It's the question the authorities and mouthpiece media will not ask:
"Mass. reports 185 heroin deaths since November 1; Tally may be higher, doesn’t count Boston, Springfield, Worcester" by Milton J. Valencia | Globe staff, February 25, 2014
At least 185 people have died from suspected heroin overdoses in Massachusetts in less than four months, a death toll that has magnified concerns of a growing public health crisis in the state and the region.
The tally, compiled by the State Police, does not include the state’s three largest cities: Boston, Springfield, and Worcester. The number of heroin-related deaths in those cities was not readily available Tuesday, but would probably significantly increase the total.
The recent overdose deaths, combined with general statewide statistics that show a steady increase in even nonfatal overdoses over the last decade, are the latest evidence that opiate abuse is hitting not only in the state’s urban centers, but also in rural communities from Cape Cod to the Berkshires.
“It’s not just your back alley junkie doing heroin anymore,” said Franklin County Sheriff Christopher J. Donelan. “It could be any kid, in any neighborhood, in any demographic.”
Though the data is limited — and there were no figures for fatal overdoses during the same period of time last year — a State Police spokesman said the 185 deaths since November clearly represents an increase.
“Our experience and accumulated knowledge . . . indicates that these numbers absolutely represent an increased rate of fatal heroin overdoses,” said David Procopio, a State Police spokesman.
According to the state Department of Public Health’s annual statewide figures, the number of opiate-related deaths increased from 363 in 2000 to 642 in 2011, the most recent year that data was compiled.
The deaths over the last few months are occurring at a much faster rate than even car crash deaths.
Would that include the people killed in crashes by addicts behind the wheel without a license?
A total of 349 people died in car accidents in all 2012, the most recent year that data is available, according to the figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nonfatal overdoses are also on the rise: In Boston, the Public Health Commission reported that accidental drug overdoses increased by 39 percent between 2010 and 2012.
Nonfatal heroin overdoses increased 76 percent in that time frame, and prescription drug overdoses rose by 38 percent from 2009 to 2012.
By the first week of this month, Boston Emergency Medical Services administered Narcan, a medication to counter the effects of an opiate overdose, 52 times since the beginning of the year, compared with 41 times by the same date in 2013.
I wonder which pharmaceutical is getting rich of that.
Procopio and other law enforcement and public health officials have attributed the rise in overdose deaths to several possibilities.
A potent strain of heroin could be making its way into the region.
From where?
Suppliers could be cutting heroin, or mixing it to increase profits and potency, with a synthetic substance, possibly the painkiller fentanyl.
Who wants to kill their cu$tomers?
A third possibility is that drug users could be taking heroin simultaneously with other drugs, specifically prescription drugs such as Percocet.
The TRUE GATEWAY DRUGS!
“Add to those one more probable factor, the fact that heroin is more readily available and easier for users to obtain than other opiates or prescription drugs,” Procopio said.
Because it costs less and its a better buzz.
Authorities continue to investigate and analyze the overdoses, Procopio said, but added, “We firmly believe that it is a problem that cannot be solved solely by arrests. . . . Treatment and public education components are equally essential.”
Look at this. Mercy from the authorities!
The increase in overdoses has triggered responses in Greenfield and Taunton, where public forums on opiate abuse have been held and where officials agreed with the need to increase the number of special drug courts that could quickly handle drug abuse cases.
I didn't go. I'm tired of talk, talk, talk, and what would the reaction have been had I asked my question (knowing the answer, of course)?
Officials agree there is a need for more beds at rehabilitation clinics.
Good luck with the budgets.
Governor Deval Patrick has requested $2.7 million to create five more drug courts and three other courts to deal with mental health issues.
The state has 21 drug courts, which are used to aggressively and swiftly address a defendant’s underlying drug addiction by ordering treatment and evaluation as alternatives to prison.
A failed policy, obviously. But that's all government knows to do.
The solution would seem to be legalization, but that would cut out CIA black profits and a money stream for banks to launder to improve their bottom lines.
Meanwhile, the state Senate has launched a special commission to hear public testimony on what officials have called a public health crisis, with the goal of formulating recommendations by the time the Legislature debates the state’s annual budget.
Anyone ask WHERE is the STUFF COMING FROM YET?
Cheryl Bartlett, the state public health commissioner, said that the growing concern across Massachusetts illustrates a worry that public health officials have long held: That heroin and other opiate abuse is not only a problem in urban areas, but is making its way across the commonwealth’s rural communities as well.
The state began the Opiate Overdose Prevention Program campaign in 2007, with ads and pilot programs to train first responders to deal with overdoses.
