The stories are in every community, across every income and background.
The mother who was only allowed to see her child if the visit was supervised, and finally actually showed up — admittedly high.
The Edinburgh woman who sold her body so she could buy drugs.
The 23-year-old found dead in the garage of his parents’ Greenwood home of an overdose after the longest stretch of sobriety in his adult life — 60 days — leaving his mother to wonder what led him to use again.
In Johnson County, 32 people died of a drug overdose in 2017, which was a 167 percent increase over the number of overdose deaths in 2015. Nearly half of the people who died of an overdose in 2017 had opioids in their system, and the numbers don’t include residents who may have died after being taken to an Indianapolis hospital.
We’re increasingly addicted and dying. And the signs are all over our communities.
Syringes litter the park where your kids play and the streets where you walk to work. Officers are spending extra time patrolling neighborhoods after repeated reports of vehicle and home break-ins.
Local hospitals are taking care of infants born addicted, an issue they had never even dealt with a few years ago. Social service agencies are begging for residents to become foster parents, taking in children whose parents are in jail, using drugs or even dead.
Tormented families are desperately trying to get help for sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. In many cases, they have to plan funerals instead.
No one is left untouched by the worst drug crisis in U.S. history.
In 2016, 42,000 Americans — or 115 people a day — died after overdosing on opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s more than the number of deaths from breast cancer and prostate cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.
And 32 of those deaths were in Johnson County — a rate higher than the state average.
Johnson County ranked No. 6 in the state in 2015 for emergency room trips by patients overdosing, nearing numbers seen in much larger counties — Hamilton, Allen, Lake and St. Joseph.
For every 100 people in our county, 84 prescriptions for pain medications are written, flooding households with OxyContin and Vicodin pills that breed an addiction, or are stolen by family members who are addicted or thieves looking for a fix during a break-in, according to data from 2016. The over-prescribing of Johnson County residents — and the nation — has been brewing for years. In 2008, 100 pain medication prescriptions were written for every 100 county residents, state records show.
FACING ADDICTION
Addiction is a nationwide issue. According to the CDC, nearly 2 million Americans abused or were dependent on prescription opioid medications in 2014. And as many as 1 in 4 people who take prescription opioids long-term for pain not related to cancer struggles with addiction.
The number of overdoses continue to climb. In 2016, the number of deaths from opioid overdoses was five times higher than in 1999, according to the CDC. More than a half a million people died from drug overdoses from 2000 to 2015. Everyday, more than 1,000 people are treated in emergency rooms across the nation for incorrectly using prescription opioids.
Another concern is the spread of potent synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, that police are finding more and more often. From 2014 to 2015, the number of times police have come across the drug has doubled. The CDC put out an alert about the spread of the drug in 2015, citing it as the reason for significant increases in recent years of opioid deaths.
And we know that those highly addictive and dangerous drugs are in Johnson County.
They caused the overdose of a mother in front of her children, and the death of a former Whiteland Community High School student whose family had to wait for the autopsy results before knowing what killed him. A father of two died of an overdose after taking heroin laced with four times the lethal dose of fentanyl.
A 21-year-old woman who had been out of contact with her father for years surprised the Whiteland family with a visit at Christmastime, and she brought her boyfriend. Earlier this month the family came home to find that their doors had been busted down and someone had taken their belongings, such as their iPad, a laptop, gaming systems, a TV, power tools and a gun. Police tracked the items, and found the daughter and her boyfriend at a truck stop. Inside the car, they found heroin and the straws that the woman used to snort the drugs and needles that her boyfriend used to inject it.
She told police it had been her idea to break into her family’s home, and they needed money for drugs, food and a place to stay. Only a few items were going to be taken, but her boyfriend kept bringing out more and more. She told the officer that jail was the best place for her so she could get off drugs.
Two weeks ago, a woman overdosed on heroin in her mother’s Franklin home. Medics revived her with Narcan and found the needle she had used. Her mother said her daughter had been drug-free for a while, and had a five-week-old newborn. The woman had already been granted guardianship over her granddaughter. Department of Child Services decided that the infant could continue to stay with the grandmother, but her mother could no longer live in the apartment or be around the baby due to her drug use.
She told police she had bought $20 worth of heroin, but had been shorted by the drug dealer, so she injected it all into her vein in one shot.
SEEKING HELP
Right now, treatment is often out of reach for people struggling with addiction.
In 2009, 23.5 million people needed treatment for a drug or alcohol abuse problem, but only 2.6 million — 11.2 percent — received it at a specialty facility, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
And local families say the issues that make treatment more challenging haven’t changed.
For families with insurance, rehabilitation is within reach, but facilities are often out of state, and bills remain high even with insurance. Just months before his death from an overdose, a 23-year-old was planning to file bankruptcy over his rehabilitation bills, which totaled more than $100,000 after insurance had paid its part, his mother said.
Communities are tasked with considering a range of options, but few have been implemented while police and fire departments are being called to more and more overdoses.
In Johnson County, officials are trying everything from a device that only recently got government approval to help with the symptoms of withdrawal, to court programs specifically geared toward drug users. A Greenwood mental health and addiction center has been named one of only a handful of designated opioid addiction treatment centers in the state.
But if you try to get into Valle Vista Health System today, chances are no beds will be available. Officials there are continuing to look at ways to expand in order to meet the surging demand.
FACING CONSEQUENCES
For others, their addiction lands them in jail.
Local officials estimate as many as 90 percent of the criminal cases they see are related to drugs in some way. That has led to a significant overcrowding problem at the jail.
Now, in addition to figuring out how to expand the jail, county officials are exploring offering classes or programs geared toward people suffering from addiction at the jail. That is also a goal for the county’s community corrections facility, where offenders on house arrest and work release report.
The issue is the cost, and no one is sure how to afford it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total “economic burden” of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment and criminal justice involvement.
So the question is: What now?
For families struggling, local officials fretting, the economy suffering and the emergency workers rushing to help, that fix can’t come soon enough.
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Addiction: Addiction is considered a brain disease and a chronic, relapsing condition. Opiod drugs change the brain.
Stigma: Families affected by cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease or Parkinson’s Disease get help and support from the community. Families affected by addiction often struggle in silence due to the stigma attached to addiction, which is an obstacle to recovery.
Number of deaths: 32 in Johnson County in 2017, not including people who die at an Indianapolis hospital.
Hospital visits: 105 people in Johnson County went to emergency rooms for treatment of an overdose in 2015, which is similar to numbers reported from other, larger counties, such as Allen or Hamilton counties.
Prescription rate: For every 100 residents in Johnson County, 84 opioid prescriptions were written in 2016.
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The United States is in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in history.
Opioids, including prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl, are killing Americans.
The Daily Journal is taking a yearlong look into the public health crisis that touches nearly every segment of our community and crosses all socioeconomic lines, from families who lost loved ones to health and law enforcement workers on the front lines.
Addicted & Dying will also explore solutions and a path forward.
Our project starts today by looking at the number of deaths in 2017, how the crisis is touching the community and its roots.
Got an idea for our project? Contact us as 317-736-2770.
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‘The brain gets hijacked.’
Addiction is now medically classified as a brain disease, a chronic, relapsing condition. The drugs change the brain over time.
”We judge people with addiction all the time.”
The stigma of addiction is one of the greatest barriers to treatment and recovery. Addiction carries with it a shame that other diseases do not.
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Lives lost.
Leland Plew, a Center Grove grad who played soccer, died of an opioid overdose after trying to kick addiction several times.
“We want to help other people and parents and addicts, to let them know what our experiences were, where our faults were, where we failed, so that they don’t make the same ones we do,” his father, David Plew, said.
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