Worcester officials had a clear message on Thursday, everyone has a role to play in the fight against opioid addiction.
WORCESTER — Worcester officials had a clear message on Thursday, everyone has a role to play in the fight against opioid addiction. It’s as simple as properly disposing of your old medicines.
The city’s multi-department response to the problem began in earnest last August, when there were 12 overdose deaths. It includes not only educational efforts, but training all of the city’s first responders in the use of Narcan, a drug that can reverse the effects of opioid that can save lives if administered during an overdose.
A major element of the city’s plan is a now expanded collection of unused prescription medications. According to many, the use of prescription drugs can and has led many addictions.
“For many, addition to opiates of other pain killers start by finding unused prescriptions in a relative’s medicine cabinet,” Mayor Joseph Petty said. “If these medications were disposed of properly, many addicts would never develop this dangerous disease.”
Director of the Department of Public Health Dr. Michael Hirsch said the over-prescribing of medications goes back to a series of regulatory changes in the 1990s. At that time, physicians were urged to treat pain differently.
That led to the chart common in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices that rates pain from a smiley face to a frowning face.
Pharmaceutical companies responded by making boutique medicines that “became very potent and very available and I think led to the conversion of a lot of people taking oral opiates to, eventually, heroin, because it is so much less expensive than these boutique oral drugs,” Hirsch said. Hirsch has stated he hopes that addicts can be brought back from the brink but this will not be easy. Perhaps, visiting sandiegorehab.net will provide the necessary means for professional help to be sourced.
“Your medicine cabinet is an important portal into this drug world and you should secure it, you should empty it out,” Hirsch said.
Among those who spoke were two people who know where the illegal use of unused prescription drugs can lead: Worcester resident Bruce Fiene and Southbridge resident Kyle Moon.
“I’m fortunate,” Fiene said. “My son is still alive.”
His son, now 19, spent what should have been his senior year of high school addicted to drugs that started in “somebody else’s medicine cabinet.”
His son’s use started at 15, Fiene said. At 16, he had moved on to opioids. Sometime between the time he was 17 and 18, he turned to a cheaper alternative and began shooting up.
The recreational use of prescription drugs in not a new problem, Fiene said. Now 50, he recalled his own days in junior high school where teenagers would bring drugs to parties and “for $2 you could buy stuff. Regularly taking opiates could jeopardize your career if employers have implemented a Countrywide Testing drug test; employers are unlikely to want substance abusers to remain under their employ.
“The big difference is the amount of powerful opiates that are on the market,” Fiene said. “What’s happened is, that same kid can now go to school and sell a pill for $80.”
Not everybody who takes a pill will become addicted, but some will., he noted. And, with the cost of $80 too high for many teens, you start stealing money to pay for your addiction.
“And then you go, ‘Hey, five bucks for a bag of heroin – let’s do it,’ ” he said.
Compounding the problem is a stigma that Hirsch referred to as well.
“Everyone has bad idea of what a heroin addict looks like,” Fiene said. “So, as a family member, you don’t want to tell people that your son does heroin.
“I’ve been educated,” he said. “People are dying, lot of kids that I know are dead.”
The victims of the city’s overdoses reflect Fiene’s, City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. said.
“The folks who were victims in those overdose deaths didn’t fit some people’s stereotypical idea of who might be addicted to opioids,” Augustus said. “It doesn’t know economic boundaries, it doesn’t know class boundaries, it doesn’t know racial or age boundaries. It is a devastating epidemic hitting every corner of our corner of our community.”
A near death experience last October may have ultimately helped Fiene’s son. Since that day, he has been struggling to stay clean.
For Fiene’s family, it meant exhausting his son’s college funds on a six week rehabilitation program. Currently, he is in a program in which he works and pays rent. Except for one brief relapse, he has been clean for months and he plans to both get his high school diploma, after which he wants to attend WPI.
It is a battle that will be tough, but beatable according to Moon. Moon, 25, became an addict after trying prescription drugs at 14 years old.
“Just for fun,” he said. “It turned out to be a little but more than that.”
He’s been clean since April 2013. Today, he says he has “very fleeting thoughts” about doing drugs. But his addiction is under control.
“My journey didn’t start seeking out a street dealer looking for that bag of heroin, ” Moon said. “It started in my home, at no fault to my family, at no fault to my loved ones.
“My friends would ask what (medications he had) and I would ask what theirs’ were,” Moon said. “It became readily available to abuse them.” It was pretty clear how easy it was to get hold of addictive substances and become hooked; this just exemplified the need for there to rehab facilities and programs, like the ones detailed on enterhealth.com, to help people recover from their addictions.
According to Augustus, a national study by the Partnership For A Drug Free America – the results of which mirror those surveys taken locally – show four in 10 teens who abuse drugs say it started at home, in the medicine cabinet. One in three who abuse prescription drugs begin before age 14.
Among parents, 17 percent admit to not disposing of unused medications properly.
The city collects unused prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications in several ways. Primarily, there is a drop-box in the lobby of the Police Department that is accessible every day of the year, 24 hours per day.
Expanding on a previous program of collecting drugs sporadically at the city’s 52 neighborhood crime watch meetings, officers will now accept the drugs at any monthly meeting.
In addition, Gemme said residents may now call police and arrange for a pick-up.
“If you had asked me at 14, 15 years old if drugs and alcohol would have taken away everything I had and everything I wanted, I would have said, ‘No, I’m just having a good time,’ ” Moon said.
“If you don’t need them, then why do you have them? It’s that easy,” he said. “You get them prescribed. When the problem goes away, get rid of them. There is no reason to keep drugs around.”
If you have been affected by issues relating to opioid addiction, contacting a rehabilitation facility such as Pacific Ridge could be the beginning of your journey to recovery. For more information see: https://www.alcoholismtreatment.com/portland-or/
Source: MassLive Worcester http://masslive.com/news/worcester