One program has increased the number of community distribution sites for Narcan from seven sites to 27.
But the state and individual communities can do better, Bartlett said.
“I think it’s a major concern to us, and I think the fact that there’s more awareness, that we can come together to call attention to this concern, can only help us as we move forward,” Bartlett said.
Look at how ALL of this is SO REACTIVE from governments that are so PROACTIVE on tyrannical security measures, fake fart mi$t, bullying at schools, and all the other good works they are doing to secure and protect us all. What is wrong with the thumb-twiddling in the face of this crisis?
Last month, the governor of Vermont focused his entire State of the State address on opiate abuse in that state.
Donelan, the Franklin County sheriff, worried that the response to the epidemic has been too slow and that heroin and opiate abuse is already intractable.
“We need to completely reevaluate how we treat addiction,” Donelan said.
“The old infrastructure we have for alcoholics, or marijuana or cocaine abusers, isn’t what’s needed for heroin addiction.”
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Again, the coverage seems so shallow and superficial. If that is what is coming from government, what gives?
As for the media muzzle about the origins of the demon drug, why aren't they mentioning or asking the question?
Glad I didn't make it over to the college now seeing as Globe was there:
"Opiate overdoses bring call for more drug courts; Broad calls for action also made in Mass." by Brian MacQuarrie and Joshua Miller | Globe staff, February 25, 2014
GREENFIELD — The recent spike in opiate deaths and overdoses in Massachusetts has created a public-health crisis that demands a speedy, sweeping response, including more courts to deal specifically with drug-addicted defendants, the chief justice of the state’s trial court said Monday.
That failed prescription is the answer, huh? More legal tyranny and an expansion of the state umbrella ?
“We can’t do it alone: We need your help,” Chief Justice Paula Carey said at Greenfield Community College, where she addressed an overflow audience at a public forum on opiate abuse.
Alarm at the spate of heroin overdoses has spread across the state, and the state Senate has launched a special commission to hear public testimony.
So it looks like they are doing something. How many more will die in-between?
At a gathering in Taunton Monday, US Senator Edward J. Markey called the increase in deaths from opiate abuse, particularly heroin, “a scourge like we have never seen before.”
The senator speculated that the rash of overdoses could be linked to a newly popular and dangerous mix of inexpensive heroin and fentanyl, a powerful narcotic.
Made you forget all about Molly, didn't it?
And where is that other drug coming from? It's a pharmaceutical, right?
“That combination is toxic, and it is across the streets of Massachusetts right now,” Markey said at a press conference with mayors, lawmakers, and the White House chief of drug control policy.
Failures, all.
Statewide numbers have not been compiled for overdoses and opiate-related deaths in 2014, but many cities and towns are reporting sharp increases over last year.
“It is here, and it is killing our young people,” said Christopher Donelan, sheriff in rural Franklin County. “We once thought that we were immune to big-city problems, but now we are painfully aware that no one is immune.”
He's a good guy. I called his office when he was a rep and was surprised that he answered. I think he went back to sheriffing because of the stench in and from the State House.
Cheryl Bartlett, the state public health commissioner, said Monday afternoon that she had been told that an estimated 30 people have died this year from heroin and other opiate overdoses in Massachusetts.
Later, in a telephone interview, she said it was “probably a little premature to give out the number,” which she said came from a person involved with an opiate overdose prevention program. The department does not yet have official statistics on overdose deaths for 2014, she said.
An estimate of 30 deaths statewide so far this year may well be low, given that the death toll from just two communities and Cape Cod is 20. In Taunton, six deaths connected to opiate overdoses have occurred since Jan. 1, according to Mayor Thomas Hoye Jr.; Woburn has had eight deaths, said the city’s chief of police, Robert J. Ferullo Jr. And on Cape Cod, more than a half-dozen opiate-related fatalities have been recorded.
Carey urged state lawmakers to approve Governor Deval Patrick’s $2.7 million budget request to create five more drug courts and three other courts to deal with mental-health issues.
The state currently has 21 drug courts in which defendants with substance-abuse problems are subjected to intense, regular evaluation by the court, including random testing, as an alternative to prison.
Defendants can be directed to quick treatment that they otherwise might not receive if they waited for their cases to proceed through the legal system.
“We have a relatively brief opportunity to help the defendant find services,” Carey said.
More drug courts are only part of the response, Carey and other speakers said. More treatment beds are needed; more education about the dangers of opiates is essential for young people and their parents; and lawmakers need to make the issue a priority, the Greenfield audience was told.
