(File photo by Kevin Sullivan, Orange County Register/SCNG)
This is from an article from the Orange County Register on March 10, 2017.
Accidental overdoses from prescription opioids such as Vicodin and Oxycontin soared 20 percent last year, according to my review of thousands of Orange County coroner records.
In total – and some deaths remain under review – opioids and heroin took 211 souls who wanted to live.
The victims included all races, nearly all cities. Many lived in south county and along our gold coast stretching from Seal Beach to San Clemente.
One young man died May 11 in Dana Point. He was 18 years old.
A Costa Mesa woman who accidentally overdosed Feb. 20, 2016, was 74.
The highest concentration of victims were middle-age women. Of the 66 women who died from accidental opioid overdoses, 49 were in their 40s or older.
Nearly half the 145 men who died from opioids had heroin in their veins. The oldest was a Garden Grove resident. He was 65.
Understand, cultural and generational divisions that once existed between cartel-manufactured heroin and pharmaceutically made opioids have vanished.
Often teens, young adults and even baby boomers find themselves addicted to pills and then seek out cheaper and less expensive heroin.
But while the epidemic in Orange County and across the nation continues to spiral out of control, there is a glimmer of hope.
New laws have made a drug called naloxone easily available. Naloxone reverses the effects of an overdose, saving countless lives.
Turning tragedy into triumph
Every Saturday afternoon, Aimee Dunkle is at the Civic Center in Santa Ana talking to addicts, handing out naloxone and taking meticulous records about when, where and exactly why the drug was used the previous week.
Dunkle reports that September was an especially tough month. She says at least one dealer was selling unusually high-grade heroin — attractive to customers but deadly.
Her efforts are more than a mission of mercy. The cofounder of a non-profit called Solace, Dunkle serves to save lives from the very thing that took the life of her son.
Ben was 20 years old when he accidentally overdosed in October 2012. He was abandoned by so-called friends and found dumped in a bank parking lot in Rancho Santa Margarita.
Despite doctors’ efforts, he died a week later. In those days, naloxone wasn’t available to the public.
“In a county of 3 million people,” Dunkle asks me, “why did my son have to die?”
There is no answer for such a question, only tears. But for Dunkle, there also is action.
In the past 53 weeks, Dunkle says her naloxone service has saved 548 lives.
Every one, she reports, was from a heroin overdose.
Dunkle tells a story I’ve heard too many times while reporting on the opioid epidemic for a half-decade. A doctor prescribed her son Vicodin and the teenager became addicted.
“I can’t change the system,” Dunkle says, “but I can make it a little better.”
UC San Diego School of Medicine Dr. Peter Davidson has studied addiction in California for two decades. He says that when San Francisco started a similar naloxone program, heroin deaths dropped from 120 a year to five.
Yes, five.
Davidson attributes part of the plunge to heroin users coming to clinics for needle exchanges and getting educated about naloxone as well as addiction.
Pill addicts, however, remain in the shadows.
One of Dunkle’s goals is to have naloxone readily available at sober living homes.
It’s an idea that should be a requirement.
Every day on average, according to CDC officials, opioids kill 91 Americans.
Deaths in gated communities
The national Centers for Disease Control tracks the ever-expanding opioid epidemic. In the past 15 years, overdose deaths from prescription opioids and heroin have skyrocketed.
“Since 1999, the amount of prescription opioids sold in the U.S. nearly quadrupled,” CDC officials say, “yet there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans report.”
Every day on average, according to CDC officials, opioids kill 91 Americans.
In Orange County, according to last year’s coroner records, we average at least one accidental overdose every other day.
The oldest man who died from prescription drugs last year lived in Dana Point. He was 75 years old.
The youngest woman who died from prescription drugs lived in Costa Mesa. She was 19.
Jodi Barber lives in south county and seven years ago her 19-year-old son, Jarrod, died of an overdose of Opana, a prescription opioid. She has produced or co-produced two “Overtaken” documentaries about local drug addiction and is a touchstone for many struggling with addiction.
Physicians, Barber says, need to step up and help wean addicts off opioids. But instead, they are prescribing pills. “Women and men my age are going to doctors. That’s where we have the epidemic.”
Yet Barber also says she hears from young people who struggle, who have friends who are dead. “I’m getting calls every day trying to get them in treatment.”
The youngest woman who was killed last year from an accidental heroin overdose died March 15. She was 24 years old and lived in Dove Canyon.
Read the Orange County Register’s article here.
