It is a chilling story, reported by our colleagues from France Blue : this Tuesday, September 11, 2018, a 37-year-old mother was sentenced by the correctional court of Mont-de-Marsan (Nouvelle-Aquitaine) for having administered anxiolytics and neuroleptics to her 2-year-old daughter.
She was given a 6-month suspended prison sentence; her husband, meanwhile, received a 4-month suspended prison sentence for not alerting the authorities. The facts took place between September 2016 and January 2017: to “calm” her daughter, the woman administered “half a tablet of Lexomil per week, in a bottle of coke”.
Drugs strictly prohibited for children and prescribed by prescription
It was a social worker who sounded the alarm at the start of 2017: she noticed suspicious marks on the little girl’s body and found her behavior unusual – she seemed “often asleep”. An analysis of the child’s hair reveals regular consumption of Lexomil and Tercian, two drugs usually prescribed in cases of anxiety or mental disorders – schizophrenia, in particular.
Lexomil and Tercian are strictly prohibited for children under the age of 6 and these drugs are only available on prescription, with a prescription of a short duration due (in particular) to numerous side effects.
More worrying perhaps: the condemned parents were not at their first attempt. In 2013, they had already faced justice for similar facts concerning two other of their five children: a psychiatrist had then detected a “personality alteration” in the mother.
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