The Opiate Epidemic

If you haven’t heard the disturbing statistics on the opiate crisis in this country, you’ve either been in a coma for the past five to ten years or you’ve been in denial. Since 2010, deaths from heroin overdoses have quadrupled. In 2016, over fifty thousand people lost their lives to their opiate addiction, a number which includes not only heroin, but prescription painkillers as well. Over fifty thousand people is a shocking number, right? How about when you put it up against the number of people who died as a result of guns? That number is around 35,000, so opiates have killed more people than guns, but only a few people are crying for better legislation on drugs.

Yes, drugs are illegal and task forces have been working hard to clean up the street drug problem for years, but most opiate addictions don’t start with shoving a needle full of poison into your arm. Three out of four new heroin users report having used prescription painkillers before they went for something harder and cheaper. Most of the world, those not affected by an addict, has turned a blind eye to the opiate crisis, until now. It’s easy to ignore something when it doesn’t impact your life in any way and opiates used to be that way. Even as recently as ten years ago, opiates weren’t something we talked about on a regular basis and then they exploded. How did it happen? How did we get here?

Prescribing Addiction

The first step in reaching the record number of opiate-related deaths was in the hands of healers. Doctors were writing scripts left and right for opiate painkillers like Vicodin, Oxycontin, and Percocet for not only post-surgical pain as intended, but for aches and pains, migraines, a broken pinky toe. What started happening with the people who took the drugs responsibly is that they’d put the leftover pills in the medicine cabinet for a rainy day or future toothache and they would forget about. What they didn’t realize is that Junior started sneaking a “vike” or a “perc” here and there to get messed up with his friends. To a lot of people a stray Vicodin here and there doesn’t sound all that threatening, but what about when you’re taking them every four hours for legitimate pain, just so you can get out of bed? People with chronic pain conditions become the first line of addicts, as they are seeking something that will ease the pain they’re feeling and eventually their Vicodin stops working, so they have to upgrade to something better. If you don’t believe that addiction starts here, then you’re kidding yourself. What’s happening is people with constant supplies of these meds are usually a little bit high themselves and aren’t aware that someone is stealing a handful of meds to sell to their friends at street value (roughly a dollar a milligram) or to share with their social circle. This is where addiction starts, because they enjoy the feeling so much, they continue to seek it out, and the habit builds to unmanageable proportions. At this point, the pills become too expensive to maintain a habit, so they seek cheaper means. Enter heroin.

If you talk to an addict or a recovering addict, there is no greater high. However, there is also no greater killer. The dangers of heroin are incredible. First of all, most heroin isn’t pure. Drug dealers are cutting it with other substances –like fentanyl (a heavy narcotic used for surgical purposes), thus making it impossible to detect the purity of the drug and therefore addicts are not able to detect how strong their actual dose is, so they’re overdosing in record numbers.

What started with over-prescribing is ending in deaths. The death of kids, the death of adults; heroin doesn’t judge whose life it destroys. However, turning a blind eye isn’t going to stop the madness, it isn’t going to stop the death. Band together in your community to help stop the spread of this horrific wildfire before it’s too late.