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Tag: Ohio

  • Fentanyl Disguised As Oxycodone Seized In Ohio

    Fentanyl Disguised As Oxycodone Seized In Ohio

    Ohio officials are warning those who buy pills on the street to exercise caution.

    Authorities in Ohio are warning drug users to be extra cautious, after law enforcement in the state seized fentanyl that had been pressed into pills meant to resemble oxycodone, which were to be sold on the street. 

    The Community Overdose Action Team, which focuses on reducing opioid-related deaths in Montgomery County, Ohio, said in a statement reported by the Dayton Daily News that drug users need to realize the dangers of fentanyl. 

    “The Community Overdose Action Team reminds you that any illegal drug you purchase and use could contain fentanyl,” the statement read. “Fentanyl is a highly potent drug which greatly increases your chance of an overdose. It is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.” 

    The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Range Task Force and Dayton police also warned people that fentanyl is becoming widespread in Ohio’s drug supply.

    Christine Ton, media director for the sheriff’s office, said that the blue pills even have the markings of oxycodone. Some people get the pills thinking they’re buying Oxycontin, while others seek out the fentanyl pills for a powerful, cheap high. 

    “It is more potent than heroin and cheaper to buy,” Ton said.

    She added that the department seizes all varieties of drugs, not just opioids. “We routinely see meth, fentanyl, marijuana and are also running across cocaine. Crack and heroin are also located frequently.”

    Benjamin Glassman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said that his office is aggressively going after fentanyl-related cases as the drug becomes more prevalent. 

    “We are prosecuting more and more fentanyl-related narcotics-trafficking cases, both in Dayton and district-wide,” he said. “Fentanyl and its analogs are incredibly dangerous and are at the heart of the overdoses and deaths plaguing our region.”

    Recently, The Washington Post reported that public health officials had pressured the Obama administration to declare fentanyl a national health emergency as far back as 2016, but the administration did not act. John P. Walters, who served as chief of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2001 and 2009, said this likely contributed to the ever-increasing rate of fentanyl overdoses.

    “This is a massive institutional failure, and I don’t think people have come to grips with it,” said Walters. “This is like an absurd bad dream and we don’t know how to intervene or how to save lives.”

    Derek Maltz, former agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division in Washington, agreed that it was a missed opportunity to save lives. 

    “Fentanyl was killing people like we’d never seen before. A red light was going off, ding, ding, ding. This is something brand new. What the hell is going on? We needed a serious sense of urgency.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Drug-Related Deaths Plunge In Ohio: How They Did It

    Drug-Related Deaths Plunge In Ohio: How They Did It

    The fading presence of carfentanil may have played a major role in the decline of drug-related deaths in some parts of Ohio.

    Overdose deaths in Montgomery County—in Dayton, Ohio—have dramatically decreased in 2018. The county has seen an incredible 54% decline in overdose deaths: there were 548 by November 30 last year; this year there have been 250.

    Dayton is an economically-challenged city, deserted of jobs after manufacturers left in droves. Some speculate that this is part of the reason why Dayton had the highest opioid overdose death rates in the nation in 2017.

    The overdose deaths were so rapid and unrelenting that according to Wral.com, the coroner’s office continuously ran out of space, and ended up renting refrigerated trailers. So what has changed?

    The New York Times did extensive research and reporting on the ground to look into the positive changes in Dayton. Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley believes the largest impact on the rate of overdose deaths came from Gov. John Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid in 2015. This expansion allowed almost 700,000 low-income adults access to free addiction and mental health treatment.

    In addition to the treatments being free for low-income residents, the expansion of Medicaid pulled in more than a dozen new treatment providers within a year. Some of these providers are residential programs and outpatient clinics that utilize methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone for their patients. These are the three FDA-approved medications to treat opioid addiction.

    “It’s the basis — the basis — for everything we’ve built regarding treatment,” NYT reported Mayor Whaley said at City Hall. “If you’re a state that does not have Medicaid expansion, you can’t build a system for addressing this disease.”

