The CEO of
Project Lazarus, Fred Brason II, spoke with members of the
Coalition for a Safe and Drug-Free Clay County Monday to discuss the
rapidly growing drug overdose problem in Western North Carolina.
“We didn’t get into it overnight, we’re not going to get out of it
overnight,” he said.
Of the sixteen North Carolina counties with the highest unintentional
and undetermined intent poisoning death rates, ten were in the mountain
region. Five were in the piedmont and only one county in the costal
region had a high death rate.
“Our problems are worse than their problems and yet where does most
of the money get funneled to?” Brason said. “I’ve rattled cages in
Washington D.C. and I’ve rattled cages in Raleigh and I will continue to
do so [until] we get some eyes focused on us.”
Steve Hudson, the chairperson of Coalition for a Safe and Drug-Free
Clay County, expressed his frustration with government assistance.
“If Washington won’t come to us, we’re going to Washington,” he said.
“We sent 58 certified letters to our state legislator trying to get help
regionally and you know how many responses we got? Zero. I’m a Vietnam
veteran, volunteer, stayed over there 28 months, because I believe in my
country and what it stands for… and not one response.”
Brason stressed that the solution was on the local level, not the
national level.
“Don’t look to Washington and don’t look to Raleigh to be the end all
because it’s not going to be,” he said. “It’s got to happen here. It’s
got to happen where the rubber meets the road, where the community can
make a difference. Because Raleigh’s not going to write a check right
now. There’s nothing to write it on.”
Across the state death rates for unintentional and undetermined
intent poisonings per 100,000 residents have risen from 3.5 deaths in
1999 to 11.5 in 2008.
Sheriff Joe Shook said he requires autopsies of anyone who dies alone
or is under 60.
“It costs the county a thousand dollars,” he said. “But then we know
exactly what happened to that person.”
The latest data available states that 45.4 percent of all drugs
dispensed in North Carolina are narcotics.
“Clay County is not one of the worst but is in the upper echelon,”
Brason said, noting that the effort against substance abuse must be
fought across county lines. “If we don’t do this regionally, we’re
really just spinning our wheels.”
Shook said that drug abuse is currently the biggest problem facing
Clay County.
“This problem will never be fixed until we get our parents or
grandparents to admit, ‘My child has a problem,’” he said. “Sometimes
your child is better off in jail.”
Brason said that 4,146,484 prescriptions for Hydrocodone were written
in North Carolina last year. That’s number is only slightly less than
half of the state’s 9 million population.
Data showed that Cherokee County dispensed more outpatient
prescriptions for controlled substances in 2008 than any other county in
the state except for Wilkes. Brason said there was a direct correlation
between more prescriptions and higher death rates.
“We can’t say, ‘you must dispense less,’ but we do need more
education,” he said.
In Wilkes County, where Brason began Project Lazarus, accidental
poisonings are recorded daily due to frequency. In contrast, Clay
County’s 2009 poisonings would not be databased until this August,
Brason said.
The county’s unintentional drug overdose deaths has almost
reached 8 out of 100,000. Brason said that the problem causes enough
deaths to be classified as an epidemic by the Center for Disease
Control.
“It seems like substance abuse has gone up since the decline of the
economy,” Clay County Schools resource officer Tony Ellis said.
Brason noted that both crime and drug abuse have both surged since
the recession began.
“We’ve got people in [Western NC] who died because they did not
listen to their doctor and they took their pain medication incorrectly,”
he said.
From 1999 to 2003 the entire state experienced a 134 percent increase
in accidental poisonings.
Three-fourths of the drugs that are being misused in our
communities today are either bought, stolen or shared from family or
friends, Brason said. Fifty-six percent are free from friends and
relatives while 15 percent were stolen or bought from friends and
relatives.
“The schools didn’t create the problem but it’s showing up on their
doorstep, so they have to deal with the issue,” he said.
Brason said he warns pastors about the plight of drug abuse in the
faith community as well.
“If you have 100 people in your congregation I guarantee you there’s
addiction in there,” he said.
Hudson said he didn’t know how to increase awareness across the
board.
“I can’t even wake up the preachers here to get them together,” he
said. “This is a huge problem.”
More than 60 percent of people who try drugs for the first time do so
because they’re curious, Brason said. Therefore, he said the first step
is to increase community awareness.
While teaching continuing medical education in a local hospital,
Brason said he asked the physicians if they knew where to send a patient
if a substance abuse issue exists.
“Not one hand went up among the doctors that were there. Not
one,” he said. “If doctors find a patient who has a substance abuse
issue, you know what they do? Fire them…. So where does that send
them? It sends them onto the street.”
Hudson said he had multiple bottles of pain medicine left over in
his medicine cabinet after his surgeries.
“Son of a gun, my wife went to clean it out the other day and I
didn’t have one pill left,” he said. “Somebody had taken every pain
pill… I’m looking at [everybody who's ever been in my house] like a
suspect. Who took the doggone pills?”
Clay County doesn’t have the money to pay someone to coordinate the
effort against drug abuse, Hudson said.
“Appalachia is going to be the first to solve the problems where
other communities haven’t been able to,” Brason said. “My agenda is that
we fix the problem in Western North Carolina… My agenda is to save
lives.”