Heather Yakin: Get help before you become an overdose statistic – News – recordonline.com

Heather Yakin Times Herald-Record @HeatherYakin845

As we’ve been following the opioid epidemic, another ominous trend has emerged: a rising tide of deaths from cocaine and stimulant overdose.

These deaths, according to last week’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rose sharply, from 12,122 in 2016 to 17,258 in 2017. Almost 14,000 of the drug overdose deaths in 2017 involved cocaine, and more than 10,000 involved a psychostimulant such as methamphetamine, MDMA (also known as ecstasy or molly), methylphenidate or caffeine.

And there’s more.

“In 2017, opioids were involved in 72.7% and 50.4% of cocaine-involved and psychostimulant-involved overdoses, respectively, and the data suggest that increase in cocaine-involved overdose deaths from 2012 to 2017 were driven primarily by synthetic opioids,” the MMWR article reads. The rise in psychostimulant deaths began independently, the report says, but those deaths too have increasingly involved synthetic opioids “in recent years.”

There it is.

“Synthetic opioids” pretty much means fentanyl.

The rates of deaths from both drugs have increased across location, across demographic groups, across rural, suburban and urban communities.

“Increases in stimulant-involved deaths are part of a growing polysubstance landscape,” the researchers wrote. “Increased surveillance and evidence-based multisectoral prevention and response strategies are needed to address deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants and opioids. Enhancing linkage to care, building state and local capacity, and public health/public safety collaborations are critical components or prevention efforts.”

Our local counties of Orange, Ulster, Sullivan, Dutchess and Putnam are fortunate to be part of a Columbia University study on a range of intervention and treatment programs, many of which local officials have already out in motion. But as bad as things are, we are nowhere near the nadir of this overdose epidemic.

The CDC and the Drug Enforcement Administration have been watching the rise of fentanyl as an additive to drugs other than opioids, particularly cocaine. But methamphetamine is increasingly available across the U.S., particularly in the west, southwest and south, and the MMWR report warns that stimulant-involved deaths are also rising in cases without added opiates.

The point is that street drugs aren’t safe. Using them, while it was never a good idea, is increasingly a game of Russian roulette.

Thinking that pills are safe is also a fool’s errand. You only have to recall the February arrests of 20-plus people, half of whom were charged with peddling pills that looked like oxycodone, but which actually contained fentanyl.

The only safe alternative for someone hooked on street drugs is to get into treatment, the sooner the better.

Get help before you become a statistic. Get help before an overdose puts you beyond help.

hyakin@th-record.com

On Twitter @HeatherYakin845