As overdose deaths rise, we must step up treatment options and grieve those we have lost
The U.S. had record-breaking 93,331 drug overdose deaths in 2020. That’s 93,331 family tragedies that left parents, friends, partners and children devastated. We are on track to produce an even higher number in 2021.
Here in Thurston County, our overdose death count increased from 39 in 2019 to 49 in 2020, edging closer to one each week.
That’s the grim context for the Thurston County Opioid Task Force’s commemoration of Overdose Awareness Day (OAD) on Tuesday, Aug. 31. This year, Thurston County and the cities of Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater have all passed proclamations supporting it.
OAD is an international event started in 2001 by Sally J. Finn in Australia. She hoped it would provide a time and place for those who had lost a loved one to grieve without secrecy or shame about the cause of their death. She also hoped it would promote harm reduction practices that can help prevent overdoses. OAD now has spread to dozens of other countries.
The services she advocated seek to keep people alive, help them manage and reduce their substance use, prevent disease transmission, and provide a human connection free of the shame, blame and stigma attached to this brain disease. Harm reduction recognizes that there are many roads to recovery, and most of them are long and winding.
If it weren’t for harm reduction programs, our overdose death rate would certainly be worse. Katie Strozyk, Thurston County’s Opioid Response Coordinator, notes that the wide distribution of naloxone (commonly known as Narcan), which can reverse an opioid overdose, has meant that “while overdoses are up, people are not dying from them as often.”
But while Narcan is saving the lives of opioid users, and medications such as suboxone are helping them avoid the misery of withdrawal when they stop using, there is no similar help for people addicted to stimulants such a methamphetamine. Strozyk notes that while there is a bit more sympathy for opioid users because of its reach into the white middle class and the culpability of the pharmaceutical industry, there is no such mitigation for the stigma of meth use.
According to the Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute (ADAI) at the University of Washington, overdose deaths from meth have increased 600 percent in the last decade, and now account for half of all drug overdose deaths. Heart attacks, strokes and seizures are one measurable set of meth’s fatal effects. Other longer-term fatalities from conditions such as congestive heart disease or kidney failure are not typically recorded as overdose deaths, making the total number of meth-caused fatalities unknowably higher.
According to ADAI, meth also is increasingly spiked with fentanyl, the super strong opioid that is now implicated in 46 percent of drug overdose deaths.
That harsh news inspired the Thurston County Opioid Task Force to include meth use in its recently adopted Opioid Response Plan.
Recovery from meth addiction is excruciatingly difficult. After years of extreme over-stimulation, the brain’s pleasure-producing capacity is in tatters. For up to a year after stopping meth, a person’s capacity to feel the simplest pleasures, such as gladness to see their own children, is simply absent.
For both meth and heroin, relapse is common, and even the strongest-willed users commonly require repeated treatment attempts — sometimes more than a dozen — before they achieve total abstinence. But even if achieving a drug-free life takes decades, it is a life worth living and a life worth saving. These are powerful reasons to do all we can to keep people alive with harm reduction programs and accessible, culturally competent treatment programs.
When we fail, we should honor the memories of the people we’ve lost to this disease.
Strozyk and the Opioid Response Task Force will host a commemoration from 12:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 31 at the Percival Landing Pavilion in downtown Olympia. The event will feature overdose response training, naloxone distribution, overdose education, and ways to remember and memorialize those we’ve lost to an overdose.