Opioid Abuse Story Archives - Page 3 of 6 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

$econd Chance: The Economic Case For Drug Treatment Over Jails

Imagine living and working somewhere designed to fit a couple hundred people. Now picture that same space crammed with twice that number. Madison County, Kentucky, Jailer Doug Thomas doesn’t have to imagine it. He lives it.

“I’m doing all that I can with what I have to work with, which is not a lot,” he said. “Because we’re a 184 bed facility with almost 400 people.”

According to the Madison County jail task force, roughly 80 percent of the people incarcerated there are jailed on charges that somehow relate to addiction. County Judge Executive Reagan Taylor wants to try a different approach.

Madison County, Kentucky jailer Doug Thomas.

“It didn’t take long looking at our statistics to realize that we really didn’t have a jail problem, that we had a drug problem,” he said.

Judge Executive Reagan Taylor of Madison County, Kentucky.

Taylor is looking into expanding the current jail for the county just south of Lexington. But he also wants the county to partner with private companies to build what he calls a healing center. People whose charges stem from a substance use disorder would be diverted to the treatment facility instead of going to jail. It’s part of a small but growing trend in the region’s law enforcement agencies to find creative approaches as the Ohio Valley’s opioid crisis pushes jails beyond capacity.

Dollars and Cells

Taylor said a new 800-bed jail would cost his county about $50 million and it would still likely be full in about ten years. He said because so many are in jail for drug related charges, a treatment center seems like a better return on investment.

“We’ve got to spend money one way or the other,” he said. “So do we want to spend money to where we just have to continue spending money and kicking the can down the road, or do we want to spend money to where we have a solution?”

Taylor said the healing center would provide long-term rehabilitation that would help people get back on their feet. Taylor wants it to be more than a basic detox facility. The center would include peer support, life skills, and education or vocational training. Taylor said he wants people to be able to become tax-paying members of their community again.

Madison County’s jail holds nearly 400; it was designed to hold 184.

A Second Chance

Eric Hudnall, of Athens, Ohio, was prescribed opiate painkillers after a car accident left him with a painful neck injury. He became dependent on the pills and soon, a growing addiction and some bad social influences led to his arrest for breaking into a home. That landed him in front of a prosecutor who opted to offer Hudnall a drug treatment facility instead of jail.

Hudnall said that because he was honest and spoke up about his addiction he was given a chance to turn his life around.

“As long as you’re truthful with people you’re going to get help,” he said. “Now, if you hide stuff and you lie to them and they find out about it, they’re not going to trust you and they’re not going to help you.”

Hudnall said he was almost homeless when he entered the treatment program. Now he has a place to live, a steady job and a car.

“If it wasn’t for the prosecutor’s office or Health Recovery Services I’d probably still be addicted to opiates or even in prison,” he said. “Everybody deserves a chance.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R84QpVyfy8

There are a lot of people in the criminal justice system like Hudnall who are incarcerated because the need to feed their addiction led them to a crime other than drug possession.

In West Virginia, for example, only 12 percent of the prison inmates were charged with a drug possession charge. But about 43 percent incarcerations in the state’s jails required substance abuse treatment of some kind in 2016.

Economic Appeal

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one year of methadone or medically assisted treatment costs about $4,700. That’s one-fifth of the cost to incarcerate one person in the Ohio Valley for a year — a $25,612 cost on average.

Warren County, Kentucky, Circuit Judge Steve Wilson, who has worked in the legal field for 35 years, said that economic argument is appealing, even for some prosecutors and judges who favor a tough “law and order” approach.

“Truly a tremendous driving force is the fact that economically it’s much better trying to treat people than it is to incarcerate people,” he said. “Because at the end of incarceration without treatment we still have the same problem.”

Wilson said the criminal justice system is often the first chance someone with substance use disorder has at getting treatment. He said prosecutors and judges need to be patient. They may well see the same offender more than once. Although it can be frustrating he said they have to try.

“I’ve always been afraid that once we send somebody off to prison we really have a feeling it’s not our problem anymore. We’re still paying for them,” he said.

ReSource reporters Aaron Payne and Mary Meehan contributed to this report.

DEA Targets Opioid Abuse with New Appalachian Field Office

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is targeting opioid abuse in Appalachia by establishing a new field office in Kentucky to oversee a region ravaged by overdose deaths.

The new Louisville field office will have a special agent in charge to oversee investigations in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.

It will improve efforts in the Appalachian mountain region and streamline drug trafficking investigations under a single special agent in charge, acting DEA Administrator Robert Patterson said during a news conference Wednesday with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

D. Christopher Evans, an associate agent in charge in the DEA’s Detroit field office, will lead the new Louisville office.

Sessions said it’s the first restructuring of DEA field offices since 1998, when the agency created an El Paso, Texas, field office.

“Today we are facing the worst drug crisis in American history, with one American dying of a drug overdose every nine minutes,” Sessions said during the news conference in Washington. The Department of Justice also announced $12 million in grants for state and local law enforcement to combat heroin and methamphetamine dealers.

Designating Louisville as a field office and installing a special agent in charge will better align DEA with the U.S. attorney offices in the three states, according to a release.

The Appalachian region has been ground zero for the opioid problem in recent years. Overdose deaths were 65 percent higher among people in Appalachia than in the rest of the country in 2015, a recent Appalachian Regional Commission study found. The study, “Appalachian Diseases of Despair,” reported that nearly 70 percent of the overdose deaths in the Appalachian region in 2015 were caused by opioids. West Virginia had the highest opioid overdose mortality rates with 52.8 deaths per 100,000 people.

