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The nation’s drug-addiction epidemic is driving a dramatic increase in the number of children entering foster care, forcing many states to take urgent steps to care for neglected children. Several states, such as New Hampshire and Vermont, have either changed laws to make it possible to pull children out of homes where parents are addicted, or have made room in the budget to hire more social workers to deal with the emerging crisis. Other states, such as Alaska, Kansas and Ohio, have issued emergency pleas for more people to become foster parents and take neglected children, many of them infants, into their homes. (Wiltz, 10/7)

The emergence of fake opiates that have been mixed with or sold as heroin, fueling a raging drugepidemic, has led to a proposed legislation in Kentucky to fight such synthetic drugs. Attorney General Andy Beshear, Kentucky House legislators and law enforcement officials Friday announced that the bill would add fentanyl analogues not approved for human use to the list of illegal drugs. It would, in addition, increase penalties for trafficking in such drugs. (DiMio, 10/7)