Did anyone, anyone at all ask WHERE this stuff is coming from?
“We need the beds, and we need the programs, and we need them as quickly as possible,” said state Senator Stanley C. Rosenberg, a Democrat from Amherst. He said the Senate’s special commission on the opiate overdose surge is expected to have recommendations in time for the Senate budget debate.
Liberal enclave causing trouble for Coakley.
Victims of the recent opiate overdoses, many of them teenagers or young adults, come from a wide range of income, racial, and geographic backgrounds, which has particularly alarmed public safety officials.
But it wasn't until the actor Hoffman died that the issue began to get notice.
Many users began with prescribed opiates, such as painkillers, that might be found in the family medicine cabinet, outreach workers said.
Or it could be the stuff prescribed to kids for a whole host of phantom disorders. Pharmaceuticals have figured it out. Hook 'em when they are young.
Tightened controls on those drugs, some of which are now being made so they cannot be crushed and easily used by addicts, prompted young users to resort to heroin, which had become much cheaper than prescription pills and easier to buy on the street.
However, the issue of opiate abuse transcends the users, said Dr. Ruth Potee, who practices family medicine in Western Massachusetts with the Valley Medical Group. People must be careful to keep their prescription drugs secured.
“Parents and grandparents need to be trained and retrained,” Potee said. “There’s a window of opportunity here because people are scared.”
That recalls 9/11 in my mind, and is really freaky.
In Woburn, the Probation Department at district court has joined forces with seven police departments to aggressively reach out to educate the community about heroin use.
US Representative James P. McGovern, a Democrat from Worcester, praised such local efforts, which he said differ from a federal approach that emphasizes punishment rather than treating addiction as an illness.
“When people get diabetes or cancer, we treat it, and this is what we must do here,” said McGovern.
Officials at both events said they would work to expand access to naloxone, a drug known by the trademark name Narcan, which is used to quickly reverse the effects of opiate overdose.
A total of 21,000 people have been trained in the state to administer Narcan. As a result of that effort, 2,500 overdoses have been reversed, said Hilary Jacobs, director of the Bureau of Substance Abuse Services at the state Department of Public Health.
In Taunton, Markey was joined by R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, to sound an alarm in a city that has had about 70 overdoses this year.
That count did not include multiple reports of overdoses that the city’s emergency medical service received Monday.
Before the press news conference, officials huddled behind closed doors at a fire station to discuss strategy. In the middle of their meeting, a call came in “for a possible drug overdose on Oak Street in Taunton, which is right down the street from our temporary City Hall,” said Hoye, who was part of the meeting. “It’s a problem that really hits home,” Hoye said.
But WHERE is it COMING FROM?!
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Of course, the knowledge that most of it is coming from AFGHANISTAN and is being smuggled by the CIA after the Taliban nearly exterminated the crop, leading to another reason for the false flag of 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan.
The TRUTH simply WOULDN'T MAKE SENSE to the American people after 12 years of war and "victory,"and that might lead them to question a whole range of things. Can't let that happen. Thus the question remains unremarked upon.
"Opiates taking heavy toll on Cape; Overdoses on rise with heroin’s spread" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe staff, February 22, 2014
A rash of drug overdoses has plagued Cape Cod since the beginning of the year and sent local officials and outreach workers scrambling to respond to the surge in heroin and other opiate use.
Related: Deadly plagues, centuries apart, are linked
Has the EndGame genocide begun without us knowing it?
Yarmouth has recorded 13 overdoses since Jan. 1, including two fatalities, police said. The Barnstable villages of Centerville, Osterville, and Marstons Mills have counted nine overdoses, including one death. And Falmouth has been hit with six overdoses, including two fatalities, authorities said.
“The ODs have become almost an epidemic problem down here,” said Detective Sergeant Chuck Peterson, who has worked in narcotics for 20 years with the Yarmouth police.
The alarming rise in overdoses does not appear to be unique to Cape Cod, as community after community in Massachusetts, Vermont, and other states has reported a spike in opiate abuse.
But Cape Cod is an example of a place afflicted by what many police and health officials are calling a crisis that is rapidly cutting across racial, income, and geographic lines.
It is a crisis in which drug users, many in their teens and 20s, are turning to heroin as a much cheaper alternative to once-popular prescription opiates such as OxyContin and Percocet, authorities said....
The true gateways drugs of a much more sinister nature, and yet this state is gasping about medical marijuana.
Pinpointing a reason for the recent spike is difficult, said authorities, but one possibility is that heroin has been mixed with fentanyl, a dangerously potent opiate generally used as a painkiller for end-of-life cancer patients.
