Plenty of drugs to go around!
Louisville Magazine’s August issue included an excellent extended piece profiling the impact of narcotic addiction in Austin (Scott County) Indiana. The sensitive and insightful article by senior writer, Anne Marshall with the collaboration of photographer William DeShazer, is titled, “The Craving.” The article deserves a wide readership and I recommend it to you. [Not all browsers may open on-line version of the story available here.] The title would be appropriate for a late-night horror show, but in real-life, the story is even more scary. This tiny town is ground-zero nationally for epidemics of opioid addiction, HIV and hepatitis, and the other medical and social side-effects of this class of drugs.
Based on visits and extensive interviews, the article makes clear the enormous cost of opioid addiction on entire communities. It is not just the users that pay the price. Legal or otherwise, the presence of opioid narcotics in communities exacerbates the poverty and social isolation that provide an important foothold for drug addiction and accelerates its grasp on communities large and small. By no means, however, is opioid addiction limited to the poor. To believe otherwise is to to hide out heads in the sand and allow this horror to grow. Some accounts of the epidemics in Scott County worry that the problem might spread to Louisville. Bad news folks! I am reliably told it is already abundantly here. This story could have been written about hundreds of towns and cities, large and small all over the nation, including Louisville.
Admittedly hard to fix– Why tie our hands?
In addition to accounts of human heartbreak, the article highlights longstanding political and institutional barriers to most effectively confront a problem that has always been with us. Detox and treatment options are subject to limitations of both effectiveness and availability. Relapse rates are high. The cost of medical treatment is also high and treatment itself is subject to both provider and patient abuse. Hard to swallow is the ideologically driven political foolishness that ties the hands of those offering effective support like needle exchanges, or playing games with the funding of Planned Parenthood which was providing HIV screening to citizens of Scott County. Perhaps when it is acknowledged that opioid abuse is not limited to the poor, to minorities, or other socially marginalized people, we will hear both the public and their elected representatives singing a different song and making resources other than more prisons available. Sad to think that is what it might take! [Read today’s story in the Lexington Herald Leader about a new federal prison in Eastern-Kentucky promoted as an economic development issue and weep!] Continue reading “Epidemic Opioid Abuse in Southern Indiana– Continued.”