The new Louisville office will have a total of 150 positions with 90 special agents in the three states. The restructuring involved moving the three states out of other DEA divisions to place them under the Louisville office. The Louisville office will begin operations on Jan. 1.

Child's Halloween Treat was Marijuana Derivative, Not Heroin

Updated on Friday, November 3 at 2:39 p.m.

West Virginia police say lab results on a substance found in a child’s trick-or-treat bag came back as a derivative of marijuana, not heroin as originally thought.

WSAZ-TV reports the substance was field-tested on Tuesday night in Oak Hill and had tested as heroin. No one was injured, including the 3-year-old girl whose bag it was found in.

The substance was then tested by the West Virginia State Police lab.

Oak Hill Police Chief Mike Whisman says the discovery doesn’t change the severity of the offense.

Whisman says the girl’s mother had called police after finding a dark substance wrapped in a glove.

No arrests have been made in the case.

Original Post:

Police say heroin was found in a child’s trick-or-treat bag in West Virginia.

Oak Hill Police Chief Mike Whisman told news outlets that the 3-year-old girl’s mother found a dark substance wrapped in a glove, and called police. Preliminary results from a field test revealed it was heroin.

No one was hurt. The mother, Stacey Norris, told WOAY-TV she initially thought the glove was the result of someone playing a joke.

Police say they will send the substance to the State Police Crime Lab in Charleston for official confirmation. There are no suspects at this time.

The chief said the substance likely came from Hidden Valley, an area where hundreds of children go trick-or-treating each Halloween.

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Part 2 – Mental Health

At the Epsworth United Methodist Church in Ripley, West Virginia, five grandparents sit around a table listening to a speaker tell them, “You are not alone.”

Although prayer is mentioned frequently at the meeting, religion is not the subject of today’s conversation – rather, how to communicate with grandchildren after grandparents are thrust into the role of primary caregivers.

“I want you to know that if you feel like no one’s listening, they are now,” said Bonnie Dunn, the the West Virginia State University Healthy Grandfamilies program facilitator.

The program is a pilot funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It is designed to help the growing number of grandfamilies cope with their situation by offering discussion sessions on topics such as communication, nutrition and stress.

“There are different things that grandparents experience when they find themselves with their grandchildren,” said Beth Frampton.

She’s a therapist at Family Care and a guest speaker in the program who focuses on mental health. Many of the families involved in the program have loved ones who struggle with addiction to opioids or illegal drugs.

“One of them is guilt,” she said. “‘What did I do wrong, that I’m having to raise my grandchildren that my children aren’t capable or willing to raise my grandchildren?’”

Frampton said they often also experience anger.

“There’s a strong sense of family and obligation. So you can have anger, depression, guilt,” she explained.

Not only that, she says grandparents are struggling with both their own health, and grandchildren who might have a variety of behavioral and academic challenges. So part of what the program does is teach grandparents how to navigate school and medical systems in today’s time.

“No matter the age of a grandparent, no matter the health issue of a grandparent, that grandparent is going to take that child, or take them children, not looking at the health issues they’ve gotten and not looking at are they really going to raise these children into the areas they need to do,” said Debbie Ball, who participated in the pilot program.

We sit at her kitchen table while her grandchildren are in school. Their mother is incarcerated with a 30 year sentence on drug charges.

“My biggest thought is Lord, just let me – keep me in good health and a sound mind to be able to maintain on their own,” she said.

Debbie found the program too short. It’s the first program of its kind in West Virginia, and was only designed as a three year pilot of six month interventions for each group of grandparents. But now that Debbie has graduated, she said what she craves is long-term support.

“We don’t have a support group,” she said. “We don’t get together two or three times a week or two or three times a month to sit and talk about how we could make things better or how we could do this or what do you think about that. Well let me tell you about how I’m working on my end with stress…we don’t have that.”

There are a couple other grandparents in Debbie’s apartment complex who are also raising grandchildren with whom she communicates on a regular basis. But she doesn’t drive, doesn’t walk well due to a bad hip and doesn’t use a computer. Which means that even if there was such a group, she’d be dependent on other people to get there.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

W.Va. Will Not See Latest Federal Grant to Combat Opioid Crisis

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday it will award $144 million in grants across the country to prevent and treat opioid addiction. But West Virginia won’t see any of it.

In an emailed statement from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which is administering the grant, West Virginia won’t receive any of the $144 million award.

The funding will be distributed to 58 recipients, including other states, cities, healthcare providers, and community organizations. It will be awarded over a period of three to five years.

This grant follows another national grant of $485 million dollars announced in April also aimed at combating the opioid crisis. West Virginia did see $5,881,983 from this award for year one.

National health surveys indicate last year 12 million people nationwide misused opioids like prescription pain pills and heroin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests 60,000 of those people did not survive.

New Project to Study Prevention & Treatment of Opioid Abuse

Over $1 million in federal funding has been awarded to a project aimed at addressing the opioid crisis in West Virginia.

The project is based in southern West Virginia, and it’s spearheaded by West Virginia University. The goal is to develop comprehensive ways to prevent and treat the consequences of opioid abuse, such as overdose, HIV, hepatitis, and sexually transmitted diseases.

The project will be supported by a two-year $1 million grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The WVU team will work with state and local communities to develop the best practice responses that could be implemented by public health systems in the country’s rural regions.

President Donald Trump recently declared the opioid epidemic as a national crisis.