Oxford, Ohio. Despite the beauty in the town, an ongoing issue persists: drug addiction and overdose. Both local enforcement agencies and community organizations work to combat drug abuse and guide individuals to the help they need. Photo by Tara Pulit.
The struggle of drug addiction and overdose in Oxford
By Tara Pulit
Miami University journalism student
The City of Oxford, Ohio, sits in a corner of Butler County, spanning seven and a half miles of land. Oxford is home to a little over 21,000 residents, many of whom attend Miami University.
From an outside perspective, Oxford appears to be free of disturbance. Yet, under the surface, an ongoing problem creeps within the community.
Oxford is not immune to the opioid epidemic that has gripped the nation for the last several years.
“Our overdoses kind of peaked around 2021,” Oxford City Police Chief John Jones says. “They’ve come down since then, but we still are dealing with some fatal overdoses that happen, so it’s something we’re still working on and battling every day.”
Although the city is exposed to far fewer fatalities than larger cities close by, such as Hamilton and Middletown, only about 7,000 year-round residents occupy the area.
According to the local Oxford enforcement agencies, a lot of people who live in the community are unaware that drug use and overdose occur in the town and are uninformed about organizations and support systems that are put in place to guide individuals living with addiction to help.
Rebecca Young is the Director of Student Wellness at Miami and the liaison to the Coalition for a Healthy Community, a group that directs individuals to resources to seek treatment. She says if people aren’t paying attention, it’s hard for them to see the problem.
“I say to people, ‘Do you know how much a refrigerator is right now and who’s having a sale?’ And they’re like no. And they say no because they’re not looking in the market for it, right? So, until you’re looking for a refrigerator, you tend to not seek that information,” Young says.
“So, a lot of our students and people who live in Oxford, you know, maybe they didn’t know we had organizations to help or that we have Narcan offered on campus, but maybe they weren’t necessarily looking for it.”
Along with individuals like Young and other resources offered at Miami, the Oxford City Police Department, the OCPD, works in partnership with the City of Oxford Fire Department to tackle substance use.
These departments most commonly have witnessed fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid drug, and methamphetamine, an addictive stimulate, being used in reported overdoses, affecting mostly people under the age of fifty, according to Jones.
Jones describes the department’s approach in addressing this issue as comprehensive. The department’s main role is enforcement and providing the physical response to a reported overdose. However, Jones says that getting individuals to accept the help they need is the most challenging part.
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink and so you have to have persistence in trying to get someone help,” Jones says. “Oftentimes we get them where we think they’re in a situation where they may be ready to get help for their drug problem, but then, one barrier happens and for whatever reason, they don’t or they relapse six months later.”
The OCPD also employees a social service liaison, Ashley Weddle, to help steer individuals struggling with addiction to the resources available to them.
When an overdose occurs in Oxford, officers are to notify Weddle and provide details including home address, phone number, call name and number, destination post overdose, if Narcan was used and the report number. Weddle will then complete a follow up and refer the individual to Hopeline.
Hopeline is a free service, and a care coordinator will assist the individual and family with navigating what treatment options are available. The Hopeline will also assess if a medical detox is needed and will find the appropriate facility.
If the individual is incarcerated or hospitalized, then the Hopeline will go to the facility and meet with the individual to discuss treatment options. If the individual decides that he or she wants substance abuse treatment, then the Hopeline will find an available treatment center and transport that person. Hopeline will then follow up with the Weddle.
“If I’m out on scene with an officer and we have somebody that’s on meth, or something, for example, and they need to go to rehab to detox, I can call Hopeline and they’ll start making calls, trying to find a facility that’s available,” Weddle says.
“If the person needs a medical detox, they can find that too depending on what they’re going to be withdrawing from. But so, they’ll find it, they’ll figure out what happened, what insurance they’ll take, and then they would literally come and pick them up and take them. It’s really an awesome service.”
Along with the local agency’s protocols that are enforced to address drug abuse, the community often comes together to raise awareness about the issue and offer different opportunities and resources to help individuals.
A national event that the Oxford Police Department, the Coalition for a Healthy Community and the McCullough-Hyde Hospital put on twice a year to combat drug addiction is the medication disposal day. Residents can turn in expired, unused prescriptions or over-the-counter medications to law enforcement officials who will dispose of the contents in a safe, legal and environmentally conscious manner.
Young helped to organize the collection and said that over one hundred pounds of drugs were turned in during the event.
“We take these drugs back for a couple of different reasons. One is certainly to get them out of people’s homes so that there’s less access for those who might be drug seeking,” Young says. “Or for young people who are curious and have access to these drugs, to get them out of their possession. So if we can dispose of them to the DEA, they incinerate them, so it is more safely gotten rid of.”
Fire Department. Photo by Tara Pulit.
On the direct prevention side of drug use, when the police department and fire department receive an emergency call for an overdose, swift action immediately ensues. The police send cruisers, and the fire squad sends an ambulance with a paramedic and shift supervisor ready to respond.
From there, if an individual is evaluated to have overdosed, naloxone, an opioid overdose treatment also known as Narcan, is administered through the form of nasal spray or injection, unless that individual is experiencing cardiac arrest.
The Federal Food and Drug Administration approved the use of naloxone to treat overdoses in 1971, though a precursor was developed as early as as the 1920's.
“If it’s a narcotics overdose, and they’ve not, and it’s not been so long to where they’ve gone into cardiac arrest, Narcan will work every time,” Oxford Fire Chief John Detherage says.
As the popularity of Narcan has increased, the overdose reverser is sold and readily available at locations such as CVS and Kroger.
“I mean, there’s really no side effects to it. And it only works on opiates. So there’s really not a reason, you know, that you can’t have it over the counter,” Detherage says. “But, it’s always been a thing where we can’t carry it unless we’ve got a protocol and a drug license and a medical director so. But they pass it out like candy.”
After a peak of overdoses in 2021 struck Oxford, the reported numbers have since decreased. However, Jones says that this doesn’t mean overdoses still aren’t happening.
“What might be what has caused the overdose numbers to go down is Narcan is being administered, and they’re not even calling police or fire calling 911,” Jones says.
At Miami’s Office of Student Wellness, boxes of Narcan with two units of the nasal spray and fentanyl testing strips with directions on both are readily available and free for students to obtain.
Young says that many students don’t entirely understand the benefits of these resources.
“I think the biggest misconception is that people think that Narcan and the fentanyl testing strips are for people who are using heroin or meth. It’s not necessarily because it’s these other more common substances that are accidentally getting contaminated,” Young says.
“And people don’t know that they’re ingesting it and then they overdose. So I think my biggest concern with that is we’ve seen a contamination of marijuana in Middletown, and we’ve seen the contamination of cocaine at OSU, which was very disturbing and scary, and the same could happen here.”
According to the Ohio Department of Health, its latest drug overdose report details that in 2022, Ohio experienced 4,915 deaths due to unintentional drug overdoses, resulting in a rate of 43.6 deaths per 100,000 people.
This marked a 5% decline from the previous year, which had the highest recorded number of unintentional drug overdose deaths in Ohio’s history, reaching 5,174 deaths.
The majority, 81%, of those overdose deaths involved illicit fentanyl or fentanyl analogs, often in combination with other substances.
As Oxford accounts for a fraction of these deaths in Ohio, the drug scene in the town is only a small glimpse into the broader national crisis of drug overdoses.
