Seniors ripe for exploitation in opioid crisis

When the public and powers that be talk about the heroin crisis, they seldom mention a population that is fast becoming deeply affected: the country’s elderly.

Often invisible and forgotten, they’re increasingly being drained of their life savings, neglected or abused by addicted family members and friends on whom they depend for care, officials say.

Addiction to prescription painkillers among seniors also is growing, with older adults increasingly seeking emergency treatment or coming to the attention of authorities.

With the rise in heroin use, more grandparents are also raising their grandchildren because their parents are dead, in jail,

chasing their next high or in rehab. It can be particularly challenging for those with limited financial resources or health problems.

Unless the tide is turned on the opiate crisis — and there’s no indication that Ohio is even, close despite tough new drug laws, a crackdown on pill mills and increased funding to fight the heroin scourge — seniors will continue to suffer.

A growing number

“Never in my years of being involved in APS (Adult Protective Services) work have the referrals been so high in number, the situations our elders face been so dangerous and intricate, and the need for more workers to help investigate and work to protect our elderly been so dire as now,” Sara Junk, chairwoman of the Ohio Coalition of Adult Protective Services, told the Ohio House finance subcommittee on health and human services last week.

“As far as the opioid crisis, these seniors are trusting their addicted relatives, sometimes to their financial downfall or death,” she added in a follow-up interview.

Unfortunately, the county adult protective services agencies remain overextended and underfunded, Junk said.

In 2014, Ohio lawmakers set aside $10 million in one-time money to improve protections. While that has been helpful, today’s state funding, at $30,000 per county ($2.6 million in total), is inadequate, she said. At least $65,000 per county is needed to support at least one full-time APS caseworker to investigate abuse cases, she said. Until recently, 46 of the 88 counties received less than $3,000 a year, and counties fear their funding could drop back down to those levels.

State officials say they’ve done a great deal in recent years to make county adult protective services more robust, including setting consistent standards, adding new training for caseworkers and creating a new helpline number to take abuse reports. They’re also developing a new statewide datacollection and reporting system.

While county adult protective services workers track and investigate reports of abuse of Ohioans 60 or older, it’s difficult to determine the full extent of the problem because they aren’t required to note if cases involve heroin and other opiates, such as pain pills.

‘Master manipulators’

An estimated 1 in 10 elderly Americans is abused or neglected each year, and the vast majority of cases are at the hands of family members, caregivers and others entrusted to protect them, according to the National Center on Elder Abuse.

In Ohio, 16,196 reports of abuse, neglect and exploitation were made in the state fiscal year that ended June 30. That’s an 8 percent increase over five years ago.

In recent years, there’s been a steady, notable rise in financial exploitation cases, largely because of addicted children, grandchildren and other relatives taking advantage of their aging loved ones. Several central Ohio APS agencies estimated that between 10 percent and 50 percent of their recent cases involved a perpetrator known to be addicted to opiates and, in many rural counties, meth and heroin.

Yet the numbers are likely higher because victims often are afraid to tell social workers or police about their drug-addled abusers for fear of being harmed or removed from their homes because they can’t care for themselves, they said.

Many also feel a mix of anger, anxiety, embarrassment, sadness and responsibility for their loved one’s drug problems and don’t want to get them in trouble. In some cases, a senior also will defend his or her abuser out of fear of losing a friendship. There are even increasing cases of older men buying younger women drugs and paying their expenses in exchange for “companionship,” officials say.

“Drug addicts are master manipulators, and the elderly are especially susceptible because of their polite and trusting nature,” said Dan McNabb, an adult protective services supervisor for Franklin County.

Psychological trauma

The problem will only get worse, experts say, as the nation ages and more seniors receive inhome care, opening up opportunities for them to be isolated, intimidated and ill-treated.

As the crisis tightens its grip on Ohio, already an epicenter of America’s heroin woes, more adult children addicted to opiates are moving back in with their elderly parents. Grandchildren, who older adults have a particularly hard time turning down, also are turning to their grandparents with offers of help or sad stories of hard times.

With monthly Social Security and pension checks, seniors become easy targets for financial, physical and emotional abuse. Advanced age, health problems and memory issues make some especially vulnerable. And older Americans are less likely than other age groups to report when they’ve been victimized.

The drug-dependent adults often get their aging relatives to change their wills and trusts and sign over their homes and other assets, said Paige Robbins, director of the Scioto County Job and Family Services. They might even dupe them into giving them power of attorney, which in the “wrong hands can be a license to steal,” she said.

In extreme cases, they’ll withhold food, water and medicine or threaten the senior with violence or not being able to see other family members and friends.

“The psychological trauma can be worse than the money they’ve lost,” said Tammy Corlette, an adult protective services worker for Madison County Job and Family Services.

Consider the case of an 85-year-old retired financial-services worker who had saved all his life so he and his wife would never have to worry. After the wife’s death, the man’s daughter moved her family into his house under the guise of caring for him. They immediately began withdrawing money from his accounts without his knowledge. Other relatives later said several of the family members had drug and gambling problems.

Over the course of two years, they isolated him from other family members and friends and told him he couldn’t get mail delivered or a phone line to his house.

By the time adult protective services workers persuaded the elderly man to cooperate, he had lost upward of an estimated $500,000, his entire live savings. He eventually filed a police report and was able to get his family evicted. But he couldn’t save his house from foreclosure and had to move in with another family member.

“He was mortified by what had happened,” said Bruce Tolbert, a Franklin County adult protective services worker.

Too often, seniors who are being abused or exploited refuse to cooperate with APC caseworkers, police or prosecutors, and authorities don’t move forward on their own.

As long as they’re competent, seniors have a right to make choices, even if they’re bad ones, say those in adult protective services.

Not everyone agrees with that premise.

“Do homicide or child victims get to tell us what to do?” Paul Greenwood, who leads the elder-abuse prosecution unit at the San Diego district attorney’s office and is a national expert on the topic, asked a group of Ohio APS, law-enforcement and justice workers gathered last week.

“This philosophy has got to change. If we don’t, human nature tells us these perpetrators will keep taking advantage of seniors.”