OPIOID CRISIS: How Did Connecticut Get Here?

(Editor’s Note: In the span of a few years, it has gone from back page to Page 1, lead story news. It’s the biggest story on websites, in newspapers and television stations in the state of Connecticut. The opioid crisis that has gripped the state is killing three people a day – many of them young, leaving parents and families grieving and grasping for answers. Over the next four Sundays, Connecticut Patch will dig deep – starting with when and how the substance abuse problem first started, how it grew to a crisis, and what’s being done, now, to try and stop it.)

By Jack Kramer, Patch Correspondent

You have to be living under a rock to not know that we have an opioid crisis not only in Connecticut, but across the entire country.

But just how did this crisis start. There is a general consensus in the medical community that the seed for the crisis started three decades ago when the World Health Organization identified "inadequate treatment for pain a serious public health concern" and encouraged physicians to prescribe opioid analgesics for cancer patients.

The American Pain Society went further in 1995, recommending that pain be treated as the "fifth vital sign," according to the 2003 report to Congress by the U.S. General Accounting Office.

In addition to the protocol of checking body temperature, pulse rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure, doctors began asking patients to rate their pain on a scale of one to 10.

Soon it became common to use the painkillers to treat not just cancer pain, but pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis, chronic back problems and osteoarthritis.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when a new report released showed that accidental drug intoxications caused 917 deaths in Connecticut in 2016, an increase of 188, or 25 percent, over those killed by drugs a year earlier, according to a new report issued by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

See also: Connecticut Mom Pens Heartbreaking Note About Losing Her Son to Drug Overdose

Additionally, Dr. James Gill, the state’s chief medical examiner, said deaths involving the powerful synthetic drug fentanyl, 479, increased by 155 percent over that same period. Fentanyl deaths nearly matched the number of heroin deaths, 504, in 2016.

Accidental drug intoxication deaths in the state over the past five years have spiked each year, starting with 357 in 2012; 495 in 2013; 568 in 2014; 729 in 2015; to 917 last year. There were more than 2.5 times as many deaths in 2016 than there were in 2012.

See also: CT Heroin Epidemic: Interactive Map Of Deaths By Town

The fentanyl death toll spike has caught everyone’s attention.

Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Dayton said the strength of fentanyl is why it kills.

“Fentanyl is much ... stronger than heroin. Two milligrams can kill you. It is 50 times stronger than heroin — so strong that two pills can kill you.’

That also means, Dayton continued, that it costs less, since it doesn’t take as much of a dose as heroin or other drugs for users to get high.

Fentanyl is a potent, synthetic opioid pain medication, with a rapid onset and short duration of action. In the mid-1990s, fentanyl was introduced for palliative use with the fentanyl patch, followed in the next decade by the introduction of the fentanyl lollipop, dissolving tablets, and sublingual spray which resorbed through the skin inside the mouth.

See also: New Haven Mass Overdoses Likely due to Pure Fentanyl: Officials

Dayton said 2.3 million teenagers, or, she said, 9.4 percent of all teens, currently use illegal drugs or opiates in the country.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has rolled out several initiatives to try and combat the substance abuse crisis in Connecticut the past few years. The governor often refers to the “cheap” cost of drugs and the “increased strength” of those drugs as part of the problem that is killing Connecticut’s young.

While hundreds, perhaps thousands of different initiatives have been rolled out in Connecticut and across the country to try and beat back this growing epidemic, in a recent interview someone who seen the impact up close offered the simplest, and least expensive solution to cut the problem off at its knees.

Jodi Switalski, a former violent felony assistant prosecutor, child protection worker, and district court judge in Michigan with 25-plus years fighting prescription substance abuse, said this: “If I had one, single suggestion to make to anyone in Connecticut or anyone in the country for that matter trying to keep their kids from becoming addicted, I’d tell them to buy a lock box safe and put all their prescription pills and cough syrup in it.”