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The Opioid Crisis Is Overloading The Foster Care System

foster care children
Credit U.S. Navy
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Wikimedia Commons
The number of children in foster care in North Carolina is at a 10-year high.

The opioid crisis continues to ravage the United States. Children of family members caught up in the epidemic face a particular set of pressures. One of the markers of that extra pressure is the steady rise in foster care rates around the country. In North Carolina the number of children in the foster care system has risen 28 percent in the past five years and is now at a 10-year high. 

Host Frank Stasio talks about the numbers with Matt Anderson, vice president of programs and business development for the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina, the largest private non-profit foster care provider in the state.

Stasio also speaks with Julia Lurie, reporter with Mother Jones, who has been speaking directly with families dealing with opioid addiction.

Laura Pellicer is a digital reporter with WUNC’s small but intrepid digital news team.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
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