Ohio’s Drug Abuse is Packing Up and Moving Out — To the Country
Drug abuse long has been contained behind the limits of the most populous American cities. The 70's music industry glorified rock legends performing high on marijuana; the 80's Hollywood pushed youth to get in on the cheap and addictive crack cocaine; and the 90's raves stormed buildings with hits of heroin or “club drugs.” Yet, drugs are no longer satiated by the steel structures and city dweller bodies that once contained them.
Opioids are now craving the white picket fence and 2.5 kids of Ohio suburbia.
Ask around Ohio and you won’t have trouble finding a story or two involving cities and addictions. There are people from all over who have experienced drug abuse first-hand in one of our state’s three C’s. For Devonne Johnson, a college student from Akron, the big C stood for both Cleveland and caution. He still remembers the night drug abuse first stood in his face at his friend’s older brother’s apartment.
“We were drinking and this was towards the end of the night when everyone was about to fall asleep,” he recalls. “That was my first experience, in high school, of seeing somebody actually use heroin in front of me. And it’s the whole nine yards. It’s everything that it pretty much shown on TV.”
Most of America would recognize Jones’ drawing of addiction. Deserted alleys containing discrete exchanges and police units flooding from gang homes with pounds of white powder bags saturate late night news. After all, cities have more people and more supplies, so it makes logical sense they would be the drug hub of the country. A Forbes report in 2009 showed the urban capitals of New Orleans, Baltimore, and San Francisco were dealing with the some of the worst drug problems in the nation.
But addiction has changed zip codes and demographics since 2009.
Dr. Keith Durkin, professor of sociology at Ohio Northern University, has seen the effects of this move first-hand. He attests, “Every other heroin outbreak was generally young men of color in urban areas. Here it’s the exact opposite. It’s generally older, being in their 20s and above, white, 50/50 male and female, rural and suburban.”
Suburban Ohio didn’t know addiction was going to make its way to their backyards. Addiction turned the corner in the night, unpacked the U-Haul, and became their neighbor. Others will whisper its name through half-cracked car windows or under the muffle of a whirling lawn mower. But if they become brave enough to take it a housewarming apple pie, they will come face to face with it themselves. “Hello,” it will say, “I’m opioid by the way. I’m really glad to be here. I’ve gotten to know so many of you!”
Data from the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) shows the death count from drug overdose in Ohio rose 129% from 2011–2016. More importantly, 86.3% of those deaths involved opioids.
The data also shows higher death rates from overdose in rural and suburban counties. The counties with the six highest death rates per 100,000 people from 2010–2016 were Montgomery (50.3), Brown (46.5), Butler (44), Clermont (41.2), and Clark and Scioto (39.8).
Drug abuse is no longer stuck in the television for those outside the city. News coverage has turned away from the metropolitan downtowns to the delicate suburbs, and the change surprised almost everyone, from homeowners to healthcare professionals to drug task forces.
Even more surprising, we also now see opioid abuse driving tractors.
Ohio’s Hardin County has an estimated population of 31,000. Most people would regard its cornfield-surrounded towns as the definition of backhome Ohio country. Areas with more tractors than humans wouldn’t be the first ones you would think of to have a raging opioid epidemic. However, these grounds are now prototypical for flourishing abuse.
The ODH data tells us at least 46 people have died of a drug overdose in Hardin County since 2010. At a rate of 20.7 per 100,000 people, the count is quickly rising to the levels of more populous counties like Clark and Scioto.
And Hardin County’s Juvenile Court has seen the brunt of this epidemic in the past five years as mass amounts of opioid-abusive youths have passed through its doors.
County government officials created a Hardin County Juvenile Behavioral Health Court (HCJBHC) in February 2015 to more effectively address the issues causing these youths to reach for their parents’ medicine cabinets. The program has been supported by an Ohio Department of Youth Services Competitive RECLAIM grant and has successfully treated 12 youths and 10 families as of September 2017.
Just like in the rest of the state, however, work still needs to be done.
Dr. Durkin is the official program evaluator of the HCJBHC, and he acknowledges the need to continue finding more beneficial ways to fight this epidemic.
“One of the first kids that was using pain pills in the juvenile court, she died of a [fentanyl-adulterated] heroin overdose,” he remembers. “She left behind a baby and everything. She was fourteen or fifteen when we first found out she was taking pain pills to get high. And then when she graduated from the program, she decided, ‘I’m on my own.’ She moved over to Fort Wayne and died of an overdose.”
Steps have been made to stop opioids at the door, pack up their baggage, and move them out of the neighborhood. Their abuse may have just moved in a little less than a decade ago, but it continues to reach out to new friends and make itself more at home.
Community action like the continuation of the HCJBHC may be needed to keep abuse rates from rising. 12 helped youths may be a relatively low number compared to the thousands of others still addicted in the area, but movement is happening. And it’s happening just in time.
