Meet heroin's tiniest victims: newborns

He was five days old and less than five pounds. He wiggled inside the white blanket that hugged him tight. He stopped moving for a moment and opened his eyes. Then, he wiggled again.

Morphine raced through the newborn's tiny body. He had been given a dose earlier that morning to fight off his opiate cravings and would soon receive more.

Without the drug, nurses told me, the baby's pain would be overwhelming. His body would shake and he would be racked with diarrhea so bad that it could eat at his skin. His loud cries and screams would pierce the halls at Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indiana.

"They feel the pain of the withdrawal so intensely," Neonatal Intensive Care Unit nurse Kelly Butler said. "You can just see how uncomfortable they are. When we wean them sometimes it gets so bad. They can't eat. You can't comfort them. They're just miserable."

That's how life begins for babies born dependent on opiates. Long before their first steps or first words, these infants have experienced a drug withdrawal so powerful it would send most adults to their knees in pain.

As I stood in the hospital room that morning, looking at a child enduring all of this agony during the first days of his life, it struck me that in a world in which so many children are given too little, I had possibly stumbled into the epicenter of unfairness.

I can't adequately describe how beautiful this tiny baby is. On the day I visited him, his parents standing nearby, I fought back tears as I looked at his tousled mess of black hair and at his eyes, their color still hard to make out. His lips were a dark shade of red. His nose was maybe the size of a jelly bean. An orange feeding tube dangled from it.

Medical staffers here said it would take six to eight weeks to wean the child off the drugs that polluted his body in utero. That's an estimate based on far too much experience.

The hospital in recent years, like many others, has seen a flood of babies born dependent on the drugs their mothers passed to them through the use of heroin, pain pills or methadone. An infant care unit that a few years ago saw Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome cases a handful of times a year, now has two or three babies suffering through withdrawal on any given day. Sometimes more.

"Think of this like the spread of the plague or Ebola," Dr. Paul Winchester, who heads the St. Francis NICU, said as we talked in his office. "Nobody had it, and then all of a sudden everybody had it."

The story of heroin and other opiate addictions is playing out all across America.

And at hospitals such as St. Francis, it's taken its cruelest path — torturing infants in the first weeks of their lives.

'Guilty'

The mother of the black-haired newborn, 35, has six children and grew up in rural Johnson County. She seems tortured herself, haunted by the mistakes she has made and by fear for her baby's future. She wanted to talk to me because she hoped her story would help someone else. Her middle name is Nicole, and that's what we'll call her here.

Nicole, with her auburn hair pulled back, nervously twisted in her seat and occasionally wiped away tears as she talked about her fierce addiction to prescription painkillers. I couldn't understand why she had given birth to another child, and she seemed puzzled by that, too, vowing not to have another.

She quietly laughed at herself, almost mockingly, when she told me about her unrealistic, shattered hope that her son would not be born dependent on the methadone she takes.

"I thought that maybe he'd go to a regular nursery, which was so exciting," Nicole said. "But then the withdrawal symptoms set in. He started the shaking. He was jumpy, real jittery, a super high-pitched cry."

Tests would confirm what his behavior indicated: His body craved the opioids he'd grown dependent on in the womb. Before the end of the second day of his life, he'd had his first dose of morphine.

"Guilty," Nicole told me as we talked in a hospital conference room. "That's how I feel."

Painkillers to methadone

Nicole's story is common.

Although the Indiana Department of Health currently has no data on the issue, a study published in April in the New England Journal of Medicine found the rate of NICU admissions for babies suffering from drug dependency nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2013. They now make up 27 of every 1,000 admissions.

At Eskenazi Health in downtown Indianapolis, officials say the hospital is on track to see a 22% increase this year in the number of newborns experiencing narcotic withdrawal.

For Nicole, addiction stretches back a decade to a painkiller prescription that followed bariatric surgery, the birth of her third child and severe back pains. The pills helped her sleep. They made everything a bit easier. Until they destroyed her.

Before long, she was taking an extra pill at bedtime, and then another. She received more prescriptions, including several after emergency gall bladder surgery, and raced through them. She once devoured a three-month prescription in a week and at one point was downing a dozen pills at a time. But, she said, at least she didn't turn to heroin when the prescriptions ran out, as many others have.

Instead, she spent every dollar she could find on illegally purchased pills, and suffered nasty withdrawals when those ran out.

After years of drug abuse, she finally sought help. And, now, she visits a methadone clinic every day for a legal dose of a chemical opioid that essentially replaces an addicted brain's demand for heroin or prescription drugs such as Vicodin and OxyContin. The methadone treatments have kept her away from prescription painkillers.

But she's still dependent — only now to methadone.