It\u2019s been said time and time again after forums, panels and public meetings held in communities across the country over the past dozen-odd years: if we could talk our way out of the nation\u2019s opioid crisis, it would have been over a decade ago.<\/p>\n
An upcoming opioid town hall event at Western Carolina University organized as part of the Jackson County Community Foundation\u2019s opioid awareness month, however, seeks to ensure that participants \u2014 academics, law enforcement, legislators and members of the public \u2014 will not only talk the talk, but will also walk the walk.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom the very first stages of planning this project, the single most important guiding principle for us was to move towards actionable next steps to improve the situation,\u201d said Dr. Edward J. Lopez, founding director of WCU\u2019s Center for the Study of Free Enterprise. \u201cTo phrase that in the negative, the most important guiding principle is, we\u2019re not going to have another event where we talk about it and then just go home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, the Oct. 3 event is about laying the foundation for actionable steps that can be implemented in the near term.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opioid and addiction crisis are national problems and we\u2019re feeling it hard in the western counties, like a lot of rural places are,\u201d said Lopez, who also serves as WCU\u2019s BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism. \u201cSince the university is one of the leading organizations in Western North Carolina, and also because we have a lot of expertise in the hallways here on this topic, I think it\u2019s actually a very natural thing for the university to be stepping up and offering its resources and expertise to help alleviate the crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in May, representatives from the Jackson County Community Foundation approached Jackson County commissioners, telling them they\u2019d like to hold an opioid awareness campaign.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought it was a good thing,\u201d said Brian McMahan, chairman of the Jackson County Board of Commissioners. \u201cIt\u2019s a continuation of some work that\u2019s been in progress. Commissioners held a forum, a year and a half ago or two years ago now, in which we tried to educate elected leaders and business leaders, community leaders and our counties about opioids and trying to break down the stigma that goes with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Presenting for the JCCF were President Ken Torok, Board member Susan Belcher \u2014 wife of the late David Belcher, WCU\u2019s immediate past chancellor \u2014 and Dr. Patrick McGuire, who said that a recent survey indicated 47 percent of Jackson residents had been negatively affected by addiction, and 17 percent of Jackson residents had used opioids in the last year, with or without a prescription.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a shock,\u201d McMahan said. \u201cIt just shows how dire the situation is, and that it needs some attention and awareness, and that\u2019s why we wholeheartedly embraced this campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
In July, commissioners approved $8,630 for the campaign, and earlier this month, they passed a resolution declaring September \u201cJackson County opioid awareness month.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the startling points outlined in the resolution are that more people die from drug overdoses than from car crashes, and that in 2017 there were 29 Jackson County residents rushed to the emergency room due to opioid overdoses. Seven others died.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Jackson County Community Foundation came to us and proposed what ultimately became this awareness campaign capped off by a town hall,\u201d said Lopez.<\/p>\n
Lopez, though, is an economist by trade \u2014 not a cop, not a doctor, not an elected official \u2014 but as it turns out, the subject of opioid addiction falls squarely under his purview.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Center for the Study of Free Enterprise specifically has a mission to provide research and thought leadership on issues that affect economic development in the region,\u201d he said. \u201cThe tie-in there is both workforce, because the addiction crisis is a workforce problem, but also more broadly the Center\u2019s mission is to study the system of free enterprise and its role in a flourishing society. The addiction crisis is keeping people from flourishing.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Some have argued that the free enterprise system may have indeed played a role in the opioid crisis spreading like wildfire over the past decade; pharmaceutical companies overproduced and physicians overprescribed opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone, according to data released by The Washington Post in July.<\/p>\n From 2006 to 2012, more than 76 billion pills were manufactured and distributed in the United States, enough to give every person in the country exactly 230 of them.<\/p>\n Lopez says it\u2019s not as much about free enterprise as it is about the blind trust in academic unanimity that had everyone thinking the pills were completely safe.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s not a more regulated, government-controlled, non-capitalist system that affects people\u2019s wellbeing more than healthcare. Healthcare is the farthest we have from a capitalist system in the United States, so we have to look elsewhere,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to be wary of scientific consensus sometimes. It is an under-reported and underappreciated reality that the pain management community for almost a generation informed us all that it was their scientific consensus that the treatment of chronic pain using opioids was non-addictive. That turned out to be absolutely wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s almost nowhere in the United States that hasn\u2019t been ravaged by the opioid crisis but data presented by The Post shows that in contrast to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, which primarily affected poor African-Americans in the nation\u2019s inner cities, the opioid epidemic disproportionately affects poor, rural whites.<\/p>\n When WCU\u2019s town hall convenes, one of the first people attendees will hear from is well-versed in that paradigm \u2014 Republican U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s a very prominent person on the national scene with this crisis,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cPartly, that\u2019s because of her constituents in West Virginia.\u201d<\/p>\n West Virginia is one of the poorest, whitest, most rural states in the U.S., and according to maps generated from The Post\u2019s data set, it\u2019s practically ground zero for the opioid crisis.<\/p>\n Mingo County, in the southwestern part of the state, received the most oxycodone and hydrocodone pills per capita from 2006 through 2012 \u2014 more than 38 million of them, for a population of about 24,000 people.<\/p>\n In North Carolina, Jackson County, home to WCU, fared much better than most counties with 11.7 million pills for 42,000 people but it nevertheless remains part of a clearly visible \u201copioid belt\u201d of counties stretching through central and southern Appalachia from northern Alabama up into Georgia, Western North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re affected by it just as badly, if not more so than we are here in Western North Carolina,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cSen. Capito also has brought the rubber to the road and has been influential with federal legislative steps that have been taken.\u201d<\/p>\n Capito, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, recently corralled more than $35 million in funds to help her home state combat the opioid crisis, but her website is saturated with press releases that show she\u2019s been a leader on this issue in Washington for several years.<\/p>\n Locally, there have been few legislators more active on that same front than Sen. Jim Davis, R-Franklin, whose seven-county western district includes some of North Carolina\u2019s hardest hit.<\/p>\n \u201cWe couldn\u2019t be more pleased to have the senator come in and cap it off with his closing keynote,\u2019 said Lopez. \u201cI think he\u2019s going to tell a little bit of his story and why he prioritized this issue, and then he\u2019s going to review the three major pieces of legislation that have come out of Raleigh on it in the past few years, all in which he had a hand in.\u201d<\/p>\n Two of the more recent are the STOP Act, which tightens prescribing procedures, and the Opioid Epidemic Response Act, which legalized syringe exchanges and test strips that can reveal the presence of deadly fentanyl in a user\u2019s opioid supply.<\/p>\n Law enforcement professionals have been saying for years that it\u2019s not possible to incarcerate our way out of the opioid crisis, much as others in the public sphere have opined that it\u2019s not possible to talk our way out of it. Without disrespecting the efforts of elected officials like Davis, Capito and countless others, Lopez doesn\u2019t think the opioid crisis can be legislated out of existence, either.<\/p>\n \u201cLegislative solutions in this crisis are inherently limited. It\u2019s true that legislation can put tighter restrictions on the distribution of addictive substances, but that\u2019s only going to be one part of many, in the solution to this crisis,\u201d he said. \u201cI think what\u2019s going to really carry the burden in improving the situation is on-the-ground, grassroots, bottom-up types of efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n Describing those efforts during the town hall will be two separate panels of experts that will bring a diverse array of expertise to the conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt starts with the idea that there\u2019s not going to be a single solution that works in every place and time,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cThe solutions will be contextual and because of that, we need to have some experimentation. One type of experiment is a veteran\u2019s court, another related type of experiment is a drug court.\u2019<\/p>\n The first panel will be led by speakers with insight into those initiatives, including Dr. Al Kopak, a WCU professor of criminology and criminal justice, Holly Jones, a community partnerships and outreach coordinator with the N.C. Department of Justice, and recent WCU alum Kevin Rumley, who was formerly a homeless veteran who \u201cspent much of his combat pay on opioids before switching to heroin,\u201d according to his bio on the event\u2019s website, but now serves as coordinator of the Buncombe County Veterans Treatment Court.<\/p>\n \u201cHearing from folks who have been on the ground leading these types of experiments with the affected community, with the people most affected by this crisis, is what this session is about,\u201d said Lopez. \u201cIt\u2019s about hearing from folks who have been trying different types of solutions and what we can learn from them about further experiments that we should be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n The second panel will take a slightly different approach, focused less on the people in the trenches and more on the people in the front of the classrooms.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an academic panel in the sense that all the panelists are WCU faculty and they\u2019re going to be presenting their understanding of this problem and potential solutions based on their research,\u201d said Lopez, who himself will sit on that panel with WCU substance use studies certificate program coordinator Beth Young and April Messer, a WCU professor who works in critical care nursing.<\/p>\n \u201cOne good thing about having faculty members contribute to this is, we get paid to kind of sit around and think really in-depth about hard problems,\u201d said Lopez. \u201cWhen you do that, you begin to understand the scenario and the fruits of that research, and how it matters in forming solutions and action plans for next steps.\u201d<\/p>\n Joining Lopez, Young and Messer on that panel will be WCU Assistant Professor of Economics Dr. Audrey Redford, who looks at those next steps as only an economist can.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the unintended consequences of a lot of these policies is that their goal is to try to reduce the number of people that are misusing substances,\u201d said Redford. \u201cFor individuals that are already misusing prescription opioids, they\u2019re going to seek out alternatives. One of the aspects of making prescription opioids harder to get is that it raises the cost of them for individuals who are trying to acquire them illicitly or illegally.\u201d<\/p>\n This past August, as part of a Smoky Mountain News series on the impact of the opioid crisis in Western North Carolina called Forced to Fight, Waynesville native and retired DEA Agent Joel Reece said it was for this exact reason that heroin is poised to make a big comeback, soon.<\/p>\n The final story in that three-part series chronicled the struggles of an active addict who told SMN that to avoid life-threatening withdrawal symptoms, she needed either $200 worth of pills a day, or $60 worth of heroin.<\/p>\n \u201cThe downside is that because heroin is significantly cheaper than many of these prescription opioids are on the black markets, individuals will transition away from taking the relatively \u2014 and I emphasize \u201crelatively\u201d \u2014 safer prescription opioids and will start using other illicit forms of drugs such as heroin and fentanyl just because they\u2019re cheaper and they\u2019re easier to access,\u201d Redford said.<\/p>\n That\u2019s exactly what happened to Haywood County native Clayton Suggs, as told by his mother Michele Rogers in the first part of the Forced to Fight series; after developing an opioid addiction subsequent to routine surgery, Suggs fought it for years until he overdosed on a mixture of heroin and fentanyl in 2018 after a full year of sobriety.<\/p>\n Redford is also a great illustration of Lopez\u2019s desire to fully utilize WCU\u2019s assets in answering questions that can produce realistic steps toward addressing a critical issue in a community of which they are also a part.<\/p>\n \u201cJust to add in there personally,\u201d Redford said, \u201cI\u2019m saying all this as someone who has had very close friends of my family pass away from opioid-related overdoses, and my research interests have come from the fact that my mother was a substance use disorder counselor when I was growing up. It\u2019s personal to me as well. We\u2019re not just sitting in an ivory tower saying, \u2018Here\u2019s what we\u2019re doing wrong.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After the panels and the politicians talk the talk comes the most important part of WCU\u2019s town hall, says Lopez.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is walking the walk,\u201d he said of the four breakout groups that will convene during a working lunch at the conclusion of the event. \u201cThese next steps that are going to help improve the situation are not going to come from Raleigh and D.C., they\u2019re going to come from our neighbors.\u201d<\/p>\n The assessment and measurement group will explore how the nature of the problem can be understood through data-driven methodology. The treatment modes group will confer on plans for various addiction scenarios. The public policy group will consider how governments can help, and the social marketing group will discuss improving awareness.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is our chance for folks who care about and work on these issues to get together and compare ideas and work on actionable next steps,\u201d said Lopez. \u201cThat could be a funding proposal. That could be a mass communications or social marketing campaign. We are designing this to where professionals who care about the work on this issue get together, and good ideas will bubble up from that.\u201d<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.smokymountainnews.com\/news\/item\/27685-western-carolina-university-event-walks-the-walk-on-opioid-crisis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been said time and time again after forums, panels and public meetings held in communities across the country over the past dozen-odd years: if we could talk our way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":567,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/567"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8200,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8197\/revisions\/8200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/affiliate.wcu.edu\/csfe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}