Can Louisiana’s Opioid Crisis in Louisiana Be Solved?
For decades, opioid abuse, addiction and overdose have been massive issues across the United States, and South Louisiana has been hit harder than most places. Almost everyone who lives near New Orleans seems to know someone who has struggled with addiction or someone who has died as a result of drug abuse. In recent years, the synthetic opioid Fentanyl has become particularly problematic.
This issue is one that has plagued the people of South Louisiana for years. Many people, even those who have been directly affected by the loss of loved ones, continue to abuse opioids. Lauren Hunt, whose brother Cameron died of a Fentanyl overdose in September of 2016, said she believes many factors are to blame for the death of her brother and those like him.
“It’s very cultural,” she said. “New Orleans just has such an intense party culture and an intense drug culture and an intense alcohol culture. You can’t get away from it because it’s what people came here for.” Hunt said that her brother had gotten into drug use at first from going to festivals with people who were using drugs, and he spiraled out of control from there.
She continued by saying, “Even people who don’t do drugs regularly, they would say its ok to do them at a concert or a festival or the kind of environment you can find in New Orleans literally any time.” Over a hundred festivals are hosted in New Orleans every year, in addition to concerts, parties and other potential venues in which drug abuse breeds.
Hunt also suggested that social media and the constant connectedness of modern society compound the problem. “Social media is great if you’re using it to do great things, but if you’re doing drugs it can be a way to contact other people who are doing drugs.”
This sentiment was echoed by an article published by the Acadiana Treatment Center. According to the article, there are places online through which people can buy drugs directly from those manufacturing them. Additionally, because Fentanyl is manufactured in a lab setting as opposed to being created from plant-based products, it is much easier and faster to manufacture and distribute than other similar drugs.
“It’s all just so much,” Hunt said. “People are overdosing so much. People are becoming addicts and going to rehab and manifesting these signs of addiction so often that it’s like whatever. You can’t even pay attention to it. It’s hard for it to remain as shocking and scary as it should be.” She asserted that, because people are unable to escape seeing drug culture all around them, it makes them more likely to be drawn in by it, even when people are dying.
One anonymous source said, “It’s like, how close does someone have to be, you know? I lost a close family member to overdose. I lost a friend from high school, too. I still went out and got high. I remember when [my friend] overdosed, all of us were shocked, and we stopped for maybe a month. But at the next festival we went right back to doing what we’d been doing before.”
“And you can’t go to rehab,” the source continued. “There’s this stigma to being an addict even though like everyone is an addict. As soon as you go to rehab people get defensive. When you admit you have a problem, it suddenly makes everyone else realize they have a problem too, and they don’t like that.”
Additionally, the source cited an inability for many who are coping with addiction to afford rehab, as well as the questionable practices of some rehab centers. “[My friend] went to a rehab center and kind of the cornerstone of their program was that addiction wasn’t your fault. You were born an addict, it was in your genes, so nothing about it was really on you. But that doesn’t help. Because if it’s not your fault you’ll keep using and using until you kill yourself, because, hey, it’s not my fault if I die, right?”
“I was very lucky,” they went on to say later, adding, “I had the resources and the support to be able to go to a treatment center. A lot of people can’t do that. A lot of people in Louisiana are really poor and it’s the poor people who are getting hit the hardest by this.”
Raye Ann Ledbetter, a scribe working with ScribeAmerica, said that opioid abuse has caused another serious issue within the medical community aside from hospitals having to help people who are addicted or who have overdosed. “Because of people abusing [opioids], we have to regulate them a lot more carefully,” she explained, “but that means it’s also a lot harder for the people who actually need this stuff for medical reasons to get it.”
Bloom Legal, in a page from their website, suggests that doctors and pharmacists should also share a large part of the blame for this crisis, as they have overprescribed opioids for the last twenty years, increasing their availability to the public and the risk of addiction in their patients. Although the issue of over-prescription has been curbed in recent years, the lasting effects left behind by this process are still affecting the medical community, as well as the nation as a whole.
Bloom Legal also asserts that over 600,000 people have died from opioid overdose in the last ten years. In 2016 there were more deaths in New Orleans attributed to drug overdoes than murder for the first time ever.
Jon Daily, who works with the District Attorney in Baton Rouge, says they are working to solve this issue. He stated that the District Attorney’s office has been gathering information on this growing epidemic for some time, and they are nearing a point where they will be able to take action to combat this problem.
“We’re gathering police reports, coroner reports, and social network analysis,” Daily said. “We’re trying to find the connection between drug dealers and the victims.” He continued by saying that Louisiana has been harder hit than most states, and the New Orleans area has been specifically affected, because most of the drugs that are causing these problems are not being manufactured in the United States.
“Louisiana has become a port, a doorway for cartels to smuggle these substances in,” Daily continued, going on to say, “A lot of this stuff is being purchased off of the black market or the dark web.”
Daily explained that fentanyl specifically has become a problem because of its potency when compared to other drugs, but also because many people are purchasing fentanyl without realizing it.
Daily also said, “Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, so drug dealers can increase their profits a lot by mixing their heroin with fentanyl, but that gets really dangerous, you know? And they’re mixing cocaine with fentanyl, or pressing it into pills to look like xanax, so people don’t even realize what they’re getting.”
“Deaths caused by fentanyl have surpassed gun deaths, car deaths, HIV deaths,” Daily continued, adding, “The CDC had to lower the average life expectancy for Americans because of the number of people that are dying.”
He also explained that many people who could be saved are dying because people around them are scared to call emergency services when they overdose, fearing the legal repercussions.
“Lots of prosecutors are trying to make homicide cases over overdose deaths,” Daily said. “They were just going after drug dealers, but sometimes they go after friends and family too, people are scared to call 911.” The District Attorney’s office is trying to make sure people know that, in Louisiana, the Good Samaritan law insures immunity if you call 911 for public assistance. “We’re trying to save lives,” Daily said, “not build cases.”
Most importantly, Daily explained that the District Attorney’s approach will be to help addicts find support and rehabilitation rather than trying to incarcerate them. “Instead of running them through court, we’re trying to get addicts into rehab, to get them help,” he explained.
He spoke of the many rehabilitation centers available in the Baton Rouge area, referring to the city as a “recovery Mecca.” Finally, Daily concluded, “Our approach is more diversion, less incarceration.”
