Bartholomew County Coroner Clayton Nolting has a dire warning concerning the deadly toll of fentanyl in our community.
“If we keep up at this rate, we can expect to hit 50” overdose deaths in 2022, Nolting told The Republic’s Andy East last week. That would shatter the latest record number of overdose deaths in the county — 33 last year. Like a broken record, our local drug overdose deaths keep rising year after year after year, but what officials are seeing now is off the charts.
Cheaper, 50 times as potent and deadlier than heroin, the synthetic opioid fentanyl is “everywhere,” Sheriff Matt Meyers said in a news release earlier this month.
“I was hoping it would get better but it isn’t,” said Myers. “It is important that people know what they are dealing with.”
What they are dealing with is the deadly prospect that any street drug they purchase may be laced with fentanyl. And it’s not just cocaine and meth that may be delivering a fatal high. As East reported, “drug traffickers are mass producing fentanyl in clandestine labs using ingredients largely made in China and have started churning out fentanyl pills under the guise of prescription medications, including Percocet, Adderall, Xanax, oxycodone, among others.”
The surge in deaths is happening across the country, and disturbingly, the teen overdose rate is skyrocketing. According to a study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 954 adolescents died from drug overdoses in 2020, a 94% increase over 2019. And the trend going forward shows overdose deaths continuing to increase.
“It appears that the rise in deaths was fueled not by greater numbers of teens using drugs — substance use in this age group actually went down during the pandemic, but by use of dangerous and highly potent forms of fentanyl,” NPR reported. “The study found that fentanyl-related deaths increased from 253 in 2019 to 680 the following year. And in 2021, 77% of all teen overdose deaths involved fentanyl.”
The NPR report said most of those deaths involved teens who thought they were taking a pill such as Vicodin, OxyContin or hydrocodone, but the illicit pills they had obtained turned out to have been laced with fentanyl.
It’s important for anyone with a substance abuse problem, and their families and friends, to realize how deadly serious this is. Anyone who buy drugs on the street or illicitly online right now must realize that they could be killing themselves.
Never has there been a more urgent time for people with substance abuse disorder to seek help. “We have tons of resources in this county,” Nolting advised people struggling with substance abuse. “Utilize them before I have to get involved in my official capacity.”
“I want people and businesses in Bartholomew County to succeed,” Myers said. “This includes making sure family, friends and employees are OK and that we let them know they are important and making sure they get help if they need it.”
If you or a loved one needs help and don’t know where to turn, you can get connected to treatment resources by calling the alcohol and drug abuse treatment hotline at 800-662 HELP (4375). You can also go to findtreatment.gov to locate treatment options.
Doing so could be a real life-saver.
