News

Community leaders gather to address opioid crisis

By Nancy Waclawek, Published: March 28, 2018

By Nancy Waclawek
Associate Editor

For the 90 community leaders gathered at Blue Ridge Community College on Wednesday afternoon, Henderson County’s opioid crisis wasn’t news. In their positions in law enforcement, emergency management, government, medicine and nonprofit agencies, they live daily with the challenge of helping individuals and their families with substance abuse problems.

What was new was having all of them in one room brainstorming for four hours about how they can strategically get together to deal with the crisis and pledging to do so.

At least two concrete efforts had been put in place by the time the gathering broke up.

Henderson County Manager Steve Wyatt said that, at the next county commission meeting, he plans to ask commissioners how they will address the issue that cost the sheriff’s department $2.5 million between January 2015 and August 2017.

Megan Powell, who works in Wyatt’s office and coordinated the forum, said she would be updating the county’s website Thursday morning with resources offering help with substance abuse. That information, Powell said, would be available at www.hendersoncountync.org under “Opioid Crisis.” It would include all the agencies in the HopeRx Resource Guide, she said.

“This crisis has affected everyone in this room in one way or another,” Wyatt said in his opening remarks. “Lives have been lost.”

Nationally, the opioid epidemic kills 60,000 to 70,000 people per year, said Dr. Craig Martin, chief medical officer of Vaya Health.

“Broken hearts, lost lives, people incarcerated, families divided, children in foster care, the stigma, lack of funding for treatment and not enough treatment programs and clinicians,” Martin said. “They are all part of the tragic story of addiction to narcotic pain medicines that were over-prescribed by physicians since the 1990s,” he said. At that time, hospitals were instructed to measure patients’ pain and alleviate it, he said. Pain was measured with smiley faces from 1 (little) to 10 (intense).

Dr. David Ellis, chief medical officer of Pardee Hospital, said that was the problem – trying to eliminate pain rather than control it.

“The vast majority of narcotics (prescriptions) are written by primary care physicians … They were written for people with chronic pain. We need a system where we can take all these people and they can be treated for their chronic pain in other ways… We should not be getting people pain free. We should have been treating pain to (allow) function. It’s nobody’s job to make people pain free.”

Kevin Marino, social work program administrator for Henderson County’s Department of Social Services, said the issue goes to “the problem of the heart. We need something to deal with the problems of the family. Families struggle with keeping their jobs, with keeping their insurance, with keeping their children, with trying to get to services … and still get their kids to school and day care. With all these life competing issues, we’ve got to deal with the family system.”

Mike Barnett, EMS manager for the county, said mental health issues are essential to address. “The frequent fliers, the frequent users, those who call on us 20 or 30 times a year … a lot is relating back to mental health. The recovery piece (from overdoses) is important but having better access to mental health would also help.”

The conversation about the opioid epidemic in Henderson County continues Thursday with listening and learning events with Sam Quinones, author of “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.” Quinones speaks at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Blue Ridge Community College.

On Friday night a Hope Candlelight Vigil takes place at 7 p.m. at the Historic Courthouse in downtown Hendersonville.

On Saturday, April 7, Nik’s Hope Run, a 5K race to raise awareness about addiction, starts at 9 a.m. in Patton Park.