Eh? I think in the case of people with children as well as drug addiction, it is our job, as a harm reduction forum, to tell them to grow a pair, stop the drugs, and start looking at what is really important. Wanna do drugs? Don't have kids. Have kids to raise? Don't do drugs. It will lead to you being a sub-par parent, your kids growing up with some minor to major problems. It just causes problems and harm and people who are addicts run the risk of having their kids taken away by the government, which is probably a better thing than a child having to deal with the same burdens of addiction that all of us around addicts have to deal with. No dinner tonight, son, mom's gotta get high. Shit like that, it's just horrible.
Sorry I'm having a bit of a rant. It's just not something I agree with. I can totally see an addict being a really good parent, but this will be rare, and in the end addiction is still going to cause pain in the child's life, even if it is something like walking in on dad nodding out on opiates all the time and being pretty non-responsive. Shit like that really affects kids, and shouldn't be taken lightly.
So I don't think that we should treat people on here with children/family to look after in the absolute same way we treat people who, to the best of our knowledge, don't have children. In one case, the addiction only affects the individual, in the other case, it affects a lot of people and quite possibly future generations as well.
