Drug curse

Green’s death reminds that dependency can claim even the most unexpected of victims.

Larry Green wasn’t the sort of man you would have expected to die the way he did.

He was a politically active attorney who ran a respected nonprofit and won a 2011 election to Houston City Council. Around City Hall, he earned a reputation as a workhorse who doggedly represented the interests of his district. Around the neighborhoods that elected him, he was a ubiquitous presence at civic club meetings. Voters considered him not so much a politician as a friend, a guy who showed up in parks on weekends to help kids plant trees. When he died, parents in his district said their children cried.

If his untimely death was a surprise, what caused it was a shock. An autopsy revealed Green overdosed on a combination of methamphetamine and a recreational inhalant called chloroethane. Meth is a notorious stimulant and chloroethane is a powerful depressant of the central nervous system. The combination proved deadly.

If the councilman had a drug problem, it seemed nobody around City Hall knew it. Green apparently died alone in his home. He was 52 years old.

Sadly, what happened to the councilman has become all too common. Drug overdose is the nation’s leading cause of accidental death, claiming almost 64,000 lives in 2016. That’s far greater than the number of people killed by firearms or traffic accidents. Most of the victims were taking opioids, which accounted for 42,249 deaths in 2016, a five-fold increase since the turn of the century.

And those numbers are growing, mainly due to the nation’s opioid epidemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report opioids were involved in Americans die from opioid abuse. Every day, roughly 91 Americans die from opioid abuse. Small wonder Harris County is one of a long list of government entities suing pharmaceutical manufacturers over the opioid epidemic.

Drug addiction in America was once perceived as a problem restricted mainly to those on the lowest economic rungs, another hazard of growing up poor in this country. Now, opioids have definitively brought the scourge of drug addiction into the middle and upper class, as innocent people who’ve been over-prescribed painkillers progress to illegal narcotics like heroin.

Green’s death, although not from opioids, is a tragic reminder that our nation’s drug problem can claim the most unlikely of victims – even a hard-working and wellrespected city councilman whose constituents considered him a good friend.