By: Caroline Freeman On April 17th it was revealed that legendary rock star Prince’s 2016 death had been caused by a fatal opioid overdose. News agencies around the world reported that the star had been obtaining a prescription for oxycodone, a common prescription painkiller, under a friend’s name. However, Prince actually overdosed on fentanyl, a drug whose mention is often accompanied by the detail that it’s 50 times more powerful than morphine or heroin. It’s a strange reality that a person who seemed so larger than life was taken by an ailment that’s becoming increasingly common among everyday Americans.
Prince is not the first celebrity to have ever died of an overdose and he unfortunately won’t be the last. But the drug that killed him, fentanyl, has become a huge problem in the United States, including here in Centre County. Fentanyl is the drug most responsible for overdose deaths in Centre County, and the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that between 2014 and 2015 the mention of fentanyl on county toxicology reports increased by 160%. Addictions to powerful substances like fentanyl often start innocently enough; a person is prescribed a painkiller by their doctor for a chronic pain issue but soon find their use of the drug spiraling out of control. Half of intravenous heroin users began their dependence on opiates with an addiction to a prescription painkiller like oxycodone or Vicodin. It's often reported that everyone knows a person who has been affected by opiate addiction. It’s easy to think that you don’t know anyone, but it can be such a hidden illness that one can never really know if someone has a problem until it’s too late. But even if you don’t personally know someone who struggles with an opiate addiction, your community may be struggling more than you know. In the process of researching my issue brief on the opiate epidemic, I learned a shocking detail about my mom’s hometown and the place most of my extended family lives My mom is from Wilmington, NC, a beach town that all my grandparents and two of my aunts call home. I’ve been going to Wilmington since I was a newborn. I was shocked when I learned that Wilmington is the worst city in the nation for opiate abuse. Not New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, but the quaint beach town that holds so much of my family history. The study that reported this determined that Wilmington has an opiate abuse rate that is greater than 11.6%. The city has a population of around 112,000 according to the US Census. By using just the 11.6% figure, this study means that nearly 13,000 people in the city are opiate abusers. Local law enforcement says that the amount of opiates they’re seizing each year has increased dramatically. I couldn’t believe that a town that has always seemed so pleasant to me has such a serious problem with addiction. And the surprises don’t end there. While states like West Virginia have had their issues with opiate addiction well publicized, other states may surprise you. For example, New Hampshire and Rhode Island are the second and fifth worst states in the nation for opiate-related deaths respectively. The opiate problem in New Hampshire was even mentioned on the campaign trail last year, when then-candidate President Trump mentioned how bad New Hampshire’s problem is. “ [T]hey said the biggest single problem they have up here is heroin. And I said ‘how does heroin work with these beautiful lakes, and trees and all of the beautiful…?’ It doesn’t,” Trump said, mentioning the natural beauty that graces the state and contrasting it with the often ugly face of addiction. But as New Hampshire’s issue and Prince’s death tell us, opiate addiction does not discriminate. It can target the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the sick and the healthy. It’s believed that 91 Americans die every day from opiate use. 10 alone die in Pennsylvania every day. Battling the opiate epidemic is a complex problem that pits statistics from the experts regarding the crisis against the social stigma many Americans hold about addicts. Too often they are seen as weak or lazy and are perceived as the dregs of society. But the fact is many addicts start out the same way: a person in pain goes to their doctor for help alleviating it. These people can be anybody you know, but because of how powerful opiates are it can be extraordinarily difficult to fight developing a dependency, no matter how “upstanding” of a citizen the person appears to be. The effects of opiates can be strong that withdrawal may be more miserable than any pain the person was experiencing prior to receiving their prescription. While it can be difficult to remove oneself from a highly negative perception of drug addiction after years of extreme anti-drug use PSA’s, the truth is judgement won’t help anybody get clean. Many people want to be sober, but opiates hold such a grip over the brain it can be extraordinarily difficult to get there. If we as a society can begin supporting people struggling instead of writing them off, we can begin the emotional foundation needed to help addicts recover and begin to turn the tide of the opiate epidemic.
0 Comments
By: Caroline Freeman On February 25th, I attended a deliberation addressing the issue of post-football riots at Penn State. I wanted to participate in this discussion because I’ve been disturbed by the conduct of some students after the Ohio State and Big Ten Championship victories. While I did go down to see the riots following the Big Ten Championship game, I left once the crowd began getting destructive because I didn’t want to be associated anymore with the actions of people who thought it appropriate to destroy our community. It’s sad that local police have to be called in en masse late at night on a weekend to prevent drunken students from tearing down lampposts.
