Answer Addiction

Tag: rural America

  • Opioid Addiction Isn't Just A Rural Problem

    Opioid Addiction Isn't Just A Rural Problem

    While the epidemic has been framed as one that mostly affects rural America, new research shows that overdose rates are actually higher in urban areas.

    The common narrative of the national opioid crisis has been that this “disease of despair” has affected rural areas the most.

    However, a new working paper argues that economic depression and access to opioids are the biggest determinants of overdose rates in both rural and urban areas. 

    “I really do want to push back against this cliche that addiction does not discriminate,” Shannon Monnat, the paper’s author and a sociologist at Syracuse University, told Pacific Standard. “The physiological processes that underlie addiction themselves may not discriminate, but the factors that put people in communities at higher risk are are not spatially random.”

    Looking at non-Hispanic whites and controlling for demographics, Monnat found that overdose rates were highest in urban areas. The rate decreased the further one moved from cities, a trend that held true for all racial groups. Overall, urban counties had an average of 6.2 more deaths per 100,000 people than rural counties. 

    Interestingly, supply and demand interacted differently in rural and urban settings. In the city, supply of drugs seemed to have the biggest effect on overdose rates. In rural areas, economic distress was the stronger predictor of overdose rates.

    “A lot of what’s going on here are regional effects,” she said. “You get regional levels of despair and distress that seemed to reinforce and exacerbate the problem.”

    Monnat did find that some of the things associated with rural living were connected with an increased risk for overdose. For example, areas with an economy heavily dependent on mining or the service industries had higher rates of overdose. Controlling for how many drugs were supplied to an area, places with higher economic distress had higher overdose rates. 

    “What that means is that drug mortality rates aren’t higher in economically distressed places simply because they’ve had a greater supply of opioid prescribing there,” she said. “There’s something about economic distress in and of itself that helps to explain the variation that we’re seeing across the country and the magnitude of the drug crisis.”

    Places hardest hit by the crisis, like West Virginia, had both economic vulnerabilities and an excessive supply of opioids, Monnat said.

    “It’s no coincidence that widespread opioid prescribing first started in the most economically vulnerable places of the country—there was vulnerability there. These places had been primed to be vulnerable to opioids, which are drugs that numb both physical and mental pain, through decades of economic and social decline.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Meth Makes A Rural Comeback In The Shadow Of The Opioid Crisis

    Meth Makes A Rural Comeback In The Shadow Of The Opioid Crisis

    “They came in with much purer, much cheaper meth and just flooded this region of the country,” says one DEA agent.

    While the opioid epidemic has been at the forefront of headlines and national attention, another danger has also been growing in the background: the use of methamphetamine in small, rural areas of the country. 

    According to Rolling Stone, meth was previously prominent in the 1990s due to “new synthesizing methods,” which allowed individuals to use cold medicine and cleaning products to create the drug in their homes.

    Eventually, due to limiting over-the-counter access to certain medications via the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act (2006), domestic meth lab seizures dropped drastically. 

    However, this wasn’t because meth ceased to exist, Rolling Stone notes. Instead, the market reportedly shifted to Mexico, where “superlabs” managed by Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel can create a large quantity of the drug in pure form and at cheap rates. 

    Such superlabs can cook hundreds of pounds of meth daily and at 95 to 99% purity. And, according to CNN, an ounce of meth today goes for $250 to $450 in Oklahoma, versus the $1,100 it cost in 2012. Similar price drops have been reported in Virginia, Ohio and Florida.

    In addition to price drops, certain states are also seeing increases in meth-related deaths. In Oklahoma, fatal meth overdoses have doubled in just five years. 

    “They came in with much purer, much cheaper meth and just flooded this region of the country,” DEA Agent Richard Salter told CNN. 

    Oklahoma isn’t alone. In Alaska, Rolling Stone reports, meth overdoses quadrupled in the eight years between 2008 and 2016. Florida, according to the Department of Law Enforcement’s 2016 report, is seeing fatal overdoses four times higher than they were six years ago. And, according to a recent report, meth seizures have tripled within two years in Southwest Virginia.

    U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that meth seizures have increased tenfold in the past eight years—from 8,900 pounds in 2010 to about 82,000 pounds so far this year. Despite that fact, the drug is still making its way into U.S. states like California and Arizona, then being taken to distribution areas like Atlanta.

    From there, it makes its way into smaller, rural areas. 

    Mark Woodward, spokesman with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, tells CNN that while attention is being directed to the opioid epidemic, meth is being left behind. 

    “There’s so much attention—not just in Oklahoma, but nationwide—on the opioid crisis,” Woodward said. “But our single most deadly individual drug is methamphetamine.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • What's Fueling The Rise Of Meth?

    What's Fueling The Rise Of Meth?

    Ohio, Nevada, Utah and parts of Montana have seen a recent rise in methamphetamine use. 

    In rural Ohio, an increasing number of opioid users are turning to methamphetamine to get high, driven in part by a medication that is meant to help them stay sober. 

    “Right now that’s our biggest challenge—is methamphetamines,” Amanda Lee, a counselor at Health Recovery Services in McArthur, Ohio, told NPR. “I think partly because of the Vivitrol program.”

    Vivitrol is an injectable medication used to support recovery from opioid addiction. It works by blocking opioid receptors in the brain, so that people are not able to get high off opioids. However, Lee points out that when the underlying cause of addiction—like pain or trauma—is not addressed, desperate users simply find a new substance to abuse. 

    “The Vivitrol injection does not cover receptors in the brain for methamphetamines, so they can still get high on meth,” Lee said. “So they are using methamphetamines on top of the Vivitrol injection.”

    Lee said that in her opinion, methamphetamine is much more debilitating than opioids. 

    “There’s paranoia. There is hallucinations. It almost looks like people have schizophrenia,” she said. “Methamphetamines scare me more than opiates ever did.”

    “You can’t really describe the smell,” said Detective Ryan Cain, lead narcotics detective for Vinton County, Ohio. “It’s a combination of lithium out of a battery. A lot of them use Coleman camp fuel. It’s a solvent. They use ammonium nitrate, which is usually out of a cold pack. And all of it’s very cancerous.”

    Trecia Kimes-Brown, the county prosecutor, has seen how meth addiction, like opioids, involves the whole family. 

    “When you’re living in a house where people are making meth, it’s not just the health effects. These kids are living in these environments where, you know, they’re not being fed,” she said. “They’re not being clothed properly. They’re not being sent to school. They’re being mistreated. And they have a front-row seat to all of this.”

    In addition to meth produced locally, cheap meth from Mexico is now trafficked into Ohio by drug cartels south of the border, according to officials. 

    Ohio isn’t unique in how the drug crisis has shifted. In Kentucky, the focus on preventing opioid addiction also contributed to an increase in meth addiction. 

    “People say, ‘Why do you not have an opioid problem? Why does Daviess County not suffer the same problems?’” Sheriff Keith Cain said last month. “I’d like to say it’s because of progressive police work. But I think the prime reason we don’t have an opioid problem here is because our people are addicted to meth.”

    Nevada, Utah and parts of Montana have also seen a rise in methamphetamine use recently. 

    “Meth is kind of the forgotten drug out there, and it’s still a huge problem in our society,” Lt. Todd Royce with Utah Highway Patrol said last month. “It’s a horrible epidemic and it destroys families.”

    View the original article at thefix.com