During a recent meeting of the Sidney Rotary Club, Brad Reed, director of community resource development of Tri County Board of Recovery & Mental Health Services, discussed the challenges heroin and its effects bring to his organization.
“Opiate addition crosses all demographic and all generational lines, from senior citizens to teenagers,” he said.
Reed reported that heroin was first produced by Bayer as a means to treat a cough. At the time, whooping cough and tuberculosis were prevalent, and heroine was seen as a means of controlling them. But developers did not anticipate the highly addictive nature of the drug.
Reed said some of the current problem stems from the unintended consequences of a well-meaning culture that demands pain prescription medications. He showed a map illustrating the volume of pain medicines that are prescribed.
“Ohio averages about 100 pain prescriptions per 100 people, so that means on average, every man, woman, and child in Ohio has a pain prescription,” he said. He provided statistics showing that alcohol-users are two times more likely to use heroine than nonusers, marijuana users are three times more likely, cocaine users are 15 times more likely, and prescription pain medication-users are 40 times more likely to use heroine than nonusers.
Ohio’s 2011 House Bill 93, termed the “Pill Mill Bill,” concerning pain medications including OxyContin, severely limited a doctor’s ability to prescribe and dispense a prescription at the same location.
“As a result of the Pill Mill Bill, the supply of legally acquired pain medications like OxyContin has become severely restricted to the general public.” An unintended consequence of the severely limited supply drove the price of those pain prescriptions much higher than they were before.
“The price went up high enough that those persons already addicted to opiates, because they were taking prescription pain medications, now turned to heroine on the street because it was cheaper and more available,” Reed said. He estimated that the majority of persons who are addicted to heroine got to that point through legally prescribed pain prescriptions.
Reed said the cost of a dose or capsule is $5 to $10 dollars in major metropolitan areas, such as Dayton. In nonmajor metropolitan areas, such as Troy or Sidney, the price is about $40 per dose. Dealers commute to Dayton and purchase a large volume of capsules and then return to Troy or Sidney and sell their supply at an inflated price. The addiction becomes very costly because of the incredible tolerance individuals can build. Reed noted that the tolerance of a late-stage user compared to an early-stage user of heroine multiplies the volume used by as much as 10,000 times the dose used early on.
Reed described the resources the Tri County Board provides to help addicts: providing housing, meals and a support system. The organization is developing more ways to put people into detox programs and then having in place more types of support programs and recovery systems. It is also doing programs jails to provide support to inmates about to be released.
