news4jax.com
They call this family protection?

Another innocent victim in the war on some drugs. Gregory Love, 23-months-old, was ripped from his family and placed in foster care when his mother tested positive for drug use. Three weeks later the child was dead due to the neglect of the foster home.

Christina Mantooth has three other children that were also displaced when the Florida Dept. of Children and Families broke up the family because she failed a drug test. That was it. She wasn't accused of neglect or abuse or of even having consumed a drug in front of her children to my knowledge. They look happy and well cared for in the photograph. Yet the DCF chose to place these young innocents with strangers who clearly don't care for their charges well, under the tenets of misguided zero tolerance policies.

The foster parents no doubt are drug free - one assumes they are tested as well - but they failed in their responsibility to the children under their supervision. According to his brother, who is also placed in this "home" - "He said he busted his nose and his lip when he fell off the top bunk bed." The foster mother didn't seek medical care for the toddler. CFS was told but didn't intervene. He died five days later, one would speculate from an internal brain injury of some sort.

If not for the drug test, Gregory Love would be playing with his siblings and getting excited about his second birthday. He would have been better off with a mother who loves and cares for him, drug consumer or not, than in the "care of" the agents of a heartless and mindless system. As this case tragically demonstrates, responsible drug use alone should not be a criteria for custody.

[Link via Sharon Secor]