The first approach that the group discussed was the potential of creating an alternative celebration for students that could be better controlled after major games. This could take the form of a celebration in Beaver Stadium immediately following the game or outside the stadium in State College or on campus. The drawbacks of an in stadium celebration come from the fact that football games are already quite long and students are usually restless to leave once the game clock hits zero. Most students normally stay just long enough for the Alma Mater to be sung and head out from there. In addition, these kinds of celebrations would be hard to plan because the result of football games are never predetermined; the Ohio State riot only happened because we were expected to get destroyed in that game and made a miraculous comeback. Time and funding would be spent on a celebration that students likely wouldn’t attend because the team had just lost. The second approach that was discussed was that of increased enforcement. During the riots police tend to deploy pepper spray to disperse the crowd, but many students see being pepper sprayed as a badge of honor. While the facilitators presented the ideas of harsher police enforcement, the group came to the conclusion that this would only damage the relationship between local law enforcement and the students. I think the best solution would be to have police already present downtown after the game, so if the students took to the streets they could celebrate for a bit but the police would already be on hand to make sure things didn’t turn destructive. Another attendee suggested making university penalties for rioting, one idea that was brought up was banning a student from attending the rest of the games in that particular season if they’re caught being destructive during a riot. The third approach was to change the culture surrounding the riots at Penn State. It was suggested that club sports and other organizations could encourage their members to not participate in riots and create a running theme of “we’re _____ organization and we don’t do that.” The group agreed that targeting riot culture could not be done without also targeting alcohol consumption on Penn State’s campus. When at the riots, it’s easy to see how many people are acting in ways that are heavily influenced by how much alcohol they’ve consumed that day. I remember when I was at the Big 10 riot a man was dancing on top of a street lamp, and when I remarked that he was going to fall and seriously hurt himself my friend commented “he doesn’t care, he’s drunk.” We agreed that none of these policies could successfully stand on their own, and that the best combination of approaches would be some mix of approach two and approach three. Riots are in their nature hard to predict, so putting funds into preventing something that wasn’t going to happen to begin with isn’t the best use of university funds. Hopefully some measures will be put in place next season to prevent future riots. Although maybe, if the uphill trajectory of the team continues, wins like that over Ohio State will no longer be seen as “shocking” and cause for riots in the first place. Caroline Freeman On February 25th, I attended a deliberation on poaching and the illegal international trade of animal products. While I primarily went to support a friend, I also knew very little about poaching and what could be done about it outside of increasing enforcement of anti-poaching laws. The deliberation group focused on poaching in Africa and southeast Asia (where poaching occurs and where many of the resources sought after by poachers are traded). Their handouts focused specifically on the poaching of elephants, rhinos, tigers, and pangolins, although pangolins weren’t focused on by the attendees.
The first approach discussed was increased enforcement and how it could be implemented. Enforcement and regulation comes in a variety of forms. In Thailand, setting a precedent of lengthy prison sentences for poachers has helped deter future poaching. Poaching laws vary widely from country to country and not every nation makes poaching carry a sentence of prison time, in Kenya poachers have to pay a fine proportional to the worth of what they’ve poached. Another country (I believe it was Namibia) has involved the local communities in regulating poaching by training community members as rangers in nearby national parks and allowing them to receive the money made from things like tourism and hunting licenses. I think this is a great way of deterring poaching; we discussed how many people are drawn to poaching because they don’t see any other means of making money. If the government gave these people legitimate ways to make money without hurting local wildlife, it can preserve this wildlife for generations to come. The second approach, legalization, surprised me. I did my multimedia project on prostitution last semester, so I know that legalization of a crime in order to protect victims or others involved doesn’t always have the intended effect. However, I could see the benefits of the form of legalization the group discussed. In 2016, the trade of white rhino tusks was legalized, in the hopes that this would promote safe harvesting practices. Rhino husks grow back after three years if harvested safely, so this could potentially be a sustainable way of meeting the demand of places like China, that use the husks for traditional medicine practices, and protecting the animals themselves. Apparently 33% of rhinos in South Africa are owned by private citizens, who campaigned for legalization in the first place. Obviously this campaign is too new to truly know its impact, but hopefully the private owners lobbied for legalization out of compassion for the animals they own, and not as a corrupt means of inhumanely benefiting off their property. The final solution was education and outreach in the local communities, both to teach about the harms of poaching and to restructure the local perception of targeted animals. We discussed how western communities look at animals like elephants and tigers as exotic and cool, but locals sharing the same environment as these animals, especially tigers, may interpret them as a threat and not care about their endangerment. I think restructuring of the public mindset is going to be vital to create a long-term solution for poaching, but westerners need to be careful. Locals would resent foreigners coming in and being condescending about a presumed lack of education or care for local ecosystems. Instead, the group thought it would be prudent that more openminded locals be trained to protect local animals and be the primary educators on poaching, as others would be more receptive to their neighbors’ concerns than those of people who aren’t actually from these countries. I went into this deliberation not knowing much about poaching but I learned a lot about the concerns surrounding this environmental issue. I hope to become more informed in the future. |
Categories
All
|