Children living in illegal grow-op homes fare quite well, likely due to the lucrative nature of their parents’ business, and shouldn’t automatically be removed from care after a bust, says a leading children’s health expert at Sick Kids Hospital.

“Basically these are middle-class people who make a lot of money. That is our explanation why the kids are doing well,” says Dr. Gideon Koren, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and director of its Motherisk program.

He authored a study that looked at 75 children who were removed from “drug-producing homes” in York Region between 2006 and 2010 and found that the majority were healthy and drug-free.

The study, published in the July 25 advance online edition of the Journal of Pediatrics, found that children living in such homes may not be exposed to the alarming health risk widely believed to exist.

The study was conducted at the request of the York Region Children’s Aid Society and York Regional Police who were dealing with a surge in grow-op activity in the early 2000s. In such cases, children are routinely removed from their parents’ custody and sometimes even placed into foster care.

“They did it because of the instinct, that it must not be good for them, but we disputed that instinct,” Koren explained.

The children, who ranged in age from two months to 15 years, came from 46 different homes. Eighty per cent of the homes were marijuana-growing operations or homes where large quantities of the drug were found. The remaining homes were engaged in cocaine or amphetamine production or had multiple different kinds of drugs being produced and stored.

While hair-follicle testing identified passive exposure to illicit drugs in a third of the children, the majority showed no symptoms of this exposure. There was no indication that any of the children had taken or were given drugs.

The school-age children attended schools at grades appropriate for their age. Some had minor health issues such as eczema, asthma and mild allergies.

Two of the children, found in “horrendous” living conditions, were small for their size and believed to have been subject to maltreatment and neglect.

But overall, the children were healthy, in fact healthier than average Canadian children, the study found.

“What we found is the kids are doing well,” Koren said. “There is no question that middle upper-class kids with better income are doing better.”

Both Koren and Patrick Lake, executive director of the York Region Children’s Aid Society, said the study will provide guidance to children’s aids societies across the country as they make custody decisions on a case-by-case basis. It shows there is no medical justification to automatically separate children in such cases from their parents.

But Lake disputed Koren’s belief that these children are better off because their families had money.

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“I think that’s a real value judgment that I don’t support. It would be like saying kids are healthier if they are raised in homes where there is organized crime,” he said.

Both Lake and Koren said there are many other reasons why children can be removed from their parents’ custody, including neglect, abuse, domestic violence or unsafe living conditions. Such conditions may even be the result of drug production, such as mould growth, hazardous wiring and exposure to dangerous chemicals.