Marysville meeting draws kids, adults who want deadly opiates off streets

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:07 AM
By Holly Zachariah

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
MARYSVILLE, Ohio -- Alarmed by news of recent teenage overdoses and bearing headlines about Ohio's growing heroin problem, parents came to a town-hall meeting last night full of questions.

They wondered how to talk to their kids, how specific to get. Someone suggested that too much talk of the wrong kind could be dangerous, that no one wants to provide a roadmap of where to get the drug and how to use it.

And in a roomful of treatment, school and police officials, it was a high-school junior who stood up and gave the most answers.

"We already know all about it," said Mallory Underwood, an honor student at Marysville High School. "But we're acting on it. We're not going to sit around and watch this happen anymore."

Mike Witzky, director of the Union County Mental Health and Recovery Board who convened the meeting, said that kind of peer pressure is exactly what is needed. He hopes both a teen and an adult task force will sprout from what began last night in the gathering of about 60 people.

For some time now, law-enforcement and public-health officials across the state have described the growing problem of prescription-drug abuse and how it leads to heroin addiction.

They stepped up the campaign last week with the announcement that drug overdoses have eclipsed traffic fatalities in the number of annual deaths. In addition, heroin --- a natural opiate -- and synthetic opiates such as OxyContin have replaced cocaine to become the second-most-common drugs for which people seek treatment, ranking behind alcohol, officials said.

"It all starts in the medicine cabinet," Witzky said. "Prescription drugs are expensive, and heroin, unfortunately, is not."

The number of heroin-related deaths annually in Ohio nearly doubled between 2000 and 2007, the latest year for which statistics are available from the Ohio Department of Health.

Also, the number of Ohioans in the state's publicly funded heroin treatment programs has tripled, to almost 10,000 individuals in the past decade.

A quarter of those in treatment for opiate addiction at Maryhaven now say their troubles began with prescription medicines, most often prescribed as part of a pain-management regimen for an illness or injury, said Paul Coleman, president and chief executive officer of what is central Ohio's largest treatment center.

Once people become addicted, they adjust their habit to the supply, said Anthony Marotta, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Agency's Columbus office.

"Someone is paying $40 or $50 a pill for OxyContin and the money runs out or the supply dries up. But they're already hooked," Marotta said. "They have a physical craving, so they spend $10 for a balloon of heroin instead."

Heroin is well-established in central Ohio. The DEA seized between 18 and 22 pounds here since January, nearly twice as much as it had taken from the streets by May of last year.

hzachariah@dispatch.com