We've all heard the cutesy slogans. Crack is whack. Crack kills. But even the horrors of what crack cocaine can do to an addict can't explain how a Florida mom stands accused of selling her 6-year-old daughter to pedophile drug dealers just so she could get her fix.
It's so disgusting, I almost wish I were making it up, but I don't think anything this depraved has ever entered my head. And sadly, it's cops in Jacksonville who say Dalina Nicholas did what no mother in her right mind would ever do. She allegedly handed daughter over to two men who would later sexually abuse the poor little girl. In exchange, Quinn Brooks, 56, and John Hagans, 47, supposedly provided the 39-year-old with her crack.
If even a bit of this bizarre tale is true, the horrors this child has been through make Nicholas unfit to ever be near the little girl again. Can you imagine willingly handing your child over to drug dealers? To drug dealers who intended to rape her (because I'm sorry, but if they did have sex with a 6-year-old the way police say, there is no other word for it)? I know I can't.
I don't think I should really have to note that I've never tried cocaine (nor do I ever intend to). It's only from years of "hugs not drugs" type training back in my school days that I got all those cutesy slogans. It's how I know crack is highly addictive. It's how I know users can spend their lives searching for that next high, trying but failing to ever regain the sense of euphoria of that first hit. But that's not an excuse, is it?
It's natural for us "normal" parents to try to find answers in cases like this. We want to make sense of something nonsensical. As the mother of a sweet 6-year-old girl myself, I don't want to think that there is a woman on this planet who would give birth to a child and then turn around and hand her over to people like this -- for any price, whether it's money, drugs, her life ... So I want to blame this on the cocaine addiction.
Drug addiction helps me imagine what would drive a mother to do this to her own child. I can imagine it. But even with drug addiction, I can't explain it. What police say happened to that child is too depraved and too disgusting.
What should be done to this mom if she's convicted?