Tag: heroin

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Opinion Viewpoint

Heroin, the Thief

I lost my friend to heroin this week. It was not quick and painless. She did not push the needle in and float off on a peaceful cloud into the ether. The last sound she made was with her body — heavy and limp, falling to the floor with a thud. Someone she was with went to check on her. She had overdosed on a batch cut with fentanyl. First responders arrived 20 minutes after the 911 call was made. She was without oxygen for too long.

She went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated four times that first day in the hospital, her chest and ribs broken to bits from the compressions. She spent nearly a week on life support as tests were run. Scans showed severe brain damage. She was completely unresponsive. A week, unable to communicate, twitch a toe, or even flit an eye. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Kristin Burge, 1982-2020

I sat at her bedside, talking incessantly about everything and nothing, joking and crying, and holding my phone up to her ear, playing some of our favorite songs. Her family gathered, her mother and children, friends, women from church — praying, pleading, mourning a life cut short … hoping for a miracle.

I lost my friend to heroin two years ago. It was not quick and painless. She was running from a contempt of court warrant for a bogus case that just wouldn’t die. She’d go to jail, 30 days, 60 days, be released. Repeat. Fines piled up. She couldn’t pay them. She was buried by an endless cycle, a broken legal system.

She was running from a man who wanted to hurt her and wound up in Louisiana. She fell ill there and went to the emergency room. Diagnosis: endocarditis, likely a result of shooting up. Doctors performed emergency open heart surgery to replace a valve — they gave her a pacemaker. She came back home to heal, but didn’t stay long.

I lost my friend to heroin four years ago. It was not quick and painless. I drove her to Heroin Anonymous meetings. Sometimes she’d be high, but I’d pretend not to know; showing up was the first step. Once, after her boyfriend beat her badly, I took her into my home, where she detoxed for a few days — angry as a hornet, her insides churning, wanting more and more and more of the drug. She took a bunch of generic sleep aid and ibuprofen, hoping it’d knock her out; perhaps she wanted to dream through the worst of it. She slept for days, but the urge remained.

I lost my friend to heroin a decade ago. It was not quick and painless. It started when her dad died from cancer. She couldn’t cope, and his pain pills helped. It progressed with an ATV accident. Major surgery, metal pins in her leg. Doctor prescribed pain pills. They helped, maybe a little too much. She took them for too long; now she needed them. When the doctor said no more, she got what she could from a methadone clinic. At some point, it became easier to get drugs on the streets. Heroin felt good — even better than the pills.

I lost my friend to heroin. It was a slow death, and it hurt like hell. Her mother lost a daughter. Her sons lost their mother. The drug took her from them long ago. We mourned her in life, for years. The urge writhed through her blood, guiding her every move for more and more and more. Her kids were taken away, she couldn’t hold a job. She ended up on the streets with who knows who doing who knows what, all for more dope.

She was a good person. She was smart but made bad decisions. Her path kinked along the way and rerouted her aims. In moments of clarity, she tried damn hard to kick it. She loved her kids. She wanted to get better and spend time with them. She wanted to help people with her story of recovery. She’d been in rehab (this time) since December. A couple of weeks ago, she snuck out. The urge won.

I lost my friend to heroin this week. It was not quick and painless. We watched her die, slowly, for a decade, but she pushed the needle in for the last time. We watched her body swell and convulse on life support as it shut down day by day. As I write this, doctors are doing the necessary work to find donor recipient matches for her salvageable organs and tissues. By the time you read this, she will be at peace.

Shara Clark is managing editor of the Flyer.

Categories
News News Blog

Drug Overdose Deaths Rose in Tennessee Last Year Amidst Falling National Trend

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Justin Fox Burks

Drug overdose deaths rose to a record high in Tennessee in 2018, according to new statistics released by the Centers for Disease Controls (CDC), while the numbers were down nationally.

There were 1,837 drug overdose deaths recorded in Tennessee last year, 3 percent more than in 2017. However, such deaths were down 5.1 percent across the country, marking the first decline of overdoses in 25 years.

The figures were discussed recently on an episode of Tennessee Court Talk, a podcast from the Tennessee Supreme Court and the Administrative Office of the Courts. The episode featured Special Agent Tommy Farmer from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) Dangerous Drug Task Force and Dr. Robert Pack, professor of community and behavior health at East Tennessee State University (ETSU).

Farmer, from the TBI, said he wasn’t surprised to see the increase in overdose deaths but hoped the state would “plateau off.” He said the rise is thanks to a transition to illegal drugs from prescription medications.
[pullquote-1] “There’s no doubt it has to do with fentanyl and heroin and the availability of them,” Farmer said.

Pack, the doctor from ETSU, said he didn’t expect a dramatic decrease in the figures here but was pleased to see the shift in the figures nationally. He said headway on reducing overdose deaths in Tennessee won’t be made unless changes are made closer to the source of the problem.

“We have to get upstream as far as we can to stop the cycle of addiction that is occurring in these (communities),” Pack said. “If we can’t stop it, then all we can do is repeat it.”

One way to do that, Pack said, would be to influence kids to be more resistant to drugs.

While much more work needs to be done, Pack and Farmer said gains have been made in Tennessee, particularly addressing the opioid crisis. Pack said more agencies are better reporting overdose deaths now than ever before, which could be one reason for the 2018 spike.

“We’ve said for a long time that the numbers were grossly underreported,” Farmer said. “There’s a lot more out there than we’re actually seeing. I do believe this number indicates that we’re doing a better job of getting good information.”

Overdose deaths are higher in big cities, Farmer said, but that doesn’t always mean the deceased lived in them. Large cities serve as a source of drugs for dealers, so drugs are cheaper there. Also, people want to be closer to the source of their drugs, so they’ll travel to it. When they get the drugs, they don’t wait to take them home, he said, “they’re getting the drugs and overdosing at that location.”

Pack said Tennessee now has better access to care and drugs to help those addicted than ever before.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid pain reliever usually prescribed to cancer patience, is on the rise in Tennessee, Farmer said. The drug is powerful, he said. One thing that means is that it’s shipped in smaller units (like the size of two sugar packs), making it harder for law enforcement to detect.

DEA

The opioid fentanyl can be 100 times more potent than morphine.

The drug is being mixed with methamphetamine or heroin. It’s smuggled to Tennessee largely from suppliers in China or Mexico, Farmer said. For users, “it gives them an incredibly powerful high,” Pack said.

What fentanyl gets mixed with largely depends on what is popular in different areas of the state, Farmer said. In Memphis, that’s heroin, where “there’s always been a steady availability” of the drug, he said. Oxycontin is popular in Oak Ridge and Percocet is favored in Nashville.
[pullquote-2] But dealers will blend their drugs with just about anything, Farmer said, if they fear customer complaints. He said TBI agents have found drug operations outfitted with blenders bought from Walmart or Walgreens producing drugs that are not at all what the dealer said they were selling.

“We’ve seen crazy concoctions, made from anything they can get their hands on, from aspirin to ibuprofen to vitamin B12,” Farmer said. “It doesn’t matter as long as it gets them high. The potency of fentanyl is so powerful in microscopic amounts that it doesn’t take much at all.”

Meth returns

Meth is returning to Tennessee “with a vengeance,” Farmer said. The TBI lab is on track to get more submissions of meth than ever before.

“We’ll probably see more than even back in the heyday and at the height of our meth epidemic when the state of Tennessee had the dubious distinction of being No. 1 in the country, the meth capital of the country,” Farmer said.

Laws here have made it harder to get the ingredients to make meth and seizures of meth labs have decreased here by about 86 percent, Farmer said. But what remains is an “insatiable appetite for stimulants in our state” and a steady supply of meth from Mexican drug cartels.

Pack said methadone clinics are seeing a rise in patients screening positive for meth.

“We can’t just deal with this on the treatment side,” Pack said. “We have got to get upstream and deal with whatever it is that is driving people to seek (meth) to fix their pain, their physical or emotional pain with something other than coping or other effective strategies.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

TBI Director Gwyn Briefs Memphis Rotary

Among the most intriguing revelations made to members of the Rotary Club of Memphis on Tuesday by Tennessee Bureau of Investigation director Mark Gwyn was that
the T.B.I., the Volunteer State’s equivalent of the F.B.I., originated in a newsman’s imagination.

TBI Director Mark Gwyn

This was John M. Jones, the longtime publisher of the East Tennessee Greeneville Sun, who, while covering a murder at some point in the 1950s, became so incensed at the way local police had mucked up the site of the crime (“contamination of evidence,” we call that these days) that he lobbied then Governor Frank Clement for a state-run professional investigative agency. Clement in turn went to work on F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, who gave the idea his blessing, and — voila! — the T.B.I. came to be.

In those days, the agency had but three employees — one for each of the state’s Grand Divisions — but when then Governor (later prison inmate) Ray Blanton began being accused of crimes of his own in the late ’70s (selling gubernatorial pardons and liquor licenses) and siphoning off agency records, the climate was right for the next Governor, Lamar Alexander, to oversee the expansion of the T.B.I. to its present dimensions as a fully staffed and independent investigative unit, with criminal and forensic divisions of various kinds, all armed with up-to-date technology.

And, as Gwyn explained to his luncheon audience at the University Club, the agency’s directors are appointed to six-year terms in cycles designed to make them independent of specific gubernatorial regimes. (Gwyn himself, originally appointed by former Governor Phil Bredesen, is now in his third term.)

The director addressed three areas of principal concern for the T.B.I — drug trafficking, human trafficking, and cyber crime — all, as he maintained, currently on the rise.

Gwyn claimed credit for a crackdown on methamphetamine production in the state that has reduced the number of meth cases from well into the thousands down to a few hundred. He said the newest specter in Tennessee is heroin and, beyond that, in street doses of heroin cut, in potentially lethal proportions, with the painkiller Fentanyl. (Tennessee has for many years ranked first or second among the states in opioid addiction.)

As for human trafficking, the T.B.I. — commendably — has a policy of regarding young women entrapped into sexual servitude more as victims rather than as criminals, and the agency’s investigative efforts are focused on pimps and customers.

Gwyn came off more as a traditionalist than as an idealist, however, and he got a bit of audience reaction to his statement that he still regards marijuana as a gateway drug as well as to his questioning of legal protections currently enjoyed by users and manufacturers of cell phones — as in the famous Apple case involving the contents of an accused terrorist’s iPhone.

 Those are both cutting-line issues, and how they’ll be resolved is still to be determined. But we appreciate Gwyn’s candor and willingness to discuss these points publicly, as he did on Tuesday.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From The Editor: Take a Look at My Life

I’ve seen the needle and the damage done,

a little part of it in everyone …

— Neil Young

I’m reading Neil Young’s autobiography Waging Heavy Peace. Or, I should say, I was reading it. I’ve stopped now, about 250 pages in. I’m a fan of Young’s music, but he writes like a ninth-grader — self-absorbed and obsessed with his “cool stuff” — elaborate train sets, rebuilt cars, vintage guitars, his ranch. It’s written in a stream-of-consciousness fashion that interweaves what he’s doing at the moment with what he did in 1972 with what he plans to do next week (which, since the book came out a couple years after he wrote it, is sort of absurd).

It’s an informal, naïve sort of book, and I stuck with it for a while because Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Crazy Horse made music I love and Young was in the middle of all of it. But Young writes more about his possessions and his friends — including those who fell prey to hard drugs — than he does about music. Bandmate David Crosby was a junkie; Young’s close friends Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry both died from heroin overdoses (inspiring The Needle and the Damage Done).

It’s an object lesson in how lots of money, easy access to dope, and an addictive personality can be a lethal combo — as we saw again this week with the death of the fine actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I’m always amazed that someone as famous as Hoffman, someone surrounded by admirers and caretakers, someone with a longtime relationship, three small children, and a fulfilling career, can somehow find a way to destroy himself, to find the crack in the facade and slip into a lonely, private hell. But it happens — over and over.

It’s important, however, that we not let the sensationalism surrounding this very public heroin death impact another drug-related discussion that’s going in Nashville this week (cover story, p. 17). Marijuana isn’t heroin. Marijuana, as the cover story makes clear, can have very specific medicinal purposes, including treatment of glaucoma, cancer, Alzheimer’s, siezures, and a host of other diseases and conditions. The proposed Tennessee statute is not the kind of sham law introduced in California 20 years ago. It will be one of the strictest in the country and will provide a real benefit for many Tennesseans who are suffering.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to imagine the legislators we now have in the General Assembly making anything but a knee-jerk decision. Marijuana scares them and the false, decades-long conflation of pot with hard drugs is a difficult perception to overcome.

But there is a difference — a big one. At 66, Neil Young has basically been stoned on pot for almost 50 years and is gaining on Willie Nelson. At 46, Philip Seymour Hoffman is dead.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

Putting the Smack Down

Jen, a 24-year-old Memphis woman, first started using heroin six years ago. Now three weeks clean, she once sold everything of value in her parents’ home, even their wedding rings.

“I got in a lot of trouble: burglary, robbing folks. I’d go to Wal-Mart and snatch purses out of people’s baskets,” says Jen, who is enrolled in a year-long treatment program and didn’t want her last name used for this story.

“When I used to go get it, I’d be the only person waiting,” says Jen. “But recently, there’d be times when 10 or 12 cars are waiting.”

Last week, Memphis Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials arrested 10 leaders in a major Mexican heroin ring operating in Memphis. Five others were indicted but have not yet been arrested. Some are believed to be hiding in Mexico.

The ring was active in 15 cities in the southeastern part of the United States, including Nashville and Knoxville. Over the course of the DEA’s year-long investigation — dubbed Operation Black Gold Rush — 50 pounds of black-tar heroin were seized. About six pounds were seized in Memphis.

“This is the first major operation targeting the trafficking of heroin here in years,” says U.S. attorney David Kustoff. “Lately, we’ve seen an increase of heroin cases in Memphis.”

Lt. Ralph Peperone with the Memphis Police Department’s (MPD) Organized Crime Unit agrees that Memphis’ heroin use is on the rise. Last year, MPD seized 5,852 grams of heroin. By the end of July this year, 5,899 grams had been seized.

The West Tennessee Violent Crime and Drug Task Force made one of the largest busts in recent years in March when 8.5 pounds of heroin were seized from a home in Hickory Hill.

“These days, I’d say about one in every three patients has used heroin,” says Kenneth Richardson, one of Jen’s counselors at Synergy Treatment Center. “It’s been on the rise for the past five years, but due to the meth epidemic, it’s kind of taken a backseat.”

If use continues to rise, Richardson says Memphis can expect more robberies as well as an increase in viruses that can be spread by shared needles, such as HIV and Hepatitis C.

“If someone has a heroin addiction, it may cost them $50 to $75 a day, every day,” says Andy Dimond with the Memphis DEA office. “If they don’t have a job, they’re forced to turn to crime, but it’s less likely to be violent crime.”

Dimond says heroin users tend to commit crimes against property rather than people. During DEA investigations, Dimond says they’ve seen everything from computers to a Blockbuster video rental card traded for heroin.

“It has a ripple effect on the entire community,” he says. “Any one of us can have a laptop stolen out of our car because some heroin user needs it to sell or trade.”

Though heroin use is on the rise, marijuana, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine are still the most abused drugs in Memphis.