The shockwaves of overdose death keep rippling through the Edinburgh community.
Misty Hogan has experienced the pain of losing people she loved and people she knew, whose lives have ended due to drug overdose. Heroin, opioid pills and now fentanyl have touched so many in the small town of about 5,000 people.
“To see all of the families around here go through the heartache after the death of someone they love, it’s terrible,” Hogan said. “I’ve seen too many people overdose.”
Like so many communities in Johnson County, Indiana and across the country, Edinburgh finds itself fighting back against addiction and overdose deaths. Police officers and emergency medical personnel receive calls regularly for overdoses, and always carry naloxone, a drug also known as Narcan that can reverse an opioid overdose until a person can receive medical help.
In one weekend in late March, police responded to five separate overdose emergencies, said Doyne Little, Edinburgh’s police chief.
Officials and residents are working as best they can to stem the deadly tide. In mid-April, Edinburgh became the first community to install a NaloxBox, a box filled with life-saving naloxone that is available 24 hours a day.
The installation is a significant step for the towns, which officials hope sets an example for other cities and town in the county.
“We’re trying to get that promotion out there, because we’re losing kids,” Little said. “They’re dying.”
The past two years have seen an abundance of opioid overdose deaths throughout Johnson County. In 2019, the county reported 19 deaths for any opioid drug. That number jumped to 57 people in 2020, and 31 deaths in 2021.
Edinburgh reported two overdose deaths in 2021, and one so far in 2022, said Mike Pruitt, Johnson County coroner.
Medical personnel are also reversing more overdoses with naloxone. In 202o, the county reported 382 incidents that involved naloxone administration. EMS gave 470 doses in 2021.
Through the first three months of 2022, EMTs are reporting 94 incidents involving naloxone.
While heroin and other opioid-based substances have increasingly become an epidemic, the introduction of fentanyl has been an unparalleled tragedy, Little said. The prescription pain reliever is 80 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, and is increasingly found in numerous substances from cocaine to methamphetamine to heroin.
“It’s not so much an opioid epidemic anymore, it’s a fentanyl epidemic,” Little said. “It’s going in everything. You can’t see it, so you don’t know.”
On April 6, the Drug Enforcement Administration sent a letter to federal, state, and local law enforcement partners warning of a nationwide spike in fentanyl-related mass-overdose events.
“Drug traffickers are driving addiction, and increasing their profits, by mixing fentanyl with other illicit drugs. Tragically, many overdose victims have no idea they are ingesting deadly fentanyl, until it’s too late,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.
Little and his department has seen that first-hand.
“We’ve had some overdose deaths, and I can tell you that they were known users that shouldn’t have had fentanyl on board. But they did,” he said. “They thought they were doing methamphetamine, and obviously it was methamphetamine mixed with fentanyl and they couldn’t take it.”
The fentanyl crisis is so significant that Edinburgh officers have started carrying extra naloxone in their squad cars, in case one of them comes in contact with the drug accidentally.
“If you can’t see it, you don’t know what it is, if you touch it, an officer is going to go down. So if an officer is giving CPR to somebody, and that person had fentanyl on their person, it’s a potential transfer,” Little said.
The addition of the NaloxBox is a positive step forward. Located on the side of a privately owned building at 105 S. Holland St., next to town hall, it is stocked with doses of naloxone.
For Hogan, the installation of the box is intensely personal. The Edinburgh resident became tangled in addiction after the father of her daughter overdosed on opioids and died in 2008.
Though she had been dabbling in drugs before his death, by the year following the trauma, she was spiraling into depression and tried meth. For six years, she was hooked. In 2018, she was sent to prison for possession, and during her sentence, participated in Recovery While Incarcerated, a program of the Indiana Department of Correction.
The program helped her turn her life around, and led to her release into Johnson County’s reentry court, which provides resources such as rehabilitation and treatment services, drug screenings, and housing and employment assistance to help people who have been in jail to stay out of jail.
Hogan completed the two-year program earlier this year, and had become a tireless advocate helping others escape addiction. She now works as an intake coordinator for Cardinal Recovery in Greenwood.
A few years after the death of her daughter’s father, Hogan and her daughter were having a conversation. Her daughter asked her if she’d ever heard of naloxone.
“She said that if it had been available to the public at the time of his death, it could have saved his life. Although my life took a turn for the worse and I became an addict myself, I never forgot that conversation,” she said.
Hogan and others in the community worked to acquire a NaloxBox, partnering with the nonprofit Overdose Lifeline, which was distributing two free boxes in every county throughout Indiana. They also looked for an ideal location for it.
Haley Roberts offered to mount it on the wall of the building she owns on South Holland Street. She had seen the destruction overdose deaths had caused, through her own observations and from those of her husband, Officer Jimmy Roberts with the Edinburgh Police Department.
“If it saves one life, it means everything,” Haley Roberts said.
Parents of individuals who are struggling with substance use disorder can also take advantage of it, without enduring the stigma of having to go to the pharmacy or hospital to acquire naloxone.
“It’s not just for drug addicts to use, it’s for families of people who might be addicted. They can pull up and get this, and have it in case a loved one has an overdose,” Haley Roberts said.
In his job, Jimmy Roberts repeatedly has helped revive people using naloxone. Each time, he hopes that the experience will set the person on the path to sobriety, but he realizes that’s not always the case.
Still, by offering someone another chance at life, naloxone could be that tool that helps them get clean, he said.
“This could be the light at the end of the tunnel for someone in addiction,” he said. “It’s all about saving lives.”
The community and public officials see the NaloxBox as one tool in helping prevent overdose deaths in Edinburgh. Hogan has taken lead in ensuring it is stocked with adequate amounts of naloxone, and Little has pledged to monitor it in case it needs to be replenished.
Despite its effectiveness in preventing tragedy, police caution that even after someone has been given naloxone to reverse an overdose, they still need medical attention.
The effects of naloxone is temporary, which means the person could still succumb to overdose if not properly treated, Little said.
“That Narcan is short-term use. That drug can come back. If we give someone naloxone, we explain to them that they need to go to the hospital and talk them into going to the hospital, because it’s short term. You could go right back out,” he said.
Police have also been increasing their focus on arresting the drug dealers throughout the Edinburgh community, in addition to providing resources for those addicted to try and find help.
That process is slow and deliberate, but represents the best option they have at this point, Little said.
“We try to deal with it one dealer at a time, to get one user clean,” he said.
