Where’s outcry over epidemic of opiate abuse in the Valley?

Imagine a rancid crop of broccoli shipped to the Mahoning Valley resulting in hundreds of people falling ill and scores dying. Imagine the public outcry, the sensitive assistance campaigns and the massive consumer avoidance of the green-budded clustered mustard plant that quickly would follow.

Doug Wentz, director of community services for the Neil Kennedy Recovery Clinics in Youngstown, Austintown and Howland, uses a bad-broccoli example to build an analogy with opiate abuse in the Valley. Simply substitute the opium-producing poppy plant for the broccoli plant. Like the rank broccoli, opiate abuse via heroin, cocaine, oxycodone and other sedative narcotics sickens hundreds and kills scores yearly in our community. But unlike the fictional tragedy of contaminated broccoli, the real-life tragedy of opiate abuse triggers little public outcry, generates few assistance programs and sucks in more and more individuals from all walks of life into its deadly trap.

Wentz’s broccoli metaphor is apt, and his stupor over the dearth in public outcry over opiate abuse is legitimate.

SCOPE OF OPIATE ADDICTION

As a special report on opiate abuse in the Mahoning Valley in Sunday’s Vindicator by Staff Writer Ed Runyan illustrated, opiate addiction is no longer confined to the mean streets of the inner city. Today horror stories fueled by heroin, cocaine, Vicodin, OxyContin and other opiates permeate urban, suburban and rural communities and traverse a wide cross-section of lives.

There’s the 40-year-old man for whom peer influence paved the way for addiction, family alienation and homelessness. There’s the 34-year-old woman whose addiction to Vicodin led to a life of lies and thievery. And there’s the 32 year-old rural Trumbull County woman whose job loss triggered an OxyContin addiction that, in her words, “ripped my world apart.”

Those three faces of addiction detailed in Sunday’s report represent only a fraction of the victims of the skyrocketing epidemic. The number of unintended drug-overdose deaths in the state increased more than four-fold from 411 in 2000 to 1,765 in 2011. That number increased five-fold in the Valley.

Such a ballooning economic and human toll illustrates the importance of investing all available time, money and resources in prevention and treatment.

In the Valley, such investment has been growing. The Trumbull County Drug Court, in which all three of the former addicts profiled Sunday have sought refuge, has served as a model program. The specialized court and a similar one in Mahoning County provide a formal legal process in which substance-abusing individuals who have been arrested for nonviolent, nonsexual and nonweapons offenses may enter a drug rehabilitation program, instead of facing a potential prison term.

The program, which includes partnerships with the community’s drug and alcohol treatment agencies, has produced noteworthy success in ridding participants of their addictions, in greatly lessening their tendency to commit new offenses and in saving taxpayers great sums in incarceration costs. But the scope of the task is overwhelming. This year, according to Mahoning County Common Pleas Court Judge John M. Durkin, 85 percent of participants in his drug court have opiate-based addictions.

That colossal increase has tested the limits of available treatment facilities in the Valley, a trend seen nationwide. In 2011, an estimated 21.6 million Americans needed treatment for a problem related to drugs, but only about 2.3 million people actually received it, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

CALL FOR COALITION ON OPIATE ABUSE

Clearly that gap must be closed to make significant dents in the epidemic. It is but one of many challenges that a Valleywide coalition on opiate abuse could tackle. Others include reaching out to unserved abusers through education and public-awareness campaigns, developing stronger lines of communication and partnerships among law enforcement, health agencies and the courts, seeking grants for drug treatment programs and more. The first step in combatting the plague, of course, must be to raise public consciousness and generate a louder public outcry.

That first step, however, stands out as a vexing and difficult step. Darryl Rodgers, coordinator of the drug-court program in Trumbull County, is understandably perplexed. “I don’t know why we are so lax in looking at the epidemic [of drug abuse]. … People are dying every day in the cities, and we’re trying to wake people up.”

It is long past time for a wake-up call to build and mobilize a fortified arsenal to fight the monstrous spread of this communitywide and nationwide contagion. Building on the success of drug-court programs with stronger coalitions of public health departments, treatment agencies, law enforcement and the criminal justice system would serve as a promising start.

After all, opiate abuse is much more insipid and much more real than a make-believe batch of botched broccoli. Metaphorically speaking, it is more accurately a potent weapon of mass destruction.