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Wednesday, August 21, 2013
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Alarming drug deaths In the new movie, “Elysium,” the world’s rich have escaped to an orbiting space station, and in leaving their terrestrial lives, the well-to-do have taken with them reliable health care. Actor Matt Damon, part of the teeming earthbound poor, suffers a fatal dose of radiation poisoning. His only chance of survival is to sneak aboard the manmade Utopia and climb inside what looks HEROIN like a high-tech tanning OVERDOSES bed. Inside the device, AND HEALTH, he’ll be rid of all disease. With all its space SOCIAL opera tropes, the movie POLICIES ends allegorically — a disquisition favoring universal health care. Painting a potential future, past our current ills, is one thing science fiction does well. But here in the present, there was nothing allegorical in the news last week that heroin overdoses have spiked, across Maryland and in Montgomery County. The county typically has ranked low in drug and alcohol deaths. For heroin overdoses, the county had recorded seven over the last three years. But last week, authorities revealed the county had tallied seven only since March. It’s a disturbing trend, and elements of last week’s announcement reveal it’s a more complicated issue than some realize. For some, rising heroin deaths might be indicative of Montgomery’s urbanization, that the gold-flecked avenues are beginning to resemble the hardscrabble streets of “The Wire.” For others, the heroin deaths could be a sign of the suburbanization of hard-core drugs. Either of those may play a role, and if so, it’s a problem that will fall, largely, on the shoulders of the Montgomery County Police Department. As Capt. Nancy Demme, director of the police department’s Special Investigations Division, said the issue has connections to the health care debate. At least part of the increase comes from efforts to make it harder to acquire high-powered prescription painkillers, she said. Pharmaceutical companies are stepping up efforts to prevent abuse of their products, which means addicts are turning to heroin. Efforts to limit access to opioid pain relievers, as they are called, should be applauded. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation is experiencing a “growing, deadly epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse.” Seventy-five percent of prescription drug overdoses come from prescription painkillers, and the increase in deaths follows a 300 percent increase since 1999 in their sale. And the CDC says most of the time, if a prescription drug was involved in an overdose, it came from a prescription originally. The convenient fiction might hold they are often stolen from a pharmacy, but that isn’t true, the CDC says. Curiously, as the CDC reports of the painkiller epidemic, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that usage of cocaine and methamphetamine is declining. So one might assume it’s not that our appetite for drugs is increasing. Possibly, the issue is rooted in over-prescription. Our authorities aren’t waiting for a Hollywood hero to solve the problem. Narcotics and homicide detectives are taking a holistic approach, investigating each death, as well as the source of the heroin. And the efforts aren’t limited to Montgomery. The state and counties are coming up with overdose prevention plans, said Kathleen Rebbert-Franklin, acting director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration, which is part of the state’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. More data will be collected — from treatment centers, emergency rooms and coroners — and reviewed by local commissions to find common threads. What else can be done? With luck and perseverance, the local commissions will find out. What data Montgomery knows now shows the ages of the county victims range from 19 to 45, and the deaths have occurred throughout the county, according to the police. The police statement leaves plenty of room for speculation, though it should dispel the notion that it’s a problem centering on a specific age group or area of the county. And it’s a problem that can’t be solved with a summer blockbuster, or two hours of escapism masking as a policy fable. Drug abuse is not a simple police issue. It’s a health care issue. Science fiction might provide a compass, but the journey, painful as it will be, is ours.
