ANYONE WHO HAS ever had a child dealing with drug addiction knows the hell the rollercoaster can put you through. The amalgam of emotions runs the gamut; fear mixed with hope, mixed with frustration, mixed with sadness.
Our son, Evan, was an active kid, always racing everywhere from the minute he could walk. He loved dirt bikes and skateboarding. He was always on the move. Evan was also an old soul and very protective of his younger sister.
Sadly, like so many others, Evan’s road to addiction and an eventual fatal opiate overdose began in high school when he was offered a Percocet pill by a peer. And he was hooked. He got in with some older kids and one girl introduced him to heroin. He was 15.
You name it, Evan, and consequently our family, went through it all. He got kicked out of school. After starting night school, he dropped out of that. He was in and out of detox three of four times. At one point he spent 43 days in the Dartmouth jail. We had to “section” him several times, which means we forced him to go to in-house treatment against his will.
Nothing worked. And, in 2014, at the age of 19, Evan succumbed to heroin. Our daughter was the one to call me.
My wife, Stephanie, and I have since devoted our lives to helping kids stand up to peer pressure and learn how to say no when offered that first pill or hit. We formed a foundation in Evan’s name and in collaboration with a Massachusetts state trooper and drug recognition expert, we educate young people on the dangers of experimenting with drugs and give them coping skills to just say “no.”
Addiction is a powerful disease. And fighting against it is more important than ever.
The drug doing the most harm now is fentanyl, which is up to 50 times stronger than heroin. Every year in Massachusetts alone, opiates claim the lives of more than 2,000 people and 93 percent of those are fentanyl-related. Our nephew is one of those statistics. So is the son of some good friends of ours.
A study out of UCLA this year found that every week in the US an average of 22 young people age 14 to 18 die from drug overdoses, “driven by fentanyl in counterfeit pills.” Think about that.
There are all sorts of ways to help those who are addicted, and all options should be available. Unfortunately, I recently learned that a treatment that is FDA-approved and can revive fentanyl victims, often more effectively than what’s currently in use, is not available to first responders in Massachusetts.
That seems incredible to me given the percentage of opiate doses that are fentanyl-related. Every state has what are called “standing orders,” which dictate which treatments are allowable. Thirty-one other states allow the use of this treatment, but not Massachusetts. It just doesn’t make sense that someone who has overdosed on fentanyl has a better chance of surviving in Alabama or Iowa, where they allow access to all FDA-approved treatments, than they do in this state. This treatment could have saved some lives and can do so in the future.
It’s my sincere hope that Massachusetts will update its standing orders to include this treatment. Our first responders need to have access to all available approved treatments. The cost of not having use of every tool in the kit is far too high. We can’t afford to keep losing thousands of loved ones every year.
John Greene is a telecommunications technician for Local 103. He is the founder of the Evan G Foundation to help fight substance abuse.
The post First responders in Mass. should have access to fentanyl treatment appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.