Vanderburgh County fatalities blamed on heroin or Fentanyl — or the combination of the two dangerous opioids — have surpassed the 20-death mark and will likely continue to increase.
That disclosure was made by Steve Lockyear, the county’s chief deputy coroner, during a public forum earlier held earlier this week by the Evansville AIDS Resource Group. Speaking to a group of about 40 people Thursday night, Lockyear said “every single one” of the people who died from a heroin overdose this year here switched to the street drug after getting hooked on prescription pills.
Lockyear told the group that authorities started to see a spike of deaths blamed on opioid painkillers locally around 2005. Many of the people who are addicted to painkillers first got the mediation for legitimate issues through the proper channels. For years, according to Lockyear, “people (have been) dying from their own medicine cabinet.”
“Prescription opiates have turned lots of people into accidental addicts,” he said. “They have gone to their doctor, they have gotten this medication, they have taken this medication for years, and now they’re addicted. “If the doctor told you to drink a case a beer every day for (a) year, you’d be an alcoholic. There’s no difference.”
In 2015, there were six Vanderburgh County deaths blamed on heroin and one on Fentanyl. The statistics are paired together because starting earlier this year, local authorities reported seeing Fentanyl added to heroin to make it more powerful — and deadly. Not included in this year’s already 22-death statistic is another death that could possibly be the county’s 23rd heroin/Fentanyl fatal overdose.
Just how powerful can it be when both those drugs are combined together?
“People are collapsing on top of themselves with Fentanyl,” Lockyear said.
Carrie Lawrence, an Indiana University public health expert, also spoke at Thursday’s AIDS Resource Group conversation. She specializes in harm reduction strategies and did work in Scott County, after that area’s HIV outbreak in 2015. She preached the need for a comprehensive response to help combat the heroin and opioid problem and asked for stakeholders to try to address the issue by developing a collaborative strategy. “It’s not a law enforcement problem. It’s not a public health problem. It’s not a medical services problem. It’s a community (issue),” Lawrence said. “You really can get sustainability when you get the community to completely support these efforts.”
One such “harm reduction” measure to deal with an opioid crisis could be a needle exchange program, though there are several steps that must be taken — and approvals given — before such a program could be implemented in Vanderburgh County. Under Indiana state law, the first step is for a county show it’s experiencing a public health crisis due to injection drug use. Such a designation is determined by HIV and Hepatitis C rates.
Lawrence, who also volunteers at exchange in Monroe County, said such programs are more than just providing clean syringes to users. They also offer paths to addiction treatment and other services addicts need but might be too afraid to pursue because of how drug users are viewed and stereotyped.
Ensuring that opioid users are still “treated with dignity,” she said, is a good first step to find solutions to the problem.
“That person might not be ready for treatment today, but we’re going to engage them in this process that maybe at the end of three months they are ready to go (get help) and there’s a bed open,” Lawrence said. “And now we have this relationship with this population that has been thrown out on the fringe. The stigma is incredibly high.”
Lockyear, who had a long career with the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office before coming to the coroner’s office, told the crowd that he once believed problems could be solved purely by making more arrests. But that’s not the case with opioid addicts, he said, though after every recent heroin overdose, authorities have made an extra effort to track down the victim’s source for the drug.
Lockyear has given several talks on the rise of heroin in the community to groups during the past several months. He acknowledged Thursday that an opiate addiction is “a big struggle.”
“These people didn’t pick to be addicts — they weren’t leading a reckless lifestyle. They started on something and now they need help. We need to get the word out to everybody — that’s why I’m out here telling everybody,” he said. “If you have a family member that’s struggling, get them some treatment.”