    Dayton’s East Held holds a bimonthly event called Conversations for Change, which lays out the available addiction treatment options. Food is served, and anyone attending can meet treatment providers. The New York Times reported the evening they attended there were more than a dozen tables of providers.

    Significant to a large degree is the fading presence on the streets of Dayton of carfentanil, an analog of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Carfentanil is described by the CDC as 10,000 times more powerful than morphine.

    In recent years carfentanil was very present in Ohio street drugs, for unknown reasons. Mid-2017 carfentanil’s hold began to loosen, possibly because drug traffickers realized they were losing money due to the large upsurge in overdose deaths, said Timothy Plancon, a DEA special agent in charge of Ohio.

    A crucial decision was made by Richard Biehl, Dayton police chief, in 2014. Chief Biehl ordered all officers to carry naloxone, directly contrary to some of his peers in other Ohio cities. Naloxone, or Narcan, is the well-known medication that reverses opioid overdoses if administered in a timely manner.

    Police in Ohio and others elsewhere oppose harm reduction tools like naloxone due to a belief that they simply enable drug use. Still, the evidence is overwhelming that they save lives.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Teen Drug Use Drops In Ohio

    Teen Drug Use Drops In Ohio

    A local prevention expert credits greater awareness, media attention and personal tragedies for the decrease. 

    There’s some good news out of Ohio, as a new survey indicates teen prescription painkiller and heroin use are on the decline.

    According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the numbers come from a survey administered every two years by PreventionFirst, a nonprofit with the goal of stopping teen drug use before it begins. 

    “2018 is the lowest I’ve ever seen it,” Mary Haag, president and CEO of PreventionFirst, told the Enquirer. 

    The survey involved almost 33,000 students in grades 7-12 from both private and public schools in the greater Cincinnati area. 

    According to the findings, 2.4% of surveyed students reported using any type of prescription drugs in the 30 days prior to the survey, and 0.3% reported using heroin in that same timeframe. In comparison, in 2012, 6.5% reported using prescription pain pills and 1.8% reported heroin use. 

    Haag tells the Enquirer that these numbers are encouraging and she credits greater awareness, media attention and personal tragedies for the decrease. 

    However, the survey did raise some concerns when it came to alcohol and marijuana. According to the results, in the 30 days before the survey, 13.7% of students reported using alcohol and 8.1% reported using marijuana.

    Another recent survey, the CDC’s 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, also asked questions about teen opioid use. This survey asked whether students had ever misused prescription opioids and the number answering yes was higher, at 14%. 

    Nancy Brener, lead health scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, tells the Enquirer that this response is concerning. However, the same survey also showed a decrease in overall drug use in teens. 

    “I think it’s important to understand that we have made progress,“ Brener noted. 

    The survey also indicates that those who do not smoke cigarettes or use alcohol, illegal drugs or prescription drugs by age 21 are “virtually certain never to do so.”

    According to Marc Fishman, medical director of Maryland Treatment Centers and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychiatry, tells the Enquirer that it’s vital that treatment centers be willing to treat all types of substance use disorders in teenagers.

    “We need more treatment,” Fishman told the Enquirer. “Treatment of cocaine-use disorder. Treatment of alcohol-use disorder. Treatment of marijuana-use disorder.”

    “The vast majority of people with opioid-use disorder start with non-opioid use,” Fishman added. “Most of them don’t progress, but almost all of the cases of opioid-use disorder started there.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Police Chief Allegedly Overdosed On Drugs Stolen From Evidence Room

    Police Chief Allegedly Overdosed On Drugs Stolen From Evidence Room

    The 35-year-old died two months after being appointed part-time police chief.

    An Ohio police chief who died in May of a fentanyl overdose allegedly swiped the drugs from his own department’s evidence room, according to local reports. 

    Kirkersville Police Chief James Hughes had only been on the job two months when he was found unresponsive in the bathroom of his Reynoldsburg home. Nearby, officials said, were three syringes—one empty and two filled with fentanyl. Authorities also recovered a bag that tested positive for cocaine. 

