COLUMN: Startling statistics concerning drug deaths in rural communities – Meadville Tribune

About five or six years ago, a cousin of mine who is an emergency medical technician in New Jersey told me something quite interesting, We're all worried about terrorists of all kinds foreign, domestic, Arab extremists, and right-wing militias, but a more dangerous and ugly threat is ... drugs.

His cautionary statement was lost on me until a couple of years ago because, for some reason, I didn't think drugs would make inroads to our rural community and its populace. Drug abuse was, in my mistaken mind, a problem of the inner city and not a concern of northwestern Pennsylvania. Anyone with any consciousness knows that I was mistaken.

The number of drug deaths in all of Pennsylvania, according to the Pennsylvania Coroners Association for 2015 was 3,505. Of those deaths, 22 percent (777) were in rural counties like ours and 85 percent of those deaths were a result of the overdose of illegal drugs.

To drill down even further, 55 percent of the illegal drug deaths resulted from heroin and 26 percent from cocaine and the balance from other drugs. Primarily, these deaths are white, single males, but 19 percent are married.

Additionally, the number of hospital admissions in Crawford County for 2015 was 150, slightly lower than admissions for alcohol abuse. Parenthetically, the number of deaths in 2016 and 2017 are well above the 2015 national number of 57,000, and drug overdose is the leading cause of death of people 50 and younger.

It's apparent that we have a problem of serious proportions. What can we do to stem the tide?

In some countries, the government supplies injection studios where the addicted can administer their drugs under supervision and, presumably, be monitored for an overdose. Given the progressive nature of the addiction/disease, this seems to not answer the root causes of the problem and just deals with the ugly outcome of it. We are left with causation of the disease and those factors most assuredly vary with each individual, though there are some causes that go across all individual circumstances.

Some individuals have an addictive personality that pre-disposes them to addictive chemicals like heroin and alcohol, while other people do not as quickly develop dependence. Additionally, some drugs, like heroin, are addictive more quickly and profoundly than others.

Of course, the basis for all behavior, addictive and otherwise, is the human search for pleasure and avoidance of pain or discomfort. So, in the case of opioids, the pleasure is especially deep in their use, the avoidance of pain extremely effective, and in detoxification, the discomfort is particularly acute.

Further, the human brain and central nervous system receptors are conditioned to opioid use and scream for it. What the addict is left with, then, is an extremely powerful physical addiction grounded in neurological and psychological dependence that makes him incapable of the rational decision to not use the drug.

Perhaps, initially, the user can decide to not try the drug, but once addicted it's well nigh impossible to stop without outside intervention. Since opioids bind with receptors in all body cells, including heart and lung, overdose leading to pulmonary and cardiac episodes become a lethal possibility. To never start, then, seems to be the answer to never having to quit or dying of the addiction.

In connection with this, it's incumbent on health care providers to rethink the use of medication containing opioids and thus avoid some medically induced addiction. Are there any concrete answers and if there are, how can a society implement them without hijacking free choice? Everyone has the right to poor judgment, don't they?

Joseph Stalin once remarked, The death of thousands is but a statistic, while the death of one person is a tragedy. So it is with opioid overdose and fatality. The one death is projected upon the mother, father, husband, wife, children, brother, sister or other family and friends of the user/victim and the incomparable pain experienced by them is a human tragedy of immense proportions and as indescribable as the breaking of a human heart.

Society also suffers in the use of valuable resources in the treatment and prevention of addiction but ultimately pays a deep and most grievous price in the loss of human talent and potential.

Everyone loses. Everyone.

Gary DeSantis is a Meadville resident and author of a book titled The 6th Floor.

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COLUMN: Startling statistics concerning drug deaths in rural communities - Meadville Tribune