Lawmakers
Are Scrambling To Find Answers “It’s really on the top of everyone’s radar from a public health perspective,” said Tomas MacLellan, previous director of homeland security and public safety for the National Governors Association. Even Capitol Hill and the White House are weighing in on what’s become a full-blown health crisis that cuts across geographic, social, racial and economic boundaries. At least 18 state legislatures addressed new heroin bills in 2014, according to the Na- tional Conference of State Legislatures. “We’ve got soccer moms on heroin,” said
Burlington, Vermont police chief Michael Schirling, who said heroin trafficking cases there increased 500 percent in two years. “Tis is a completely underground, behind- closed-doors phenomenon.” In the Great Lakes region, the DEA’s
National Drug Treat Assessment reported that 9 percent of law enforcement agencies deemed heroin highly available in 2007. By 2013, the percentage rocketed to 40 percent. In New England, the percentage rose from 40 percent to 55 percent over that same time and, in New York and New Jersey, jumped from 30 percent to 45 percent. Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, in
January 2014, devoted nearly his entire State of the State Address to what he called the “rising tide of drug addiction and drug- related crime spreading across Vermont…. It is a crisis bubbling just beneath the surface that may be invisible to many, but is already highly visible to law enforcement, medical personnel, social service and ad- diction treatment providers, and too many Vermont families.” In Massachusets, aſter deaths from
heroin and opioid drugs spiked more than 90 percent since 2002, Governor Deval Patrick declared a public health emergency in March 2014. “Sometimes it takes a crisis with big numbers to get the public’s aten- tion,” said Public Health Commissioner
www.datia.org
Cheryl Bartlet. “Heroin is such a harsh drug that no one figures that it will be a part of their lives either through themselves or someone they know until it’s too late,” Bartlet said. In Kentucky, heroin abuse is “spreading
like a cancer,” Senator Mitch McConnell told a Senate narcotics group in May 2014. “We are losing close to 100 fellow Kentuck- ians a month to drug-related deaths. Tis is more lives lost than to fatal car crashes.” Overall drug related deaths now ex-
ceed car fatalities nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the federal agency that stud- ies drug abuse and policy. In Knoxville, Tennessee, 73 people died from drug overdoses in 2013, more than from ho- micides and traffic accidents combined. Opiates of some sort were involved in at least half of those deaths. “Heroin got here later than other places, but it is here now full-blast,” Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch said. Ginger Marshall, the volunteer alcohol and drug treatment coordinator for the local Lost Sheep
Ministry stated “[t]his is just overwhelm- ing everyone.” Previous U.S. Atorney General Eric
Holder acknowledged the epidemic “snuck up on us” at a national law enforcement summit on heroin in April 2014 and referred to the heroin resurgence as “an urgent public health crisis.”
The government, law enforcement and medical experts now concur that the heroin surge can be traced to the rise of prescription painkillers such as OxyContin®
and Percocet®
, Vicodin® .
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