Opioid alarm: Crises on a personal level grow into a national emergency

Take a walk down Any Street, USA and you might not see crack vials lining the street gutters like you might have in the 1980s. You might not see hookers and junkies huddled at each corner like in the mid '70s.

But sometimes it is what you don't see that is more revealing.

President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis in America a national health emergency Thursday.

And it's because of what -- rather who -- you don't see anymore.

The Associated Press puts the number of overdose deaths in the U.S. since 2000 at more than 500,000.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that of the 140 Americans who die every day from drug overdoses, 91 of them OD'd on opioids.

The local numbers are just as alarming. In Goldsboro alone the number of overdoses reported in all of 2016 amounted to 66. We surpassed that number this past weekend.  

It is hard to say what impact the declaration of a health emergency will do for the fight against opioid addiction. Opioids are among the most heavily prescribed medications. They are found by teens and young adults every day in the medicine cabinets of their parents, their aunts or uncles, their grandparents.

Kids share them or sell them at parties. And when cabinets run empty and the bottles have no contents left to spill, the addiction drives the user's body to heroin.

This is more than just finding the pushers on the corner and locking them up. The issue is much more complex than cutting off supply lines between Mexican cartels and street gangs.

Pharmaceutical companies have been sued by cities over the death and destruction opiate-based pills and in turn heroin have wrought on America's cities, towns and neighborhoods.

It's good to see the federal government is beginning to take notice. And maybe some money -- the declaration only frees up existing resources, it doesn't provide new ones -- will start to flow against the ever rising tide of the drug supply.

But when you've got police officers and EMS workers dressing for work in the morning and, in addition to their bulletproof vests, guns, flashlights, handcuffs, stethoscopes and crash scissors, adorning themselves with a life-saving, overdose symptom reversing nasal spray as a part of their daily routine, that says something about the state we are in.

Published in Editorials on October 26, 2017 10:39 PM