THE HEROIN TRAGEDY
BY ISHAN VAISH – Heroin use is something mostly associated with poor neighbors and rough circumstances. Use of such a dangerous drug is not supposed to plague affluent communities and is certainly not thought to affect the middle class. While this dated mindset may have once had its merits, heroin usage is at an all-time high, and the boundaries of poverty no longer contain the problem. It has slowly morphed into an epidemic that is ravaging suburbia at an alarming rate.
Georgia’s heroin crisis is centered around a region now dubbed the “Heroin Triangle.” Composed of varying parts of Dekalb, Forsyth, Gwinnett, and Cobb County, the Heroin Triangle has had a 4% increase in the number of heroin-based deaths in the past six years. In fact, this region has had the most substantial increase in the number of heroin-related deaths and yearly overdoses by region in Georgia. In the next ten year, it is expected to have the highest number of heroin-related fatalities per year in the state of Georgia. However, what is perhaps most startling about the heroin triangle is that it is home to some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Georgia, which only a few decades ago were completely free of such problems.
According to an 11Alive Report that talked to numerous physicians and economists, a significant reason behind this alarming trend is the increasing stress placed on students today. In the race to get into a good university, students turn to drugs like heroin to deal with their stress. Students try heroin thinking it will be a temporary relief to their problems. Heroin copies the brain’s chemicals that regulate its sensations of pain and pleasure. While initially students simply feel euphoria, after repeated use, their brain starts to associate this hormone with the brain’s normal state. This forces students to use even more heroin in order to feel the euphoria that helped them initially deal with their stress. This is especially the case in Georgia students commit the majority of reported overdoses in high school or college. Though some schools have started raising heroin awareness, little has been done to combat the problem at this front directly.
Another source of blame comes from the prescription of opiates. In the early 90s, major pharmaceutical companies started pushing opiates to the medical community. Companies marketed them as a new, non-habit forming solution to pain relief. Within the next twenty years, their abuse would widely grow, but this problem would not gain mainstream attention until 2017 by which point hundreds of thousands of people were addicted. In Georgia alone, over 75% of heroin users and the majority of older abusers attribute their heroin addiction to the medication they were required to take to recover from a procedure. People start craving opioids even after a few uses, which forces them to turn to heroin after their prescription runs out. Opioid addiction plays out much like heroin addiction except that prescription opiates are significantly stronger than the average dose of early a heroin user. This means that when these prescription users switch over to heroin, they are using an extremely potent dose. Using larger doses can be extremely expensive and may end up costing the average abuser of thousands of dollars even dragging some into debt.
This sudden rise in heroin abuse has put a tremendous strain on paramedics and first responders. While they receive basic training on dealing with overdoses, they often arrive to find abusers who are delirious, unresponsive and even aggravated. This puts a significant amount of pressure on paramedics, who must act quickly if they wish to save abusers from overdoses. Former Georgia governor Nathan Deal helped to partially alleviate this problem by legalizing naloxone, a drug that reverses heroin and opiate-related overdoses. Moreover, he officially dedicated the week of April 23-29 as National Addiction Treatment Week in Georgia. While Deal’s efforts have brought more attention to the heroin problem in Georgia, it still leaves paramedics underequipped. Though Governor Nathan Deal suggested plans for future funding, only time will tell whether the state under its new leadership, will actually come through with its promises.
It has become clear that Georgia has a heroin problem that needs to be addressed. While Southern culture may encourage brushing such issues under the rug, the increasingly deadly heroin triangle serves as a wakeup call for change. The education system, underequipped paramedics, and the opioid crisis all play a role in this growing problem. Though new initiatives hint at progress in the horizon, change must come at many fronts to successfully combat these problems.