I still don’t see how the cops can dismiss the parents as having had the drug with them just because their belongings were searched. I don’t care if they’re doctors or lawyers- plenty of supposedly upstanding citizens have a hard drug habit. In fact, one just got sentenced to life in prison.
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I’m sure lawyers will make this strong argument in court, @muddy .
I just read the complaint, thanks so much @JJD , the complaint disturbs for multiple reasons.
Apart from the horror of this poor child’s death, all the info about drug use in AirBnBs is sobering indeed. I’ll be better in the morning but right now I feel like throwing in the towel.
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Wow @Rolf this poor family lost their child in tragic circumstances and you talk about ‘misleading clickbait’.
The most likely place for the child to pick up the drug was in the holiday home her family booked. The guest who held a party at the property previously admitted their was cocaine use at the party so likely there would have been other drugs too.
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Well, you got me to read p 6-7. LOL. The first thing that occurs to me is that is all hearsay evidence and inadmissable in court. And if it’s admissable, I can be a witness to the truth that hosts will both lie and be mistaken. A host posted that he found a cocaine spoon on the property? But no cocaine? A bong? Weed is legal in many places. Needles? Would these folks know if the guest were diabetic?
I know the goal is a settlement and a child is dead for some reason, but p 6-7 made me laugh.
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I don’t understand what happened to the CC site. It really is not clear how to use it and most of the long term hosts, as far as I can tell, have disappeared.
Since they totally changed the format, aka “improved” it, I notice there is very little participation compared to before.
Also several long-time contributors have gotten banned from the CC, including me.
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you got a whole post devoted to your passing (for want of a better term, lol). Andrew and Ute too, sparked a lot of conversation. When another host brought up my situation they actually deleted her comments!! 
I also made a post the morning of my dramas, and they deleted that too.
And I had a stalk recently and it looks like many of my posts have been deleted. I swear they’d done that to Andrew too, cos in older threads you don’t see him as much as you should. What a waste of resources… And they claim to appreciate the criticism but really they are just itching to remove people, and the few long term posters left I think are very, very careful. And if they knew that you could be banned from hosting too, over some words in the forums, they’d be wise to stop posting in the forums completely.
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Muddy, what was the reason they banned you?
Oh, they have this overarching political correctness where they see discrimination under every pebble. I had gotten a few warnings, over stuff like mentioning that a certain demographic tends to… whatever. Things we tend to discuss here easily. I think one was something about how millennials tend to send one one-liner message after another, as if they were texting with their friends. I always am aware not to paint everyone in any demographic with the same brush, because of course people are individuals, and don’t all behave the same. But I think it helps lead to understanding of other demographics if you aren’t afraid to acknowledge that there are cultural differences and try to understand why they do certain things, because if you do, you are more likely to have more tolerance for behaviors that otherwise might irritate you.
In any case, the last warning was when I said something tongue-in-cheek in a thread where I think a host was complaining about her guests responding to her messages asking her this or that, without answering her questions, as if they had never read them. I wrote something to the effect that it sounded just like how the Filipino CS reps dealt with hosts. That was supposedly some discrimination against Filipinos, even though it’s a fact that their CS operates, for the most part, out of the Phillipines. Had it operated out of France, or the US, I would have said the French reps, or the American reps.
But I didn’t get banned right away after that, I think it was when I called out Catherine Powell for her tone-deaf feel-good responses, asking if they were being written by the CS reps, because that’s what they sounded like.
As well as things posted here. Also in the media.
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Ah! That’s actually helpful. I have an upcoming VRBO guest that’s doing that and it drives me crazy. Three notifications (app, text, email) per one-liner, so I get 12-15 notifications in less than a minute from her.
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Exactly my thoughts, whoever travels with a small child or a pet should check all hidden places, upon arrival. With same day turnovers, something as small as a pill can easily be overlooked under the furniture or between sofa pillows
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Yes, they use the send button like a period 
I asked one of my guests why her generation does that- why they don’t just write all in one msg. The answer was enlightening. She said her texting generation views messaging as a form of speech rather than a form of writing. I say something, you say something- they keyboard so fast that they can exchange messages in instants, whereas I’m just starting to respond when 7 more msg pings happen.
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As @JJD points out a lethal dose of fentanyl for such a small child could be the size of two grains of salt, so while I agree with your suggestion it would not have helped here.
Another takeaway is the potential risks of everyday homes to very young children. While I suppose that we all ‘know’ this, each time I read cases like this some surprise me and re-light a fire to think about what risks on our property might pose a risk to guests, especially young children.
Another takeaway is to remind Hosts of lawsuits related to injuries to young children. The lawyer for the plaintiffs here settled another lawsuit for $17.5 million when a 2-year old was killed by a dresser tipping over on the toddler.
