Sub-replacement fertility is now a national security issue for Taiwan, and even at this time, many children are vulnerable to the effects of narcotics abuse exposure.
According to local media, a woman who habitually took amphetamines — a Schedule II controlled substance — while she was in charge of her boyfriend’s four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son, exposed the children to smoke inhalation.
The two children tested positive for the drug, which means they were exposed to secondhand drug smoke intake over a period of time.
The Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office indicted the woman based on the Offenses Against Child Development (妨害幼童發育罪) article of the Criminal Code.
DRUG DEN
In recent years, many analogous cases — children having to breathe in secondhand drug smoke — have occurred in Taiwan, harming children’s health, in some cases causing irreparable damage to their physical and psychological well-being. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to this issue.
In 2020, a two-month-old infant was sent to a hospital in Kaohsiung with a cold and died suddenly. As blood and urine tests came back positive for amphetamines, the police went to the parents’ house and rescued the other eight children — aged two through eight — living in what was described as a “drug den.”
The investigation found that the parents and others at the home had habitually used drugs in front of the children, and this is why they tested positive for drugs, with some exhibiting symptoms of autism, language impairment, developmental delays and of being underweight.
In a 2019 investigation, the parents of a newborn boy in Taoyuan hired a caregiver to help them, but discovered that she was using drugs while taking care of the baby in the child’s room. The child later tested positive for amphetamines.
Babies and kids do not have the capacity to recognize or distinguish objects or protect themselves. If an adult habitually abuses narcotics with children present and fails to understand the gravity of what they are doing, they are essentially forcing those children to take drugs.
The government should amend the laws to increase the severity of punishment for this kind of behavior.
FAKE PACKAGING
The increase of newly emergent drug-related crimes, especially disguising drugs as normal instant coffee, has become a major national security issue in recent years.
An average of 100 people die suddenly per year due to ingesting narcotics-laced coffee, and most are adolescents and young people.
The data so far show that the youngest death to date was a 16-year-old high-school student, showing that the abuse of drug-laced coffee severely endangers people.
With ever newer and diversified types of drugs, the youngest victims — directly and indirectly harmed — are babies and children, and the government has a responsibility to address this situation.
Drug enforcement and related laws such as the Criminal Code and the Protection of Children and Youths Welfare and Rights Act (兒童及少年福利與權益保障法) should move with the times.
In addition, whether increasing penalties for exposing others to secondhand drug smoke or not should be reviewed and considered.
Chang Sue-chung is a former president of Taiwan Shoufu University, specializing in criminology.
Translated by Chien Yan-ru
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS