Substance Misuse Summit focuses on science, social impact of addiction
Drug and alcohol addictions are some of the hardest habits around to break; trying to get clean and sober in a social environment that doesn’t recognize those problems as the physical diseases experts say they are can make things much harder.
That was an important part of the premise for the Taos Substance Misuse Summit on Thursday (June 20) at UNMTaos’ Bataan Hall, which brought together a large audience of behavioral health professionals, clinicians and county residents for an engaging discussion about the science and social impacts of addiction.
Organized by local anti-drug coalition Taos Alive, Holy Cross Medical Center and other county behavioral health agencies, 10 speakers with various angles on the entrenched problem of substance abuse in Northern New Mexico drove the discussion and fielded questions from the audience.
Like a prior summit held in September, Lawrence Medina, director of Río Grande Alcoholism Treatment Program, and Ted Wiard, founder of Golden Willow Counseling, hosted the event, which ran from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The day began with an invocation from the Taos Pueblo tribal government. Marie Romero, a tribal member at Taos Pueblo, and Harold Lefthand, Taos Pueblo’s tribal secretary, spoke later in the day, offering a glimpse into the addictions faced by tribal members and the lack of treatment options available around Taos County.
Lefthand said he recently responded to an overdose on tribal land, an experience that he said inspired him to organize a new community effort to address addiction at the pueblo.
Romero, an activist who has spoken before the United Nations Security Council, has also seen the impacts of addiction and the desperate need for better local resources and strategies to address them.
“The continuum of care in Taos is disjointed,” Romero said, adding that the community needs to spread awareness of what resources do exist and how they can be accessed.
While the presentation discussed substance abuse broadly, presenters continually returned to the ongoing opioid epidemic as one of the most urgent public health threats facing the county.
According to a report prepared by the organizers of the summit, an estimated 2,054 in Taos County experience “opioid use disorder,” defined by the American Psychiatric Association as “a chronic lifelong disorder, with serious potential consequences including disability, relapses and death.”
The United States recorded 70,237 drug overdose deaths in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than half of those deaths were caused by opioids, such as heroin or prescription painkillers.
In New Mexico, 332 people died from opioids in 2017 out of total of 493 overdose deaths, according to New Mexico’s Indicator-Based Information System.
While overdose death rates have fallen from peak levels a few years ago – in large part due to the proliferation of Narcan, a highly effective opioid reversal drug – opioid addiction remains very difficult to treat, especially in rural areas that lack the resources of urban areas.
Understanding how addiction works is a key starting point for gathering public support necessary to build better resources, according to clinicians who also spoke at Thursday’s summit.
Dr. Eric Ketcham, a staff physician at San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, sees the emergency department – where many opioid addicts often end up many times – as a crucial point of intervention.
“This is a highly lethal disease,” he said. “We’re talking about a disease that is so prevalent that it does not care about the color of your skin, or whether you are male or female, or whether you have money or you don’t.”
He said that while drug counseling is an important part of treatment, medications like Suboxone – a mix of the chemicals Naloxone and Buprenorphine that reduces cravings – is also critical for treating opioid addiction.
Dr. Gina Perez-Baron, who formerly worked for Tri-County Community Services, is also an advocate for combining “opioid replacement therapy” with psychological counseling. While her operation closed when TriCounty shut down in 2018, she maintains a clinic at Questa Health Center and is now working to bring the same form of treatment to rural areas in the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. James Montgomery, who started working in the field after substance abuse impacted his own family, offered a presentation that explained “why addiction is so easy and recovery so hard.” He explained that substance abuse is a physical addiction, unlike many others, which are often only psychological.
According to Heidi Wahl, a recovered addict who has worked in the behavioral health field for 13 years, social stigma can be another reason why drug and alcohol addiction can be so hard to overcome.
“People struggling with addiction are overwhelmed by shame,” she said. “Disconnection is what drives further substance abuse. This is at the very heart of what drives addiction.”