Leadership desperately needed in opioid crisis

Kellyanne, Pardon the informality of this salutation, but I do so on the chance that a personal appeal is perhaps more likely to find its way onto your desk or into your Twitter feed.

I write upon hearing that you are taking the lead in the Trump administration’s response to the opioid crisis that holds much of our nation in a death grip.

I’ll admit up front that your lack of public health or addiction expertise concerns me, but I also know you have remained a close adviser to the president during a turbulent year. So I choose to be optimistic that your involvement is a sign that the White House truly considers this crisis of supreme importance. I hope that you will use your unfettered access to the president to keep this unfolding catastrophe fresh on his mind.

We need help, desperately.

We are losing our loved ones at an astounding rate. There were 4,050 drug overdose deaths in Ohio in 2016, most of them tied to the use of heroin, fentanyl and related opioids. This year doesn’t bode any better.

Tonda DaRe, who lives in the eastern Ohio village of Carrollton, reflected on 2016’s total when she spoke to The Dispatch in August. DaRe lost her daughter, Holly Noel Jenkins, to a heroin overdose in 2012.

“I just saw 4,000 Hollys, 4,000 sons and daughters of Ohio,” she said.

The dead have accumulated so quickly in some Ohio counties that coroners have run out of room to store the bodies. You’ve heard of modular classrooms? Think of these as modular morgues.

So many dead shatter even more of the living.

Ohioans, from infants to

the elderly, are grasping for lifelines. Grandparents raise grandchildren. Children steal from their parents. The state’s hospitalization rate for neonatal abstinence syndrome — a set of symptoms suffered by infants born dependent on drugs — climbed from 14 for every 10,000 live births in 2004 to 134 per 10,000 by 2014. Children services agencies are being overwhelmed. Some counties have reported that more children were being adopted than reunited with their parents.

Heroin and its kin have invaded Ohio’s rural hollows and moneyed enclaves. You can buy a bag in new suburban subdivisions and the state’s oldest neighborhoods.

In Columbus, that neighborhood is Franklinton. Drive down one of its major thoroughfares, Sullivant Avenue, and you’ll see the nodding prostitutes not only at 1 a.m. but at 3 p.m., when they share the sidewalks with schoolchildren stooped from the

weight of sagging backpacks. Many of these women are driven to sell sex to support drug habits so debilitating that if arrested, they will tear at their staph sores until they bleed. They do this in the hope that the prison won’t take them in, and that the courts will return them instead to streets.

Guns and drugs go hand in hand, and Columbus is in the final stretch of its secondbloodiest year on record. As of my writing, we have had 121 homicides. We can’t say for certain how many of those had ties to opioids, but it seems more than coincidental that the only year with more homicides than 2017 was 1991, the pinnacle of the crack cocaine epidemic.

The temptation is great to characterize this as a war against opioids, as we did with crack cocaine. We are still gauging the damage of that lost war, in which we criminalized addicts and filled our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders. That us vs. them philosophy helped to gut our inner cities and drove a wedge between police and the communities they served. Thirty years on, officers and citizens continue to pay the price.

What do we need? Swift action and much more money. We need more treatment options and more beds. We have dedicated experts with promising ideas. The problem is often one of scale.

The president’s opioids commission reported much of this on Nov. 1, yet his 2018 budget request, released last spring, asked for an increase in addiction treatment funding of not even 2 percent.

It’s hard to overstate how misguided that is. We can’t wait any longer while elected officials stroke egos or play politics. Please stay grounded. I know you have four children of your own.

Think of that. In one year’s time, four lives times a thousand.