Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear led a discussion panel, made up of regional addiction specialists and healthcare leaders, in Mayfield on Thursday about how to best tackle the ongoing opioid epidemic in west Kentucky. Panel leaders repeatedly said that addiction prevention in many cases starts at home.
One of the at-home solutions pointed to was through opioid disposal kits that local officials passed around to the audience. These kits neutralize household prescription drugs so individuals can’t abuse them, and the Kentucky Opioid Disposal Pilot Program started in 2017 provided kits to four counties, including McCracken County.
“Making sure that we don’t have the same prescribers flooding our communities, cleaning out every single medicine cabinet, and raising awareness that a stocked medicine cabinet is a threat to their kids is one of the most important steps we can take,” said Beshear.
Beshear said that most new addictions continue to be caused by prescription drugs, which makes tackling the issue critical in households. Panel participants said it's also important to look for signs of addiction in others, which include changes in personality and stealing money.
An investigation by the Washington Post found that eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia were regions that saw some of the highest rates of prescription painkillers distributed by pharmacies. At the same time, these regions also see some of the highest rates of opioid overdoses.
Dr. Jeff Carrico is an addiction treatment specialist at West Kentucky Family Healthcare, who participated in the panel. He said west Kentucky hasn’t been as severely impacted by the opioid epidemic as other parts of the state, but there’s still a high porportion of people in the region becoming addicted through prescription drugs.
“One of the differences we see is that in western Kentucky we seem to not been as hit hard by oxycontin. We still have plenty of other opiates that are out there being used,” Carrico said. “We get a lot of referrals from Louisville, Lexington, and a lot of them are using the IV heroin. The ones we get locally tend to be more prescription opiates.”
Carrico also said that specifically in west Kentucky, when addicted people can’t get their prescription drug of choice, they transition to abusing methamphetamine, or meth. A recent report by NPR showed that seizures caused by meth use increased 142% nationwide from 2017 to 2018, according to federal data.
The panel discussion also centered around combating stigma faced by people suffering from addiction. 32-year-old Jeremy Colwell of Hopkinsville was one of the people who spoke to the panel.
He said he has been in recovery from opioid addiction for three years and has been revived from overdoses multiple times using Narcan, a nose spray that reverses overdoses. Colwell said fighting a stigma that addicted people are criminals is critical in encouraging victims to get treatment.
“The best way to fight the stigma is just the fact that we’re another human being. We all have vices. Some of us just have problems manifested in different ways than others,” Colwell said. “So, the best way to stay out of the stigma is to stay in the solution. Don’t just point out the problem we have, but help us find the solution for it.”
Other solutions the panel highlighted to encourage addicted people to get treatment include a Graves County needle-exchange program started in April. The program allows those addicted to receive clean, low-cost or free needles to help prevent blood-borne disease from using drugs.
