Stats indicate drug-abuse epidemic, but have we become desensitized?

WARREN

Mahoning Valley professionals who work in drug treatment and law enforcement say statistics are one way to understand how destructive addiction to heroin or other drugs can be.

For example, the number of heroin-overdose deaths in Ohio jumped from 71 in 2000 to 426 in 2011.

And the number of unintended overdose deaths in Ohio rose from 411 in 2000 to 1,765 in 2011.

And there’s the number of people in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties — 123 — who died of overdose deaths in 2011 compared with 24 who died of overdose in 2000.

Finally, every man, woman and child in the Mahoning Valley, on average, consumes about 80 doses of prescription pain medication per year — 91.8 in Trumbull, 77.5 in Mahoning, and 70.3 in Columbiana. Trumbull County had one of the highest rates in the state, according to the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy.

And although Trumbull County is not on a record pace for drug-overdose deaths this year, heroin overdoses have created a scary outlook because cheap, high-quality heroin has flooded the market, said Doug Wentz, director of community services for the Neil Kennedy Recovery Clinics in Howland, Austintown and Youngstown.

“I’ve been here 35 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this situation,” he said of the current heroin-addiction problem.

Neil Kennedy Recovery Clinics started in 1946 to treat alcoholics, but today 85 percent of their patients are addicted to opiate painkillers such as oxycodone, Percocet, Vicodin or heroin. Sometimes their patients also abuse anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax.

Wentz said one reason addiction has become so prevalent is that users in many cases were introduced to opiates by their doctors, giving them the false sense that the drugs were safe.

“Or just young people liking to take chances, ‘Hey, I’ll try this,’” he said.

Wentz said he likes to draw the analogy of drug-abuse deaths to the public-health scare that would result if people were dying from bad broccoli instead of drug overdose.

“If people were eating bad broccoli at a restaurant and dying, people would be up in arms,” he said.

In the decade since oxycodone abuse took off, law enforcement and the medical community have done a better job to stop it, but public awareness about drug-abuse remains low, and treatment options are low, he said.

“I don’t know why we are so lax in looking at the epidemic [of drug abuse],” said Darryl Rodgers, coordinator of the drug-court program through the Trumbull County Common Pleas Court. “I don’t know when we’re going to start.”

“People are dying every day in the cities, and we’re trying to wake people up. I think we’re becoming desensitized,” he said.

Through drug court, addicts get into a relationship with a therapist and other support systems of people “who understand the challenge of living one day at a time. And if you don’t have that recipe, you’ll have problems.”

He compares it to insulin dependency for diabetics.

“You have to deal with it every day,” he said of addicts receiving support for their addiction. “If they don’t take their insulin, they run the risk of having problems.”

Rodgers remembers one of the people on the list of 30 who died from overdose in Trumbull County in the first nine months of this year.

A 29-year-old Girard woman indicted on a heroin-possession charge June 28 came to see Rodgers in the Trumbull County Courthouse in August about getting into drug court, but she died of a heroin overdose two days later.