New Hampshire employees of day care arrested after six-month investigation and each face 10 charges of endangering children

Four New Hampshire daycare employees allegedly spiked children’s food with the sleep supplement melatonin and were arrested on Thursday.

After a six-month investigation, police discovered that children had been furtively dosed with melatonin. Officers arrested the daycare owner, 52-year-old Sally Dreckmann, along with three of her employees: Traci Innie, 51; Kaitlin Filardo and Jessica Foster, who are both 23.

Melatonin is a sleep aid supplement that is sold over the counter. But the long-term impacts of melatonin on children are not widely known.

Furthermore, there have been several reports of children being overdosed with melatonin in recent years. About 7% of emergency department visits between 2012 and 2021 were for children who had accidentally ingested melatonin, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a health warning for melatonin use around kids and adolescents, warning against the lack of US Food and Drug Administration oversight for the sleep aid.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    403·
    6 months ago

    I don’t know that I would ever use it on a kid, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about the impulse to drug a kid to calm them down. Pretty much every parent has had that thought at one point or another. But it’s just a silly fantasy you’re not supposed to act on.

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      575·
      6 months ago

      I let my baby smoke a fat joint to try to get to sleep, but it didn’t work. He just kept wanting to eat and wouldn’t shut up about the federal legalization of marijuana.

      Worst advice I’ve ever gotten.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        332·
        6 months ago

        True story: My grandmother, who spent a lot of time watching me while my parents worked, used to make wine out of sour cherries she grew in the garden and I had this fond memory of her regularly giving me a bowl of the delicious cherries from the bottom of the wine vat to eat and then one day I realized, “wait a second, those were full of alcohol!” She was clearly doing it to calm me down if I was too hyper.

        She was not the best person.

    • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
      7·
      6 months ago

      Yeah. The Bear has an episode where they Xanax the kids on accident. Hilarious but something that should never happen intentionally.

    • NABDad@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      We gave our son children’s Benadryl to get him to sleep, but:

      He was five.

      He couldn’t sleep because he broke his arm earlier that day and we had to wait until the next day to get a cast on it (so the swelling would go down). He just had a splint, so every time he moved, it hurt.

      When we called the ER to ask what to do so he could sleep, they said anything they would do would require him to be admitted, so the best solution was to just give him a dose of children’s Benadryl.

      He was our kid, not someone else’s kid entrusted to our care with the understanding that we wouldn’t drug him.