Gov. Mike Pence deserves the praise he is receiving for tackling the heroin epidemic that is devastating some regions of Indiana.
Pence responded by forming The Governor's Task Force on Drug Enforcement, Treatment and Prevention. He said its 21 members will look at ways to address the root causes of drug addiction. They’ll focus on prevention and treatment, as well as law enforcement.
Heroin took Indiana by surprise and hit hard. State reports show deaths linked to heroin abuse in Indiana spiked from three in 2003 to 154 last year. Indiana’s ranking rose to 16th among the states for overdose deaths.
The plague of heroin still hasn’t become widespread in northeast Indiana, but we’re vulnerable. The center of Indiana’s new heroin outbreak has been in rural areas such as Scott County — not in cities, where heroin use traditionally has flourished.
We hope Pence’s task force can stop the spread of heroin before it reaches a crisis point in our region of the state.
But we already have our own drug epidemic in methamphetamine, and we hope Pence’s drug task force will look beyond the new heroin crisis to pay attention to meth.
Northeast Indiana residents might be wondering why no one formed a similar blue-ribbon group to fight meth a long time ago.
Indiana may be joining the top ranks of states with heroin problems — but we’re already No. 1 in methamphetamine.
Everything that can be said about the evils of heroin applies to meth, too:
• It ruins the lives of users. Check.
• It devastates families and puts innocent children at risk. Check.
• It’s highly addictive and hard to kick. Check.
• Heroin uses leave dangerous needles littering their communities. Meth users leave dangerous and potentially explosive “one-pot” meth labs littering their communities. Check.
So why hasn’t meth already seen the kind of high-priority effort heroin is receiving?
It could be that heroin doesn’t have a lobby group. In the case of meth, the pharmaceutical industry works hard to resist the remedy law enforcement experts say would work best. Police believe strongly that requiring a prescription to buy cold and allergy medicines containing pseudoephedrine — the key ingredient in meth — would put a huge dent in the problem.
It’s curious how state leaders show strong respect for police officers except in listening to their advice about meth.
Meth also fails to get attention because it’s not a big problem in the center of the state. Of the seven counties with the biggest meth problems, five are in the state’s northeastern corner — Noble, DeKalb, Allen, Kosciusko and Elkhart. Another, Vanderburgh (Evansville), is in the far southwestern corner. Meth is most prevalent in Delaware County (Muncie).
In contrast, the seven counties of the Indianapolis region had only 35 meth labs combined last year — compared to 57 in Noble County alone and 49 in DeKalb County.
The approach Pence and other state leaders are taking to combat heroin is on the right track.
But we have to ask: How about putting the same effort into fighting meth?