volume #78, issue 6
monday, March 28, 2016
NEN E P NM
T
OGOVER Is our universe rife with life?
Success found in self publishing
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Page 5
State needs FOIA reform UR
VIEW
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Stitching tri-cities together
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butterfly garden blooms in midland
Bennett Smith, 4, holds a butterfly that landed on his finger during the Butterflies in Bloom event. The exhibit is an indoor butterfly conservatory at Dow Gardens, where visitors can directly interact with a variety of butterflies. (Delta Collegiate/Josephine Norris)
View our extended photo gallery online at DeltaCollegiate. com
FOUNTAIN
TALK
What do you think would help end the heroin epidemic? Cassidy Jordan 15, Saginaw You have to provide people with an accessible rehab. If you’re going to try and get drugs off the street, I’d think you’d need to work with a recovery system in accompaniment with that. Karsen Palmer 17, Saginaw Easily accessible recovery programs. If you have a lot of people addicted to a substance, that only spreads. If you help break the cycle by eliminating the amount of drugs in the area, and also helping people get off the drugs, then it will stop.
Jaleesa Betz 26, Midland If they raise more aw a rene s s… A nd (particularly) awareness to young kids. And say “This is the result of this.” And put a face to it. I think it more or less starts with pills. Etoyi Johnson 39, Saginaw
I would say, “Lock them up,” but they’d be out there again. The only thing I can think of is more help for them any way they can.
Road to recovery Heroin hitting hard in Bay County Greg Horner There’s an epidemic that’s destroying communities throughout the country — heroin. Bay County is a microcosm of the struggle playing out in communities across the United States as addicts, families and community leaders try to deal with the rising abuse of opiates and the increasing number of deaths. “There’s so many, it’s unbelievable how many,” says Patricia Starr of Bay City. “Almost every family you talk to has someone they know with a drug problem. It’s very sad.” Starr is looking for solutions to the problem. Her son is in recovery for opiates — he’s been in and out of rehab for eight years — but she isn’t convinced this will be the last time. “We want people to get information about what to look for if they’re concerned their loved ones are involved in heroin,” says Barry Schmidt, the coordinator of the Bay County Prevention Network. “We want to tell families, ‘here’s the resources available in the community to get their child, their family member or themselves help.’ ” To accomplish that, Schmidt, along with fellow recovery specialists, local law enforcement and public health officials, have begun to host heroin summits throughout the area to build community support in fighting the epidemic. The most recent of these summits was held in Essexville’s Garber High School, an area that, like much of Bay County, has seen an increase in heroin abuse and overdoses. According to the DEA, since 2008, drug overdose has surpassed gun and auto fatalities as the biggest cause of accidental death in the United States. “These summits are an opportunity for people to get some information on the issue, see the severity, and understand why it’s important to get involved,” says Schmidt. “It’s also a way to get everybody on the same page — so everyone
DCGregHorner understands what we’re doing [and] why we’re doing it.” The Bay County Prevention Network has provided information, skills and strategy on how the community can deal with marijuana, underage drinking and the threat of opiate addiction since 1989. The organization is just one of many in the area that is working to spread awareness on the ongoing crisis. A COMMUNITY AT RISK Janine Kravetz has worked at Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Center at their downtown Bay City location for 20 years. She has personally witnessed the rise of opiate and heroin addictions that are impacting the area. “When I first started working I saw a lot of cocaine, but lately there’s been a lot more marijuana — there’s always alcohol — and, of course, we’ve been dealing with opiate addiction.” An opiate is a compound that naturally develops within the opium poppy f lower. When synthesized, it can create a powerful group of drugs called opioids. Common opioids include: Morphine, Oxycodone and Hydrocodone (the active opioid in Vicodin). For years, doctors have used opioids for their ability to treat patients suffering from pain, but opioids are highly addictive. When people suffer from severe dependency, they often turn to the most common illicit opiate available — heroin. “This didn’t start with heroin; it started with opiates. A few years ago, opiates became the first line of defense for a lot of people, and the result was, a lot of people used opiates and ended up getting addicted, because [they’re] very addictive,” says Schmidt. “They end up turning to heroin because, after changes in the pharmaceutical industry
and doctors prescribing less, opiates are now harder to get.” According to a survey conducted by the American Society of Addiction Medicine in 2014, 94 percent of respondents started using heroin because prescription opioids were more expensive and too difficult to obtain. Additionally, the National Institute of Drug Abuse reported that in 2010 the U.S. accounted for 80 percent of the world’s opioid prescriptions. “This heroin problem didn’t creep up on us. It’s been here. We just haven’t noticed it because we haven’t seen the deaths,” says Schmidt. People are starting to see the deaths. In 2009, fewer than five people died from overdoses in Bay County. In 2015, 25 people died from drug overdoses. According to Schmidt, 90 percent of those deaths are caused by opioids. There are other health concerns besides overdose. According to Bay County Public Health Director Joel Strasz, 57 cases of Hepatitis C were reported in 2015, most likely due to addicts sharing needles. Strasz fears that unless something is done, that number is going to rise, and he has a more dire warning as well. “Addicts like to hang around together. They use drugs, they share drugs and if you get a person who’s infected with HIV, or Hepatitis C, and they share needles...the probability increases pretty substantially that you’re going to have a public health issue like HIV,” says Schmidt. Schmidt added these sobering words: “We saw this coming years ago. Law enforcement warned us about it, public health officials warned us about it, but people didn’t listen because they thought, ‘no it can’t happen here.’ Never did I think I would have to go to a sixth grade class and speak about heroin, but there are sixth and seventh grade kids who are addicted to heroin.” According to Kravetz, heroin has been a problem in minority communities for years, but now that the drug is affecting the suburbs, people who never considered heroin are now confronted with it. “It seemed like when it was more common with minorities, it got buried
under, and there was a feeling that ‘we have no say,’ ” says Kravetz. “So when it started creeping into the white population, that’s where you saw the attitude of ‘we have to do something about this.’ ” OUT OF THE BASEMENT As a recovering addict who now counsels others, Ricardo Bowden, an independent contractor who works with LIST Psychological, has struggled with heroin and counsels those in recovery on how to move forward. “I am a person in long-term recovery. My chosen pathway is an abstinencebased pathway, I’ve been totally abstinent now for 18 years,” says Bowden. “But for 30 some odd years I’ve been engaged in recovery…but for the last 18 years I’ve been successful in having no substances in my body.” Bowden also acts as the program coordinator for the PEER 360 Recovery Alliance, which works with addicts of all types regardless of their addiction or chosen recovery path. “We’re rooted in the reality that people find better living in a variety of different ways. Our goal is to create an overarching network that’s inclusive of all those different pathways to recovery.” PEER 360 is working to promote addiction awareness by hosting social events at various parks and coffee shops throughout the area. Bowden encourages those in recovery to share their message and change attitudes. “The recovery community has never been a community that is visible or vocal,” says Bowden. “...having individuals in recovery embrace more visibility is a challenge — but it hasn’t been done before and it’s a part of the change process.”
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