year old boy who will, in all liklihood, be in care for the whole of the rest of his childhood?

I wonder if this picture was set up by people who took the payment from the Daily Gullible and exchanged it for a handful of magic beans, or some other substance?

I'm not saying that addicts don't exist and that they aren't desperate, pitiful and often do disgusting things.

But it's the job of a reputable newspaper to ask how we can tackle this for the good of the addicts and society as a whole.

I wonder if they ever find time to run stories like that?

lyingwitch "Of course it's about the child but that doesn't mean that being with it's mother isn't the best thing subject to her getting cleaned up and receiving help to stay off the stuff. She's demonstrated commitment to getting over her addiction, no?"

Yes I agree with your first point here, sometimes Social Workers are damned if they do and damned if they dont regarding child protection and removal of children from families. A little boy died in a case thats been well publicised recently here in Scotland that could have been preventable if he had been removed from his Mother who had addiction issues. I guess Im just very interested in the emotional and psychological consequences of addiction on children because of my job, so whilst I dont think " whipping children away immediately" is necessarily always the right thing to do, I do think it may be the best option for some children.

I dont know about " demonstrating commitment to get over addiction" though - you cant tell this just because shes on methadone. I have known addicts to continue to abuse heroin at the same time as being on methadone. But you cant tell form a picture in the newspaper. It was designed to shock and provoke outrage and its worked.

I think there is some hypocrisy here. Yes I can feel sorry for an addict, I can wish them well and hope they get over it, i feel the government has to try and tackle addiction and especially the poverty stricken areas where often it has a foothold. But i wouldn't want to live next door to one and all the crap that often brings - would you, really? Lots of folk have to live amongst this kind of thing and suffer alongside - christ, i'm thankful i don't have to live in an area where it is common place with all the violence, anti social behaviour and crime that goes with it. It's all well to be all sympathetic and take a nice liberal stance when you don't have to live next door to it.

also don't believe anything the daily record says, shite paper.

HillyWallaby as I asked earlier, why always adoption? Why not look to the extended family to care for the children of addicts. (Which incidently SS always do).

Surely they are better off with extended family.
Of course not every addict will have a caring family, but if they have, then the child will be far better off with them.

BM yes, obviously in certain circumstances that would be the ideal, but it would have to depend on the quality of the parenting available from other family members.

Personally I am afraid I have no sympathy and feel no compassion for the mother in the picture. I have every sympathy and concern for her child/children.

I don't know the solution... I'd hate the thought of her child/children being removed from her but... Gosh... I just don't know.

What an awful situation.

Family members that step in to care for children whos parents are unable to care for them because of an addiction save this country a fortune and deserve more help and support. It cant be easy, especially for Grandparents who have raised their own children and are at a different stage in their lives to go back and parent young children.

You cannot gauge an entire life story from one photograph and some biased reporting. We do not know the woman in question or the circumstances leading up to that picture being taken. It may well be that the woman was set up as they do seem to have a lot of information about her.

I should imagine if she is on methadone then social services will already be monitoring the situation. And for the record, there are a lot of abusive and shitty parents out there who aren't on drugs and who present a very civilised and respectable exterior to the outside world.

Just saying.

It's the Daily record, so I wouldn't believe a word of it.

There is very little news in that particular paper.

It's like the daily mail for illiterate bigots.

Known as the daily rangers round here.

HillyWallaby Of course it would depend on the parenting skills of the family members, but that is the same with anyone who is going to adopt/foster or care for a small child.

HungryHelga I see you are a bona fida poster who likes the Daily Mail and the Daily Record. What I find distressing is that based on one photograph and the publication of what can only be regarded as salacious gossip at best, you feel entitled to judge the woman as a "scumbag" and announce that her child should be taken off her.

Yet if you saw a respectable, middle class woman you'd probably judge her as a good mum. Unfortunately there are a lot of well to do mums who snort up cocaine in front of their kids, lots of middle class mums who are abusive and some mums who get absolutely trollied whilst in charge of their children. What's the difference?