The Gazette Karen Acton, President/Publisher
LETTERS TOT HE EDITOR From a glance, everything is relatively clean. From a glance you would assume a campus, which students like me and students like your children go to, is safe. But it’s not. It’s haunted by a monstrous force known as pollution. Our school grounds, waterways, neighborhoods and parks are littered with bottles and cans. It’s
Support for a bottle bill hard to go on a nature walk without seeing rusted-over cans with vines trying to grow over them. While Maryland’s overall recycling rate remains about average, we as a state should be a champion in the recycling effort with our percentages. In their next session, if the Maryland General Assembly
passes a bottle bill, all this avoidable trash could be cleared. The bottle bill’s incentive recycling program would boost Maryland’s recycling rate and in turn make our communities cleaner. Who wouldn’t want to be able to have their children play in a park that’s used-beer can free? Right now, that idea in the
New Food and Drug Administration regulations could threaten local farms Each week at farm stands in the Maryland area, we try to explain a peculiar situation to our customers. On the one hand, they want to buy our fresh fruit and vegetables. However, I tell them, that in a few years, these will all be illegal to sell! Why? Because they have some degree of dirt and bacteria on them. The strawberries for instance, have some trace amount of straw and soil on them. As do the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers. We do rinse them before leaving the farm — but we won’t put them through a disinfectant bath nor pack them in antiseptic plastic containers and put “PLU” labels on them. That’s not what consumers want at a farm market — nor is it something we’ll ever be able to do. Regulations for a new food law — FSMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act — administered by the FDA are currently in the process of being finalized. Although the act originally had protections for family farmers like myself, we see those being ignored or phased out over time. Common sense and following the data of recent food safety scares lead us to a very strong conclusion: the further the food travels from the farm to the consumer, the more opportunities it has to become a food safety problem. The current cyclospora food poisoning problem in bagged salads is a good example. This is one reason why 20 million consumers come to farmers markets like ours and want fresh produce from our fields — preferably grown without pesticides, herbicides or GMO seeds. And sadly, protecting consumers from these
synthetic perils is not addressed by FSMA. Nor does the FDA address what is common sense to many scientists, doctors and parents: our bodies are dependent on the good germs and bacteria. If anything, rather than developing the antiseptic globalized industrial-style food system FSMA seeks, we should be searching for ways to increase the amount of good bacteria in our bodies. In fact, fecal implants to repopulate the gut with bacteria are not science fiction — the medical profession is now performing them every day. So, why is this bad science becoming the law of the land? First, it is partially due to corporate profit. Corporations depend on a global supply chain, and in doing so they are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver safe food. At the same time they are losing market share to the local food systems that customers are demanding — witness the sharp increase in farmers markets, community supported agriculture and restaurants offering “farm-to-fork” menus. To avoid legal liability, the corporations want to legitimize an industrial approach to sterilizing everything, without regard to the unnecessary and costly burden placed on local farmers. If your local farmer goes out of business trying to comply with the costs of hundreds of pages of new federal food safety regulations, that just leaves more customers without a local alternative. Second, there is the misguided advocacy of the consumer organizations, like Center for Science in the Public Interest. They mean well, but they think that throwing regulatory words and paperwork
burden at a problem will solve it. This approach is overly legalistic, and it ignores the realities of nature and the practical fact that over-regulating a sector that is not causing a problem — small farmers — cannot possibly lead to safer food. And, finally, there is this administration’s commitment to the biotech industry. It’s no accident that FDA’s deputy commissioner responsible for food safety, Michael R. Taylor, is a former Monsanto vice president. That partially explains why the “safe food” mandate does nothing to protect us from genetically engineered food, and the harsh chemicals that are necessarily paired with it. It will, however, put many of us farmers, who are committed to fresh, healthy and sustainably grown food, out of business. We can all see the future. It is those antiseptic, theoretically bacteria-free plastic containers that will soon become the only way we will be able to shop for all of our produce. And that should be an issue of public outrage.
Michael Tabor, Takoma Park Nick Maravell, Potomac Michael Tabor has been farming for 41 years and supplies Baltimore-area universities and colleges with GMO-free, sustainably grown produce. He is being honored this September for running his farm stand in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C., for 40 years. Nick Maravell serves as a farmer representative on the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board and has farmed organically since 1979, raising grain, livestock and vegetables.
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future but that future lays in our state legislators’ hands. Urge representatives to clean up your community by voting for the bottle bill. My school years have been filled with playgrounds of recyclable trash; do you want your kids’ lives to be the same way?
Jordan Newmark, Olney
Master plan balances environment, development I served on the committee that helped write the 1994 Clarksburg Master Plan and am upset by the groups coming in now trying to rewrite the plan and misrepresent its intent. The master plan was carefully crafted to balance the environment with community building. It placed 1,800 acres on the west side of Ten Mile Creek in the Agricultural Reserve and placed homes on the east side. The additional housing called for in Stage 4 of the master plan — in [an area meant for extra development to preserve other tracts] — is important to helping us attain the full master plan vision for Clarksburg. I never thought in 2013 I’d still be going to Milestone in Germantown to shop. The stores, restaurants, library, fire station and transit promised are not even under construction. So many promises to the people of Clarksburg haven’t been carried out. The same state and local laws that allowed the Intercounty Connector to be built in an environmentally sensitive way will protect the environment. Protecting the Ten Mile Creek watershed can be accomplished without destroying the promises made. Clarksburg is still waiting for things that most Montgomery County residents take for granted. To change course in Clarksburg now is not fair to the people who came here or want to come here.
Joann Snowden Woodson, Clarksburg
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