DRUG USE IS TOPIC of town hall meeting

(Via Dave Herndon, The News-Herald Newspapers)

Taylor School District families should take note that the war on drugs is heating up, thanks in part to the ever-changing, more potent market for illegal drugs that kill users at a much higher rate than before.

RELATED: Communities deal with deaths

Taylor Police Chief Mary Sclabassi said she worked on an undercover team in the 1990s where it was a huge deal that she bought a couple of bindles of heroin. Now it’s common to find large amounts of the drug during routine traffic stops.

Hundreds of people, from teens to elected officials, turned out at Wayne County Community College on Thursday evening for the first of what likely will be many town hall meetings on heroin and other opiates. Heroin and other illegal opiates kill more than 90 people a day nationwide.

“This isn’t just a problem, it’s an epidemic,” 23rd District Judge Geno Salamone said. “Just 10 years ago almost no one had a heroin story; now most everyone in that room does.”

Attendees learned about the increasing number of users, deaths and other statistics; where to turn for help if friends or families become addicted; and many other ways to identify issues relating to the problem.

According to a report released by the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, there were 19 deaths in Wayne County between August and September 2016. For the entire year, there were thousands of overdoses and 507 deaths in the county.

Eight communities in the county had at least five opiate-related deaths in 2016, including Allen Park, Lincoln Park, Southgate and Taylor in the Downriver region.

During the town hall meeting, which lasted more than two hours, speakers from the City of Taylor, Beaumont and many other organizations spoke on their perspectives of what opiates are doing to society.

Of the 507 opiate-related deaths in Wayne County last year, 486 were accidental. Sclabassi said that is because drugs are now far more potent than they were just a few years ago and people are accidentally overdosing themselves.

“People are dying, not because they are choosing to,” she said. “When people are dabbling in prescription drugs, at some point that is no longer satisfying that high and they move on to heroin.”

Lt. Mary Capp of the Michigan State Police said part of the problem is that drugs such as fentanyl are far more potent than heroin, and are cheaper to produce.

“Fentanyl is used to treat terminally ill patients,” she said. “It is 80 times more potent that morphine. It is being cut into heroin because it gives people a better high and it’s cheap.”

She said drugs are coming in from Mexico and are laced with both fentanyl and carfentanyl -an even more potent drug- because the average user doesn’t know the difference and it increases profits on the sale of the drug.

“They put the fentanyl in there and sell it as heroin and make a lot more money,” Capp said. “The non-pharmaceutical forms come from Mexico and China.”

Lethal doses of fentanyl are about the size of 32 grains of salt; carfentanyl can be lethal at about nine grains of salt.

“No one knows what they are buying if they buy it off the street,” Capp said.