    The part-time police chief died a short time later, and in July the coroner officially deemed the cause of death a fentanyl overdose, according to the Newark Advocate.

    The larger Reynoldsburg Police Department investigated the fatality, and last week Lt. Ron Wright revealed where he apparently got the fatal dose: the village police evidence room. 

    “There was packaging that indicated that he was taking controlled substances from there,” said Wright, according to the Advocate. It’s not clear if that could impact any ongoing cases. 

    The 35-year-old was appointed to the 500-person village’s 20-hour-per-week job as top cop on March 13, during a two-minute council meeting. Almost a year earlier, then-chief Eric DiSario was shot to death in the line of duty during an incident at a local nursing home, according to WSYX. His replacement, Jeff Finley, resigned abruptly in early March, citing disagreements with the mayor. 

    Though village council members didn’t offer any comment to the local media on it, Hughes had a troubled past before his appointment as chief. 

    During the 14 months he previously worked at the local sheriff’s office, internal affairs investigated him three times. Once, he resigned after six months, though he was later rehired working at the jail. 

    “I believe that Deputy Hughes needs to think before he acts,” one supervisor wrote in a 2012 performance evaluation, according to the Newark paper. “Deputy Hughes is known to make bad decisions on and off duty.”

    A few months later, Hughes notched up a misdemeanor conviction for a drunken incident at a nearby fast food restaurant when he spit at a drive-through worker and called her a “bitch.” 

    Once Reynoldsburg police wrap up their investigation of the chief’s death, they’ll likely forward the case to state authorities, Wright said. 

    “It’s kind of gone beyond our level. You’re talking about another agency’s property room,” he said. “We think the state should probably intervene.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Fentanyl-Related Deaths Skyrocket In Ohio

    Fentanyl-Related Deaths Skyrocket In Ohio

    “There is nothing that worries me more than synthetic opiates—and what will be the next, more powerful synthetic that hits the street,” said one police official.

    Fentanyl is taking over the illicit drug market in the greater Cincinnati area, sparking a 1,000% increase in overdose deaths in Hamilton County. 

    In 2013, authorities there logged 24 fentanyl-related deaths. Last year, they counted 324, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. 

    The drug’s popularity has grown so explosively it’s overshadowed heroin deaths. Last year, the Hamilton County coroner found fentanyl involved in 85% of overdose deaths the office examined, while the county’s crime lab detected the substance in more than 90% of the drugs tested in the first five months of this year.  

    “Fentanyl and similar synthetic opiates have produced overdoses and deaths in not only unprecedented numbers but previously unimaginable,” Newtown Police Chief Tom Synan told the Ohio paper. “It is no longer a heroin epidemic but a synthetic-opiate epidemic.”

    The problem in Ohio mirrors the issue nationwide, Synan said. In 2016, according to a research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, fentanyl was involved in roughly half of opioid-related deaths.

    “It’s the small amounts of the extremely deadly substances that are killing people,” Hamilton County coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco told the paper.

    Just days after the Cincinnati paper published its report, the Billings Gazette in Montana detailed an apparent uptick in fentanyl-related deaths in the county that houses Fort Peck Indian Reservation. There, officials are bumping up naloxone training efforts and considering reactivating a regional drug task force. 

    And in May, the Minneapolis Star Tribune detailed a spike in fentanyl-related overdoses in Minnesota, where officials are pushing to treat fatal overdoses as homicides. 

    Even as the epidemic spreads, officials in Ohio are warning it could get worse as underground chemists start pumping out new analogues of the dangerous drug, some of which could be more potent. 

    And, as officials elsewhere have warned, fentanyl is starting to pop up in cocaine and meth supplies. 

    “The introduction of synthetic opiates like fentanyl has killed tens of thousands of Americans and should be seen as the country’s most pressing health, national security issue and social crisis we face right now,” Synan said. “There is nothing that worries me more than synthetic opiates—and what will be the next, more powerful synthetic that hits the street.”

    View the original article at thefix.com