Lunch & Learn speakers address drug issues
DBell@CalhounTimes.com
Calhoun Police Chief Tony Pyle said he fears it’s only a matter of time before the fentanyl overdose epidemic that is plaguing much of the United States makes its way to Calhoun.
“I hope I’m wrong, but I think we’ll start seeing it,” Pyle said Wednesday during the Gordon County Chamber of Commerce’s Lunch and Learn event, the theme of which was Educating Workforce on Drug Addiction. “It’s going to be everywhere.”
The police chief pointed out that the number of the number of drug overdose deaths in the country has risen steadily and that the number of deaths in 2017 — 70,237, according to Department of Health and Human Services — would be enough to wipe out the entire population of Calhoun and Gordon County combined.
Pyle said drug dealers use fentanyl, which is a synthetic opioid pain reliever, to cut their supplies of other, more common drugs like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. The problem is, he said, that users don’t know the highly addictive and dangerous fentanyl is in their drugs, so it becomes easy for users to overdose.
He said about 65 percent of overdoses in the U.S. were related to opioid use and, while that hasn’t been a problem in Calhoun or Gordon County yet, he believes it will be eventually.
“It’s a supply and demand issue,” he said, “and it’s a higher profit for drug dealers.”
LUNCH, By Anayeli Seguri, a senior at Gordon Central
He compared it to the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early ’90s in that that drug was only a problem in the major cities for a while, but eventually spread everywhere else.
Pyle said his department’s officers, including the K9 units, have already been supplied with Narcan, a drug that can temporarily stop an overdose until a user can be treated by medical professionals.
AdventHealth Gordon’s Director of Community and Physician Outreach Tracy Farriba also addressed the crowd during the event, speaking specifically about vaping and her efforts to educate local students about the dangers of the increasingly popular devices.
Farriba told the story of one local 17-year-old who approach her after a presentation at his school and told her how he had been diagnosed with a severe lung infection after a weekend of near nonstop vaping. She said the teen told her that he didn’t he know why he had done it, but he did know that something wasn’t right with his body.
Two days later he woke up with a sore throat and bad cough and went to the doctor, then was sent to a lung specialist after the infection was discovered.
“He said, ‘I want you to tell the students and the people you talk to that it really can happen to you,’” Farriba said, who noted that seven teens in Georgia have died from vape-related illnesses.
She said one of the main problems with vaping is that there is no good way to know exactly what is contained in the oils or juice the devices use and that illegal drugs are often used in much higher concentrations than they would be in more typical methods.
Farriba said one local student used a vape device with THC — the active chemical in marijuana — at school before collapsing to the floor and