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MARTINSVILLE –Opioids continue to be a problem for Martinsville and Henry County. For three of the five months from May to September, the city and county jointly held the number one rank in Virginia for emergency department visits due to opioid overdoses. That’s according to data from the Virginia Department of Health released over the past week. For the two months where they didn’t hold the number one ranking, the city and county came in third and eighth, respectively.
“It’s sad to see those statistics when we know how committed so many organizations are to changing that,” Bonnie Favero, prevention director for Piedmont Community Services, wrote in an email. “So many of the organizations represented by DFMHC [Drug Free Martinsville/Henry County Coalition] are working hard to prevent and stop the problem.”
“Law enforcement reports to the coalition what they are doing and it is impressive,” Favero wrote. “NCI [New College Institute] is hosting events to raise awareness.”
That includes providing REVIVE education, so that people know how to save someone from an overdose; handing out lock boxes to those who need a safe place to store their medications and installing permanent take-back boxes in the city and county so people can safely dispose of medication.
“Piedmont Community Services has prevention specialists in every elementary school, teaching drug prevention so that children will understand the risks involved and how to resist the temptation to experiment,” Favero said, adding that the specialists were in middle and high schools as well. “We are employing all the best practices to curb this epidemic and yet we have much more to do.”
The problem isn’t getting better. In September, Martinsville and Henry County combined had 29.5 emergency room visits because of opioid overdoses. The cities of Hopewell and Petersburg tied for the second worst in September, coming in at 26 visits per 100,000 residents. The numbers went up and down throughout the summer. In August, Martinsville/Henry County also had the worst rate, with 34.2 cases. In July, the area had 23.3 cases and in June, there were 24.9 overdose cases reported in the local emergency department.
From 2011 to 2016, opioid overdoses caused 53 deaths in Henry County and Martinsville, according to data from the Virginia Department of Health. In Henry County, 38 people died from prescription opioid overdoses and six people, from fentanyl and/or heroin overdoses. In Martinsville, five people died from prescription opioid overdoses and four from fentanyl or heroin overdoses.
A report released in July 2017 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that patients in the city of Martinsville are prescribed more opioids than anywhere else in the United States. The report, called “Vital Signs,” detailed the number of opioids given out by prescription in 59,000 pharmacies in this country from 2010 to 2015.
On average, the report said, doctors in a typical U.S. city or county prescribe a person 640 morphine milligram equivalent (MME) units of opioids each year. In Martinsville, that number at that time was 4,086.9. Henry County had an average of 1,007.9 MME per person at the end of 2015.
You hear people talk about the opioid problem in Virginia, but what exactly does that word mean?
The National Institute on Drug Abuse clbadifies opioids as “a clbad of drug that includes the illegal drug heroin as well as powerful pain relievers available legally by prescription. [That includes] oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, morphine, fentanyl and others. The drugs are chemically related and interact with opioid receptors on nerve cells in the body and brain.”
Are they harmful to take? National Institute on Drug Abuse officials directed the Bulletin to this statement on their website, which reads that “opioid pain relievers are generally safe when taken for a short time and as prescribed by a doctor, but they are frequently misused (taken in a different way or in a greater quantity than prescribed, or taken without a doctor’s prescription) because they produce euphoria in addition to pain relief.”
“Regular use — even as prescribed by a doctor — can produce dependence,” the statement continues, “and when misused or abused, opioid pain relievers can lead to fatal overdose. The current epidemic of prescription opioid abuse has led to increased use of heroin, which presents similar dangers.”
U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine announced in August that Virginia Tech will receive $99,705 in federal funding to conduct a two-year research project that will bring together community partners and stakeholders in Martinsville to help address the local opioid crisis.
Carlin Rafie, an badistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise, will be in charge of the program. Rafie also works as an adult nutrition specialist with the Virginia Cooperative Extension.
She’ll be joined by Emily Zimmerman from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health, as well as members of the Opioid Task Force of Martinsville.
Basically, to get started, the group will have a lot of input from local officials. That includes Martinsville Chief of Police Eddie Cbadady; the prevention director of Piedmont Community Services, Bonnie Favero; the coordinator of the Drug Free Martinsville/Henry County Coalition, Ann Gibson; the West Piedmont Health District; and the project director in Martinsville, Dawn Moser.
In August, Kerry Gateley, director of the West Piedmont Health District, stated in an, email, “We are looking forward to working with the team to better understand the underlying causes of substance abuse and to address it with our partners.”
How will that happen? The project is broken down into four aims.
First, the group wants to develop conceptual models, related to opioid abuse. Second, the group will rank priorities, in terms of policies and strategies for addressing the opioid problem in the city. Third, the group will come up with ways to move forward on those plans; and fourth, the findings from this research will be distributed locally, regionally and nationally.
Rafie, Zimmerman and Moser indicated in August that bringing together diverse stakeholders who have different perspectives on the opioid epidemic will promote a broader understanding of the issues and possible ways to address the problems. For example, that possibly could include such things as challenges and needs of people who use opioids; the perspectives of doctors and nurses, counselors, law enforcement and social workers who may deal with people who use opioids; personal challenges related to access to health care; economic issues; how the opioid issue is related to social policies; how factors relate to one another; what resources are available in and out of the community; social needs and issues related to social support; ideas for research; if a new intervention program is needed, and how it can be built, tested to see if it works, and funded; and more.
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