28 Jan Opioid addiction’s terrible toll | Editorials
The toll that opioid addiction has taken on our community over the past six years is startling and depressing.
It has grown from a problem that barely existed in 2012 into a monster in the last three years. The number of nonfatal overdoses has declined somewhat from its peak in 2016, but the number of deaths remains stubbornly high.
News-Post staff writer Jeremy Arias reported last Sunday that law enforcement agencies in Frederick County responded to 11 fewer opioid overdoses last year than in 2017. Nonfatal overdoses declined from 291 to 279. But fatalities rose from 51 to 52.
The numbers do show a steep decline from 2016, when the county had 355 nonfatal overdoses and 54 fatalities, which offers some degree of hope. But the explosion of the opioid problem since 2012 is dramatic. In that year, the county recorded just 15 overdoses and six deaths.
The epidemic hit the city of Frederick especially hard last year. Mark Burack, the Frederick Police Department’s heroin coordinator, told our reporter that the city had 25 fatal overdoses, the most since the recent epidemic began, as well as 122 nonfatal overdoses.
Burack said fentanyl, the synthetic opioid, was responsible for the high death rate. Of the 25 fatalities, all but two involved either fentanyl or some other drug laced with fentanyl, he said.
“We’re seeing a more potent substance out there and the ME [medical examiner] reports are clearly showing that the predominant mixture is with fentanyl,” the analyst said. Fentanyl is estimated to be 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. “There may be people out there actually seeking fentanyl and knowingly taking fentanyl rather than heroin because it’s a stronger drug and they’re seeking a better high.”
While the numbers are shocking, the human toll of the opioid scourge is heart-rending. Our reporter recounted the sad story of a woman from Thurmont, Tina Lowe, who lost her son Brandon Michael Terpko to opioids when he was just 25.
After breakfast on a Sunday morning in June, Brandon went to take a nap in his bedroom, where he snorted cocaine laced with fentanyl. His mother found him dead several hours later.
The pain of such a loss to the survivors is almost incalculable.
The scope of the impact on Frederick County families gives added urgency to the work of health care officials and community members who set the county’s health priorities for the next three years at the Local Health Improvement Process Planning Summit.
The three priorities identified by the group are behavioral health, adverse childhood experiences/infant health and chronic health. But participants ranked substance abuse — which is included in behavioral health — as the highest priority.
Judging solely by the numbers of overdoses reported by our law enforcement agencies, it would be difficult to argue that any other issues should take priority over substance abuse.
Overdose response training, educational campaigns, law enforcement support and drug take-back campaigns are already being used to address the drug problem, according to Todd Crum, prevention program administrator with the Frederick County Health Department. So we are not starting from ground zero.
The last local health summit three years ago identified a detox center as one of the top objectives, and recent developments bring that goal closer to reality.
The plan announced late last year by County Executive Jan Gardner and County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins is to open a detox center in the same building now housing the county’s work release center. The county just received $500,000 from the state to renovate the building and create a separate space and entrance for the detox center.
Our hope is that the detox center will soon be taking in patients, and that should be extremely helpful in treating addicts who are trying to change their lives.
It cannot help Tina Lowe and her family, but it might keep another family from living through such a nightmare.