Why would you kill your clientele? What kind of business model is that? Or is there something much more sinister going on here?
Lab tests from Cape Cod overdoses have yet to detect fentanyl, officials said, but its presence in heroin bought on the streets has been linked to fatalities in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and other states. The sense among public safety officials and outreach workers is that fentanyl is on its way to Cape Cod, if not already there.
In Falmouth, Detective Captain Brian Reid said he suspects that fentanyl has arrived. “The evidence indicates that, absolutely,” Reid said.
Max Sandusky, prevention and screening director for the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod, echoed that belief.
“We’ve had reports of fentanyl from about a handful of users through our outreach; we don’t know where it’s coming from,” said Sandusky, whose group is part of a pilot program to train the public in use of naloxone, an opioid widely known by the trademark name Narcan that can quickly reverse life-threatening effects of overdoses.
With all the spying apparatus and all the monitoring of communications, and all the U.S. satellites keeping a watchful eye on the world -- and no one knows where any of this poison is coming from, huh?
The AIDS Support Group, which also runs a needle-exchange program, provides training and distributes naloxone kits to a range of people, including family members and friends of addicts, emergency workers, and users. Since 2008, Sandusky said, about 100 people have reversed overdoses with Narcan they got from the organization. “That’s 100 lives saved,” he said.
The need for naloxone might become greater very quickly because fentanyl can be more than 40 times more powerful than heroin, said Sandusky. For that reason, mixing it with heroin can be irresistible to a user seeking a more intense kick.
But that combination carries unpredictable and occasionally fatal risks, particularly because heroin on Cape Cod is generally sold in larger units now, often in half-grams or grams, which are exponentially bigger than the traditional bags of heroin that dealers offered as recently as several years ago, Peterson said.
As a result, the narcotics detective said, the user’s “ability to regulate dosages is different; the potency is higher.”
On Cape Cod, the frequency of overdoses this year compared with last year at this time is striking....
The spread of heroin on Cape Cod has sparked an increase in public discussion about the problem....
Cape Cod is not alone in battling the rise in opiate use, but the area’s relative isolation in the offseason might tempt some to abuse drugs as a way to relieve boredom, officials said.
I blog.
The Cape “goes from being a vacationland to being a pretty rural type area” in winter, said Joe Carleo, executive director of the AIDS Support Group. “People lose their jobs. It’s pretty quiet. There are probably a variety of issues.”
******************
The ripple effects from overdoses often devastate families who feel powerless against the pull of an addictive drug on a son, daughter, or other family member, and the perceived stigma can prompt families to withdraw in shame.
They should be ashamed!
But in recent years, Sandusky and others said, the scourge has affected a much broader segment of society and led to a greater willingness to step from the shadows.
“Now what we’re seeing is communities coming together to address the problem in a way that we have not seen,” Sandusky said. “This isn’t the drug user of the 1970s. It’s your brother, your sister. It crosses all socioeconomic strata.”
Winn, the fire chief in Barnstable, said that attacking the issue head-on should be part of the job description for a public safety department, even if firefighting is its main focus....
They want to take a “proactive approach.”
So from WHERE, oh, WHERE, has the heroin come?
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Related:
Heroin is Here
No Joy For Joyner
Heroin Bust in Hatfield
Not Interested
Heroin in Hyannis
Pair arrested in hotel, accused of dealing heroin
Also see:
Critics’ calls for tougher pain pills are resisted
Driver tossed cocaine out of car window
And yet this state is all bunged up about medical marijuana.
"11 more die amid ‘epidemic’ of R.I. overdoses" by Erika Niedowski | Associated Press, February 15, 2014
PROVIDENCE — Eleven more people have died of accidental overdoses in Rhode Island this month, say state health officials who called on police Friday to carry a drug that can counter the effects of a heroin overdose.
There have now been 38 fatal overdoses in the state so far this year. The 27 recorded last month represent a sharp increase from the 18 reported in January 2013 and 15 each in January 2012 and 2011.
‘‘We’re really in the middle of an epidemic of drug overdose deaths,’’ said Dr. Michael Fine, director of the state Department of Health.
The department has reported an increase in deaths associated with the powerful painkiller fentanyl, which has been implicated in dozens of fatal overdoses across the Northeast....
No implying WHERE the stuff is coming from?
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Related: Sympathy For the Devil
I have none, sorry.
Also see: Four arrested, heroin seized in N.H. drug investigation
And the wheels keep spinning....