You cannot tell someone's background from such little information. You've deemed this mother to be a scumbag without even knowing her, yet what about Kate Moss who has admitted taking cocaine and who is never at home, preferring to party the night away and introducing her daughter to someone like Pete Docherty - hardly the model mum herself is she? Would you adovate taking her daughter away?

Don't place yourself on too high a pedestal as it just makes the fall a darn sight harder.

I have an uncle who was a drug addict from 17 years of ago until he was 40. He is so mentally unbalanced from all the years of drug abuse, homelessness, disappearing acts that my grandmother, at 72, has to go out to work to financially support them both because he refuses to get work himself. He claims he is on the sick with depression and anxiety issues.

This may offend some people but growing up with a family member who chose to do this for over 20 years means I have little respect for drug takers. So many times he has been given chances to change etc and he always ended up disappearing with a few items of my grandmothers jewellery.

I have very little patience for such people. IME.

Well said Rhubarb. In fact where is the OP?

FeedZombie, I can understand your pov but I'm from a home where I was emotionally abused by a woman who received an award for being SuperMum of the Year. She and my stepdad were seen as pillars of the community yet they took away every ounce of confidence and self esteem from me, making me feel like a piece of dog shit that was on the bottom of their shoe.

Her claim was that she was a depressive and that we, her children, were the cause of her depression. She would read an illness in the paper and would then diagnose herself with it. She was abusive because she was depressed, neglectful because she was depressed yet this didn't hinder her from fostering children and giving them 100% more attention than she ever gave us.

But I don't have a problem with sufferers of depression. I have a problem with people who don't help themselves, such as your uncle and people who just want everyone else at their beck and call and use depression as a suitable excuse for this. But the woman in the link may be neither of these. We don't know her or her circumstances. That she is on methadone suggests she is trying to wean herself off heroin. Other than that, we know nothing of her life so we are not in the position to judge.

If you are methadone dependent and you drop yours on the floor, what are you supposed to do? Go cold turkey? Replace it with heroin? Clearly the pharmacist is not going to give you a second dose.

AFAIK some people have a prescription where they have to drink it in the shop, other people can take a single dose away in a little paper cup, and others can get it weekly in a bottle. If this woman was allowed to do either of the latter two, she is probably in a serious substance abuse program and proved to be making an effort to get clean.

Perhaps im wrong here but aren't meth patients required to take their dose in the chemists in front of the pharmacist?

Good work reading the thread trustissues75!

you do have to take methodone in front of the pharmacist.... they certainly dont bloody give a bottle of it to a known drug addict to walk about with, and do what they please! In some chemists they even make them open their mouth to check they have swallowed it so stop then spitting it out and selling it later. In fact some addicts who are on methadone have to go every day to the chemist to get their dose, so I think it is quite unlikely that she dropped a whole bottle on the floor.

That said, it is a very emotive subject and people who are addicts most certainly can love theirt children but are not always able to look after them. Id she is a junkie then those are some very clean white jeans!

loie - although I wouldnt phrase it as "they certainly dont bloody give a bottle of it to a known drug addict to walk about with, and do what they please!" Im afraid youre wrong - pharmacists do give out bottles of methadone for addicts to take at home e.g for the weekend when the pharmacy is closed.

I have no idea whether this picture depicts a woman with a dropped bottle of methadone or not but yes she could have dropped a whole bottle.

It just says there is a child with her...not that it is her child. Very well could be the woman with her is the mother.
Sensationalist at best, not alot of fact in the article was there?

Agree with the poster who mentioned Kate Moss, well known coke user and had Pete Docherty around her DD for years. Hardly model mum behaviour but because she is a celebrity that makes it fine.

Let's face it, she's going to be dead within a week anyway licking the pavement in Wester Hailes. Maybe if it was Marchmont she'd get away with it.