‘Enough is enough’
Multipronged attack is critical, NM leaders and experts say
One day after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy toured a local rehab center as part of a national tour to “focus energy and attention on the opioid epidemic that we have all across the country,” nearly two dozen experts gathered in a public forum at the Albuquerque Journal to discuss what they agreed is a crisis.
Opioids — drugs that include illegal heroin and prescription drugs such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and fentanyl — are highly effective painkillers, but they’re also highly addictive.
For much of the past decade, New Mexico has been either No. 1 or No. 2 in the nation for drug overdose death rates. In 2014, the most recent year for which complete
statistics are available, about 47,000 people died of drug overdoses nationwide — the majority of which are attributed to opioids.
New Mexico had 540 drug overdose deaths that year, despite declines in the previous two years.
As prescription drugs became more expensive and harder to obtain, many users turned to cheaper and easily available Mexican heroin distributed through an efficient criminal network described by one federal lawman as akin to a “pizza delivery system,” exacerbating the crisis.
In an effort to address the state’s opioid crisis, the Journal and KANW-FM Radio hosted the Heroin and Opioid Prevention and Education public forum Wednesday evening. Co-hosted
by U.S. Attorney Damon P. Martinez and Richard Larson, vice chancellor of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, the two-hour forum included advice and discussion from recovering addicts and parents who have lost children to drug overdoses, along with experts from law enforcement, health care, state and local government and community organizations. Forum moderators were Journal editor Kent Walz and Journal investigative reporter Mike Gallagher, who has covered New Mexico drug issues for decades.
“Last year in New Mexico, more people died of drug overdoses, accidental drug overdoses, than the death toll for vehicle accidents and homicide gun deaths combined,” Walz said in opening the forum. “Those are just numbers. Those don’t measure the human loss, the economic loss, the attendant crime that comes with some of the drug issues that you’re going to hear about tonight.”
Here are selected excerpts, generally in the order they were made, from other forum participants as part of their presentation or in response to questions submitted in advance by Journal readers.