When I read about the furniture tip-0ver case I quickly visualized the Airbnb for which I am co-Host for any such risks but I don’t think we have anything like that. As I reflected it occurred to me again that when permitting young children as guests that the preventative measures need to be ‘more’ than if we were not permitting such young guests. For example, I think if we did have dressers in the property and admitted toddlers that it would be prudent for us to bolt the dressers or similar items (a picture, a wall hanging, of course a bookcase, etc.) that could tip over/fall.
Here’s the link about the tip-over settlement: Leesfield Scolaro sues corporations responsible for creating safety standards that resulted in furniture tip-over fatality — Florida Injury Lawyer Blawg — April 8, 2021
I raised 3 kids, there were plenty of other toddlers in my home over the years, none of the furniture was “bolted down”, nor did any toddler ever have a piece of furniture fall on them.
Obviously if you have some lightweight, pressboard, inexpensive furniture which is tippy, or could easily be pushed or pulled over, it should be secured somehow, but a normal wooden dresser isn’t going to tip over even if a toddler pulls a drawer out and stands in it.
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A top cause of death in toddlers and children is suffocation and choking. Drowning as well and that can happen in a tub or a dog’s bowl of water but it’s usually a pool. None of these are labeled “parent failure to monitor child” which is also a leading cause of child death. Ranked above that is intentional homicide. The greatest danger to children are their own families.
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Well, take a look at that link I provided on the tip-over case. It turns out that the ASTM standards/procedures were faulty.
I get that. Same in my family.
But that’s really anecdotal or as some might say here, non-sequitur.
Even if everyone on this forum had the same experience that you and I had, that doesn’t mean that it’s safe or prudent for a commercial hospitality provider. Accidents occur with a frequency, some very low. For example, the probability of dying in a car accident is very low, about one in four million. So that’s a low risk for you and me but for a country it’s significant and warrants study on how to reduce those accidents.
It’s very simple to toggle bolt furniture to the wall.
Suppose a dresser fell over on a 2-year old in a Host’s property and seriously injured or killed that child.
Can you imagine how an attorney would grill that Host on the stand?
Suppose the lawyer could establish somehow that the Host actually did hear/read about the possibility of bolting the dresser, had read about the tip–over case above but concluded, “Nah, not going to do anything because our dressers when I grew up/raised a family weren’t bolted down, don’t know anyone whose was, or killed by a tipping-over dresser.”
How do you think that might go?
How do you think the Host would privately feel about the death/injury of the child when a simple precaution would have prevented it?
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Are you talking to me? I’m not disputing that ASTM was at fault. I think you’re addressing Muddy but just wanted to be at fault. If you ever see me post any kind of “well, when I was a kid it was this way” as any justification for anything, please call me out on it. That is so much bs. Child mortality due to accidents has plummented since 1950 in large part due to increased safety regulations.
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Not in this post. You’re right that it’s in response to @muddy’s post.
Call me out on it too, though I do understand the instinct to do this and I am sure that I have some/many nonsensical ideas based on my life experiences, especially when I was young and these are now internalized in a way that I’m not even conscious of them.
In the last few days it strikes me from my forum participation that each Host has whatever experience they have, and especially if they’ve been at it awhile there can be a tendency to conclude ‘this is the way it is.’
Many members here are good about pointing out that one Host’s experience is not another’s: different properties, different locations writ small (this street or that) or write large (this country or that).
Members are good about pointing out pitfalls of stereotyping and broad generalizations.
I think we need to add to the list recency/availability bias that just because some bad contingency hasn’t arisen to you or to most of us (yet) doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t at least consider preventative measures. Of course, anyone can take this too far and each of us apply our judgment.
But we also need to understand that that judgment is subject to human cognitive biases, like the recency/availability bias. For example, if someone’s never heard or heard just many years ago of a toddler dying in a tipped-over dresser, it’s kind of ignored. I’ve just read about, so my mind probably over-emphasizes it.
It might be helpful to think of risks this way: taking risks might be like playing Russian Roulette with one bullet and a large range of chambers. Sometimes there are ten thousand or a hundred thousand chambers, or for a 19-month old toddler encountering two grains of fentanyl just one chamber.
You spin the cylinder, pull the trigger, the gun doesn’t fire, and it’s human nature to tend to think you’re safe.
But, really, you just dodged the bullet, this time.
And it’s another cognitive bias that if I get hit by the bullet to think I was at least somewhat negligent/brought it on myself, but if you don’t get the bullet it’s because of how you handle things.
I can still remember my “car seat” when I was a young child in the early 50s. It was a seat that had 2 metal hooks that it hung by over the back of the long front seat, and it hung there a foot above the seat itself. It might have had some flimsy little lap belt, I don’t recall. I rode between my parents in the front seat able to see out the windows. It had a little steering wheel with a red horn. I can see that red horn in my mind’s eye clearly to this day- it was a plastic half dome in the middle of the steering wheel.
Had we ever been in a collision, I would likely have gone flying through the windshield, “car seat” and all.
It took me 10 minutes to attach and tighten down all the straps of the proper child’s car seat we used for my 3 year old grandaughter when they came for Christmas this year. No way that thing would move in an accident.