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Trumbull coroner, national drug-abuse adviser focus on deaths, recovery
By Ed Runyan
HOWLAND
Trumbull County’s heroin overdose epidemic is intensifying, according to data presented by Coroner Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk.
Dr. Germaniuk updated the numbers on the county’s heroin epidemic Friday, saying there have been 16 confirmed overdose deaths so far this year and probably 27 more that have not been confirmed yet for a total of 43 — nearly three per week.
By comparison, the county had 39 such deaths in all of 2013, which spiked to 54 in 2014. Dr. Germaniuk said the number would reach 125 by the end of 2015 at the current rate — almost double the record high of 64 in 2007.
“We’re getting killed over there,” Dr. Germaniuk said of the workload at the coroner’s office.
He spoke to more than 200 substance-abuse professionals and others attending a day-long Alliance for Substance Abuse Opiate Summit at Avalon Inn.
It featured the overdose-death statistics from Dr. Germaniuk, a more national overview from a recovering addict who is senior adviser to the federal Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration and eight other presentations.
Planning for the substance-abuse summit started a year ago, before Trumbull County officials knew that its overdose deaths had taken a dramatic upward turn for 2014 and long before the county’s current heroin-driven spike, said Lauren Thorp of the Trumbull County Mental Health and Recovery Board and Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention project director.
Dr. Germaniuk said some common characteristics of the drug overdose victims he sees are women 25 to 35 with two children, uneducated with no job. Men are frequently 38 to 45, unemployed or semi-skilled, “living in their mom’s basement,” he said. Almost all of them are white.
“My only goal for getting up in the morning is to get my next hit” of heroin, he said of many of the substance abusers who die. Because of the difficulty of escaping the grip of an addiction to opiates, Dr. Germaniuk said the best hope for lessening the crisis is educating people 13 to 21 with the message: “Don’t start.”
“Families have to be families again,” and people have to pick friends who won’t lead us to experiment with dangerous substances, frequently in the order of marijuana, pills, heroin.
“You don’t do it yourself. Someone usually shows you or helps you,” he said.
Tom Coderre of the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, who served in the Rhode Island Senate from 1995 to 2003, began his keynote presentation with a story about a man who “turned to alcohol and other drugs” out of dissatisfaction with his life, which “started to unravel,” who “resisted help,” and eventually lost his freedom and “his desire to live.”
The story was about Coderre and how “God intervened, and I got the help I needed and got clean.”
“I was a badly broken person 12 years ago,” he said, but he had support, and after six months in a recovery house, then another 18 months as assistant house manager and then house manager, he got better.
He went back to college and finished his bachelor’s degree. “It gave me hope and helped me believe in myself. I started taking care of myself. I attended 12-step programs. I started socializing with people in recovery. I started having fun again.”
He eventually went back to the Rhode Island Senate as chief of staff of the Senate president. Being appointed by President Barack Obama to his current position was “unbelievable, a pinch-me moment,” he said, and “I have relationships that are very unlike the ones I had before.”
He said his story is “not unique. There are 23.5 million people who have climbed out of this disease and learned again how to live.”
Coderre said SAMHSA believes behavioral health care is essential for achieving long-term recovery, and medication-assisted treatment with drugs such as Suboxone “is very effective” when combined with behavioral treatment, relapse prevention, family therapy and self-help support systems such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
He said 259 million prescriptions were filled in 2012, the equivalent of 75 opiod pills per American that year.
“Doctors, pharmaceutical companies have to be held responsible for this epidemic in our country,” Coderre said. “We have to stop blaming the people who are taking them” he said of addicts taking pharmaceutical drugs. “We forget about the billions that are being made by the pharmaceutical companies.”