ELYRIA – Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine surveyed a room alive with conversations and said a Drug Abuse Community Forum was successful April 21 at Lorain County Community College in Elyria.
‘What I hope happens is just what you see when you look around the room,’ DeWine said. ‘There are conversations going on. I can’t solve this problem. We can help. But ultimately lives are going to be saved at the local level. To bridge the gaps, we need agencies working together. It takes the churches, schools, business community. Everybody has got to be involved. It could be their child next.’
In a survey of county coroners, 897 deaths in 2013 in Ohio were attributed to heroin overdoses, DeWine said, including 31 in Lorain County, 195 in Cuyahoga County, two in Huron County, and six in Medina County.
Judge Debra Boros said she sees addiction while working with adults at Lorain County Domestic Relations Court, and with juveniles at Lorain County Juvenile Court.
‘I hope none of you have ever had the experience of watching a juvenile detox,’ Boros said. ‘It’s horrible to witness.’
Most parents are not educated enough to help a child detox at home, Boros said. The obstacles that prevent a juvenile from beating a drug habit are different from those of an adult, she said. Children are sent back to school, when the ‘triggers’ – people and situations connected with the addiction – often are at school. And in some cases, she said, the triggers can be closer to home.
‘Their homes are sometimes their triggers,’ Boros said. ‘They’re using in their homes and parents don’t know about it. We don’t have the detox facilities available for the treatment of juveniles.’
Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera said that while heroin has been a relatively new phenomenon in suburban and rural areas, it always has been a problem in Lorain. Now it’s multi-generational, he said.
Heroin addicts police dealt with in the 1970s returned to the drug beginning in 2005 and were overdosing, Rivera said.
An epidemic about seven months ago resulted in a rash of overdose deaths because of Fentanyl added to the heroin, Rivera said.
‘Everybody got together, finally arresting all of the culprits,’ Rivera said. About 10 years ago, the drug enforcement unit gathered information for about 18 months to arrest key dealers, Rivera said. Now officers target open markets for illegal activity. Logged citizen complaints are reviewed in bi-weekly meetings, with officers accounting for how they handled those tips.
Since neighborhoods were falling apart because of increased violence, the police department formed a Community Impact Unit to handle drugs, gangs and bullying, Rivera said.
Because of Sen. Gayle Manning’s efforts to pass legislation for a pilot program allowing police officers to carry and administer Narcan, which reverses the effects of a heroin overdose, Lorain Police Department has saved 26 lives so far, Rivera said.
The state legislature passed a measure to spread Narcan use to all police agencies in Ohio, Manning said, adding it goes into effect as soon as Gov. John Kasich signs it into law.
Michael Ferrer, representing Lorain County Urban League, said he works from a totally different angle – prevention – with 380 youths in three programs from seventh grade until they reach their first year in college. A key to prevention of drug abuse is dealing with root causes, such as bullying and depression, he said.
‘Heroin isn’t in their vocabulary,’ Ferrer said. ‘Crack is. Alcohol is. And all of those drugs in Mom’s cabinet. To them, heroin is the needle, and we are afraid of needles.’
When dealing with a gang that told a boy to be a lookout, one boy said, ‘I live here. I either do what they tell me or fight it and die,’ Ferrer said. So police officers went to the boy’s house, shook him up in front of the neighborhood dealers, put him in a police car and drove him around for more than an hour, Ferrer said. The dealers didn’t want anything to do with the boy because police were watching him, he said.
Now the boy is a young man who pastors a church, Ferrer said.
Rob Brandt spoke from an experience of losing a son, Robby, to a heroin overdose during a fight toward sobriety. Now through Robby’s Voice, an organization that educates people about drug addiction, other parents contact Brandt with their stories.
‘What we’ve seen is scary,’ Brandt said. ‘There are no easy answers. Once you go through the door, it’s a roll of the dice. We deal with parents who are woefully uneducated to deal with their children’s substance abuse.’
Brandt recommended prevention.
‘We need a culture change,’ Brandt said. ‘We need resiliency. These drug dealers are making too much money to step back. I for one will run it to the grave.’
A common theme of the forum was community involvement.
‘We can’t arrest our way out of this whole problem,’ said Dennis Cavanaugh, chief deputy of the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office.