Film screening highlights drug problem in DeSoto
20 in county have died from overdoses this year
It started when he was about 14 or 15 years old — he doesn’t remember exactly. He does remember, though, that it began with Lortab, an opioid pain reliever. He got a 30-day prescription after foot surgery.
“I didn’t even like it at first,” Tyler Smith says. “It made me sick. So I started out taking one at a time. Then it was two. Then it was 15.”
At 17 he tried heroin for the first time. He was sold after that first warm rush. But it wasn’t just heroin; Smith also had an affinity for Xanax.
Finally, one day while redoing a Kroger as part of his construction job, he had eight seizures in three hours while withdrawing from Xanax — “I’d buy 600 to 700 at a time, but I was out.” So he was taken to the hospital, and the next day he overdosed on heroin. A dose of Narcan, a prescription medication used to counteract the effects of opioids, brought him around.
After overdosing on Xanax one day and heroin the next, Smith of Macon, Ga., decided it was finally time to get the help his mother wanted him to get several years earlier and that his girlfriend said he had to get as a condition for her sticking around. So that’s how Smith, 21, found his way to Turning Point, a drug treatment facility in Southaven where he’s now 15 days clean.
“I called a hotline, and this is where they said I could come,” he says.
Smith knows he’s lucky to have made it this far. He also knows he’s part of the nationwide epidemic reflected in “Generation Found,” a film screening Thursday evening at Malco’s DeSoto Cinema 16. The independent film explores how various groups and individuals in Houston, Texas, have come together to battle the region’s exploding youth drug addiction problem. Producers chose DeSoto County as a screening location because of its unenviable distinction as Mississippi’s top county in heroin-related over-
dose, with 20 already this year.
DeSoto County’s problem is largely an outgrowth of Shelby County’s problem, where the number of heroin-related deaths over the past five years increased nearly 800 percent, from nine in 2011 to 80 in 2015. DeSoto County Coroner Jeff Pounders, who sees many of the overdose fatalities first-hand, says the problem is worst in the northern half of the county, those areas closest to Memphis.
The story isn’t new, of course, and seems with each year’s statistics like it can’t get worse. Yet, it does. And Pounders says it never gets any easier to see.
“We often find them with the needle still in their arm,” Pounders says. “It (heroin) is just so highly addictive. They want to re-create that first high, and they just can’t accomplish it.”
Smith gets what Pounders is saying. He understands even better than Pounders.
“It’s a warm feeling,” he says. “You don’t feel nothing. You try to duplicate that feeling you got the first time, but it’ll never feel the same. You just chase it, and chase it and chase it.”
He eventually chased it to the tune of three grams of heroin a day — he injected it — plus 18 two-milligram tablets of Xanax a day.
He sold heroin to help finance his habit. Smith says he could get $10 to $35 — “depending on who was buying it” — for one-tenth of a gram of heroin, or $3 to $8 a pill for Xanax. He could also sell the Suboxone that was prescribed to help curb opioid cravings for $25 each.
The money supported his habit, and then some.
“I made some money,” he admits. “I bought a lot of stuff I probably shouldn’t have, but I don’t have it anymore.”
Smith, who dropped out of school when he was 16, was arrested six or seven times, but only once for possession — and that was marijuana. There were also arrests for shoplifting and DUI.
He’s confident he’ll complete rehab successfully and won’t need it again, though the odds of never relapsing aren’t good. And he knows that. He says he expects several people in rehab to die soon, maybe most eventually. He’s lost five friends already.
He doesn’t want to return to ironwork and construction when he gets his habit under control — “my back already hurts without carrying around a tool belt all day” — but would like to help others battle their addiction as a counselor or clinic operator.
Karen Morgan, regional director for Addiction Campuses, says she doesn’t want to call Smith “typical,” but starting drug use at a young age is typical.
Morgan, also a recovering addict 14 years clean, says everybody needs to understand it’s a community problem, and everyone in the community needs to know about it.
“I think the misconception sometimes is that people are doing it to have a good time,” she says. “You’re not having a good time. There’s nothing glamorous about it.”
A portion of the proceeds from Thursday’s screening will go to Healing Hearts Child Advocacy Center in DeSoto County. The screening starts at 7:30 p.m. at DeSoto Cinema 16, 7130 Malco Blvd. in Southaven.
To purchase tickets in advance, visit gathr.us/screening/17809.