Orrin Hatch: “it is becoming difficult to open a newspaper without reading another horrifying story of drug-related child abuse. From…”

“it is becoming difficult to open a newspaper without reading another horrifying story of drug-related child abuse. From Brooklyn, we learn of Elisa Izquierdo, the 6-year-old girl who was born to a crack addicted mother. Elisa's mother allegedly beat her to death, leaving New York's public welfare agencies to engage in the usual finger pointing. In suburban Chicago, a woman and two children are brutally murdered by a trio that includes a convicted drug dealer high on crack. In Patterson New Jersey, a crack-addicted woman beats her 14-year-old daughter with a three-foot board with a nail protruding, after a dispute over dirty dishes. To most of us, horrifying incidents like these seem nearly unimaginable. They demonstrate the incredible dangers of drugs like crack cocaine--drugs so addictive that they could actually impel a mother to kill her own child. These may be extreme cases, but they are instructive because they represent the extreme end of the kind of pressures facing young people today. Indeed, sometimes it almost seems to me as if our culture is dedicated to separating children from their innocence.”