Town-hall meeting discusses opiates

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

CHAMPION

Three statistics provide clues into the nature of Trumbull County’s most serious problems with drugs.

The number of drug- related deaths rose from 49 in 2010 to 59 in 2011.

The number of people dying from heroin overdoses rose from six in 2010 to 19 in 2011.

And the number of males who died from drug overdoses doubled from 23 to 45 in the past two years, while the number of females dying from overdoses dropped nearly in half.

The problem, statewide, has to do with the use of opiates — drugs like heroin, Vicodin and OxyContin, a speaker said Thursday at a town-hall meeting on opiate use at the Trumbull Career and Technical Center.

The average person in 1997 used seven opiate-related pills. The average person in 2011 used 67, said James Lapczynski, deputy director of the Ohio Department of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Services.

There is a close relationship between opiate use and fatal drug overdoses, he said.

One graphic seen by the 100-person audience showed that the amount of prescription opiates used by Ohioans and the number of drug-related deaths in the state both increased roughly 372 percent between 1997 and 2010.

Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk, Trumbull County coroner, said one of the more common types of opiate death he’s been seeing is among men 45 to 55 years old who started using pain pills because of an injury.

“Americans love the quick fix,” Dr. Germaniuk said, and frequently family members cover up for the addicted man.

Another common victim is a white female 25 to 35 years old with two to three children working an unskilled job and dying from a heroin overdose.

Dr. Germaniuk says some of the common denominators he frequently sees among drug-overdose victims is a person who has not succeeded — “no education, no job, no hope, no future.”

Several speakers said educating young people is one of the best ways to combat opiate abuse. It needs to start as early as possible.

Dr. Germaniuk advocates that parents ask their children who they are spending time with and where they are going and taking whatever steps necessary to find out early if a child is using drugs.

“There’s nothing wrong with tossing your kids’ room around” to look for signs of drug use, he said.