Middlesex DA: Dealing with hardships key to avoid path to opiate addiction

Teaching kids how to cope with hardships, keeping them away from alcohol as youngsters, and throwing out old prescription medication are three ways to interrupt a path to opiate addiction, Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan told an auditorium full of parents and teenagers in Framingham last night.

Ryan said drug overdose deaths have risen every year in Middlesex County since 2012.

“We were thinking about how we can do some prevention pieces. One of the voices we realized we were not really hearing from are people who actually managed to overcome their addiction,” Ryan said. “Our thought was, a good way to know what was working or what worked, would be to bring together some of those folks, talk to them about how they got to that place in addiction, and then how they were able to get to somewhere else.”

One trait nearly all of them shared was a “trauma” that they treated with opiates, she said — something as routine as a breakup, or as serious as losing a parent.

“When you see your kids or when you see your friends and they’re not coming back from something, you’ve got to help them out. That’s when you need to be talking to a grown-up — school nurses, parents or someone,” she said. “For parents it’s really about modeling that behavior for your kids. Kids have to see us rebound from things.”

The drug overdose death numbers in Middlesex County show an unarrested rise from 65 in 2012 to 251 last year.

There have been 44 overdose deaths so far this year in Middlesex County.