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HUGHESVILLE – In a milestone in the opium epidemic veiling the country, Project Bald Eagle officials spoke with students and residents of East Lycoming School District on Wednesday.
Over 700 students listened to two programs earlier in the day.
During the evening presentation in the Hughesville High School auditorium, concerned residents listened to Superintendent Michael D. Pawlik welcome other members of Project Bald Eagle.
“This is an opioid crisis that we’ve seen coming,” Pawlik said, “but a lot of people don’t want to admit that there’s a problem.”
The first step in battling the epidemic that leaves no corner of the community untouched is to forget every preconception or notion of what an addict is, he said. “Most of the things you’ve heard are probably not true.”
Another big part of combating the disease and beginning to set things right is educating the community, said Steven Shope, executive director of the project.
Shope said the problem is far bigger than people realize and it often is misunderstood.
“The nation, the state, the county is not in a heroin epidemic,” Shope said. “We are in an opioid epidemic. The rise in crime and heroin on the street is just one of the many symptoms of the greater problem.”
The origins of opioid and opioid addiction goes back as long as people have been on the planet, Shope said.
The poppy plant has been used medicinally to treat pain
throughout the world. Farmers will cut slices in the sides of the top of the plant and a white substance will seep out of the slits.
That white substance is opium, he said.
In 1803, scientists researching medicine discovered how to isolate the morphine compound of opium and, later, heroin.
“Heroin was originally used to treat opium and morphine addiction,” Shope said.
It wasn’t until 1920 that heroin was made illegal.
The epidemic began out of misinformation and misunderstanding, Shope said.
“This stuff has been around for 140 years, so why are we only having a serious problem with it now?” Shope asked the audience. “Because 25 years ago, there was a massive increase in opioid prescriptions.”
The United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population but uses 80 percent of the world’s opium supply, Shope said. But its use isn’t all recreational.
Eighty percent of people addicted to heroin first started using prescription opiates, he said.
“It takes a 60- to 90-day supply of opiates to create an addiction,” Shope said. “And people have described the withdrawal as a pain similar to having fire in your bones, burning from the inside.”
An opiate addiction often leads to an overdose, and an overdose may result in respiratory failure and death.
In the state alone, 10 people die from overdoses each day, Shope said.
In a 20-year period, there has been a 570-percent increase in overdoses and, in 2003, overdose deaths surpassed those in motor vehicle accidents, he said.
“In Lycoming County, you’re more likely to die of an overdose than an accident,” Shope said.
In 2013, there were eight overdose deaths; in 2014, 13; and in 2015, 25, he related. Deaths are almost doubling each year and, in 2016, 48 were reported by July 10, Shope said.
A way that legislators and the project are trying to thwart that death rate is by increasing the availability of Narcan – a drug that reverses the effects of an overdose – to everyone in the state.
Kathleen Hugo, certified recovery specialist at Crossroads Counseling, shared with the audience what she does and her experience with addiction.
“As a recovery specialist, we work on a peer-to-peer basis with recovering addicts to make sure they are fit to adapt to a drug-free world,” Hugo said.
Hugo said she was given a pill by a friend and became an addict shortly afterward.
“I didn’t know the severity or the dangers of this epidemic,” Hugo said. “But there is a stigma that needs to be avoided. Every day you hear about deaths of someone, and that could’ve been me.”