Every two hours, someone in southern Florida overdoses from heroin or a similar powerful painkiller, according to data presented Thursday at a summit in Boca Raton to address the mounting drug death toll.
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“During Prescription Drug and Heroin Epidemic Awareness Week, we pause to remember all those we have lost to opioid use disorder, we stand with the courageous individuals in recovery, and we recognize the importance of raising awareness of this epidemic”, President Barack Obama said in a statement.
U.S. Attorney Edward Tarver said today that overdoses of pain relievers and related drugs pose “a real crisis” nationally. He said the number has remained steady for the facility in recent years.
He says the epidemic with prescription pain medication and heroin has quadrupled since 1999.
Earlier this year, the Charleston Police Department equipped some of its officers with Narcan, a drug used to reverse opioid overdose. The synthetic drug is 100 times more potent than morphine and is being combined with heroin.
– Heroin is more accessible and less costly than prescription opioids.
“It’s the most urgent public health challenge we face”, Ferrer said at the event held at Lynn University in Boca Raton.
Charleston police first used Narcan to save a man from overdosing on September 14, department spokesman Charles Francis said in a statement, Wednesday.
He called for education and community awareness to curb the problem. Of the 47,055 drug overdose deaths in 2014, heroin was involved in 10,574 overdose deaths, while opioid pain medication was involved in 20,808 fatalities, the CDC noted. Since 1999, prescription pain medication deaths in the U.S. have quadrupled, and 44 people a day die from prescription opioid overdose, according to the office of the ONC. The prescriptions are legal but show thousands of patients are taking pain medication, he said. The statistic doesn’t include those who may use opioids in tandem with another drug of choice.
“In the ’70s, when someone was addicted to heroin, they started with it”. Fentanyl is illegal in China, but chemists are slightly altering the drug and selling it, he said.
This is a particularly resonant issue in Tennessee, where health care professionals wrote more than 7.8 million opioid prescriptions previous year, the second highest rate in the nation per capita. “It’s a slippery slope”.
While the changes are an important step forward, Sandoval said one of the best ways to combat the problem at its source is to educate on the dangers of prescription opioids.
“Honestly, you should treat them like you would a gun”. “Kids believe that these are pharmaceutical drugs so they must be safe”.
This specific kind of medical heroin is less unsafe than the true opioid and helps addicts to focus on their treatment instead of their need for illegal drugs.
Since 2010, heroin-related overdose deaths have more than tripled. “He would want us to go on”, said Mattei.
“Fentanyl … it’s death”, he said.
Comparatively, officers found only 4.2 grams of heroin.
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A grant from the U.S. Justice Department would target the heroin trade and misuse of prescription drugs. Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said opioids have been “entrenched in the community” throughout his 30-year career, but he said enforcing the laws against them can be one of the more hard investigations. “We’re not doing a good job informing our young health professionals”.
