Officials seek swift response to Trumbull County heroin plague

April 9, 2015 at 5:32p.m.

WARREN

State Rep. Sean O’Brien, law enforcement and drug-treatment officials spoke by conference call Thursday with state leaders to attack the local drug-abuse problem, which killed eight last week among more than 30 overdoses.

O’Brien of Bazetta Township, D-63rd, said he initiated a conversation about the Trumbull overdose problem Wednesday with Gov. John Kasich while meeting with him regarding a Vienna Township oil spill.

The governor “immediately asked his staff to come up with an answer,” O’Brien said Thursday during a news conference at the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office.

That led to the conference call and a commitment from Kasich that short-term help will be provided immediately in the form of around 500 naloxone kits being provided to local law enforcement and health officials.

Local officials will also meet over the next 10 days to establish strategies to address the problem more aggressively in the short-term and long-term, said Capt. Jeff Orr, commander of the Trumbull Ashtabula Group Law Enforcement Task Force.

Orr told reporters last Friday that a spike in overdose deaths had hit Trumbull County that week. He estimated that most were heroin overdoses and that the prescription drug fentanyl had probably been added to it, creating a combination much more potent that straight heroin.

Orr said Thursday the overdose problem is everywhere, but the “severity of it impacted us unlike we’ve seen before, so we had to take some swift action.”