Cooper makes visit, talks addiction
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on August 30, 2016 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/SETH COMBS
State Attorney General Roy Cooper speaks about the dangers of prescription drugs at the Wayne County Center on Monday.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper spoke Monday at a conference at the Wayne Center about the rise of heroin and opioid prescription drug abuse in the state and what can be done to combat the growing problem.
"Prescription drugs now are so plentiful, and prescriptions are being written many times by doctors with lots of units, lots of pills," Cooper said. "And we are finding that people get their prescription drugs, most of the time, particularly young people, get their prescription drugs that they abuse either from their own home or the home of a friend."
Cooper stressed the link between opioid prescription drugs and how abusing those substances can lead people to begin using and abusing heroin.
"The stories are there," Cooper said. "A kid who gets hurt playing baseball begins taking hydrocodone, or a kid who's having trouble focusing starts taking Ritalin or Adderall, and the problem begins to explode -- addiction occurs."
Cooper said prescription drug addictions now turn into heroin abuse.
"Oftentimes heroin is cheaper than getting ahold of prescription drugs," Cooper said. "The opioids grab people, and they don't let them go. It's causing significant problems with law enforcement. Law enforcement, instead of being out in the community and doing their job and keeping people safe, are having to deal with addicts, are having to deal with people that have significant mental health substance abuse treatment issues, so we have to tackle it."
Goldsboro Police Department officer Tom Collins, who is a K-9 officer on C shift and spoke immediately after Cooper, said local law enforcement has seen a dramatic increase in the number of arrested related to heroin in the past several years.
Collins said officers are also seeing a spike in the presence of Xanax, suboxone, oxycodone, Lortab, Percocet, methadone and hydrocodone on the streets of Goldsboro.
"The people that we're running into, there's no specific age -- they're not old, they're not young, it's just a mixed variety of people that we're running into," Collins said. "These drugs are not biased -- white, black, whatever, the drugs are not biased. They're taking control of everybody."
Collins said the Goldsboro Police Department has seen 91 arrests related to heroin in the past five years. While that number may seem low, he said, it's important to realize that arrests related to heroin only began climbing in number between July and December 2013.
Cooper said that while prescription drugs have their place, even those that can lead people to abuse heroin, it is important to understand how powerful they are and that it is illegal to give them to someone else.
"Many people believe that prescription drugs are OK, because they are legal in and of themselves. When a doctor writes that prescription and gives it to you, and you get those pills from the store, it's legal," Cooper said. "But we spend a lot of time in schools, and we send people out to schools to tell them this, to start with -- once you give that pill or sell that pill to someone else, you have then committed a felony in North Carolina. The reason for that, as you know, is that these prescription drugs, when taken not as per prescription, particularly when they are mixed with other prescription drugs, or with alcohol, often are more deadly than street drugs, because they are so powerful."
And the number of people killed each year by overdoses -- accidental or intentional -- is on the rise.
"We know prescription drugs can be good, they help cure illnesses, they help relieve people of pain, but at the same time when they are abused they are deadly," Cooper said. "Over a thousand people a year in North Carolina (are) killed from accidental or intentional drug overdose. That number, across the country, exceeds the number of people that are killed in automobile accidents."
Collins said he could identify two epidemics of heroin in the past -- one during World War II and one during the Vietnam War -- and he believes we are seeing a third epidemic of heroin, and it is hitting close to home. People start by getting addicted to prescription opioid drugs, and then move to heroin because it is cheaper and readily available, he said.
"We have a lot of car accidents in the city -- back injuries, sports injuries -- and you see even young children getting hooked on the pain medication," Collins said. "We're seeing that it's over prescribed. A lot of these pain killers are being prescribed in large amounts -- nobody needs 300 painkillers for one month. People are taking them every two hours, and I don't know how they function. Once you're on them for a certain amount of time, your body is functioning normally, just like I'm standing here, and you're on it, and you didn't get the effects of it anymore, your body is craving it. You're not even getting high anymore, you're just getting the dependency of it. Heroin is readily available. Heroin is flooded throughout the city and Wayne County. When I first got hired in 2000, crack cocaine was the big drug at the time. We hardly ever see crack cocaine like that anymore. It's heroin on a daily basis."