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Jewish Community Board of Akron hosts seminar on heroin addiction.
NATALIE PEACOCK
Legal News Reporter
Published: November 9, 2015
While all eyes over the past year focused on the issue of legalized marijuana in Ohio, The Jewish Community Board of Akron and its Community Relations Council held a seminar for legal and medical professionals on the drug war being waged and lost against heroin.
Joseph Pinjuh, assistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Ohio, spoke at the Schultz Campus for Jewish Life.
“Every day we pick up the paper and we read about war, don’t we?” Pinjuh said. “We pay a lot of attention to whatever war du jour is in the paper. But there’s a war that’s been raging, it’s the longest war fought by the United States. It’s the most costly war fought by the United States. It’s the war on drugs.”
Barberton Municipal Court Judge David Fish spoke about his experiences witnessing the effects of this epidemic in his courtroom.
“I’m here to tell you that everything you are hearing and seeing on the news actually understates what we are seeing,” Judge Fish said. “It used to be with heroin addicts, you could help them, hope they get treatment. Now they’re just dying right under our noses. We see it in Green, Copley, Barberton and the Portage Lakes. It crosses all socio-economic levels. Don’t think that it’s not going to touch your lives in some way and as a matter of fact I’m sure it has.”
Pinjuh said this country is losing the war on drugs. He traced the spread of heroin addiction to abuse of prescription drugs.
“You can’t even begin to talk about the heroin epidemic in this country,” he said, “without first discussing the prescription drug problem in this country.”
Pinjuh said the problem started when pain became the fifth vital sign. In a forum discussing the problem at the Cleveland Clinic, Pinjuh said medical professionals shared why patients get prescriptions for painkillers so easily.
“One brave doctor raised his hand and said ‘You’re not going to like this but here’s the truth,’” Pinjuh said. “’We’re getting graded by patients about how good they feel and if they don’t get their drugs and they have a little pain and we get a bad grade, we lose money. And if we lose money, we lose jobs and everything else. ‘”
Other doctors said they are pressured by drug companies to prescribe larger amounts of painkillers. A nurse pointed out that insurance companies don’t want to pay for multiple doctor visits so doctors write larger prescriptions to cover longer recovery periods.
Pinjuh conceded that some small victories have happened to slow down the supply of painkillers. Thanks to efforts by the Drug Enforcement Agency and some drug companies, Oxycontin was reformulated to make users unable to snort it.
“So now we’ve really shrunk the availability of prescription drugs,” Pinjuh said. “We’re doing all this continuing education with the medical community. They’re not prescribing the way that they had done. But what did we treat? We have a whole segment of society that really has a disease, that really are addicted. They need those pills.”
Pinjuh urged the audience to go home and see what is in the medicine cabinet and clean it out. Tragically, he said, the drug that has replaced all of those prescription painkillers is heroin.
“Today’s heroin is totally different than the stuff of the 1960s and early 1970s,” he said. “You can snort this heroin and because of that it has opened it up to a population that you would have never thought would be involved with it.”
People who never would have considered shooting up a drug with a needle are more willing to snort heroin -- until they discover that the snorting effect wears off and they eventually have to shoot it.
“Now this drug is the number one drug threat in the state of Ohio and it’s the number one drug threat in the United States,” he said. “By and large, it is controlled by the Mexican cartels and they know our hunger for this drug and do a damn good job of getting it into the country.”
Pinjuh says that the demand for heroin is so great that when they are monitoring drug dealers, they find that their advice to other dealers is to not sell cocaine or crack because heroin is what everyone wants.
According to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office, heroin overdose related deaths have continued to go up every year. In 2011 there were 115 overdose deaths. In 2015, there are already 185 overdose deaths from heroin in Cuyahoga County.
“I’ll give you a really horrific stat,” Pinjuh said. “In 2013, 2014 and 2015, more people have died of a heroin overdose in Cuyahoga County than in those three years in Los Angeles County. LA County is about 10 times the size of Cuyahoga County. ”
The Cleveland community is fighting back. In November 2013, there was a historic Heroin Summit at the Cleveland Clinic. More than 750 people from the legal, medical, law enforcement, government and media outlets came together to strategize how to address the problem. They came up with a community action plan that addresses the heroin epidemic through education, prevention, legislation, treatment and law enforcement.
“We have a heroin action committee that meets quarterly with all these folks coming together from all these different areas to try and help us get a handle on this problem,” Pinjuh said.
While Pinjuh doesn’t think we can arrest our way out of the problem, stricter sentencing for serious drug dealing is now being utilized.
“Some people need to be warehoused for our society to be free.”
Pinjuh said that if people want to be part of the solution they should educate themselves and their kids.
“Clean our your medicine cabinets,” he said. “Educate yourself and know the facts.”