It was affecting every socio-economic status out there and so middle class and upper class and lower class young people were dying. So the policy makers both at the state level and in Washington said, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Of course, the drug makers are complicit in this too in that they were promoting their new painkilling drugs to the doctors and the doctors were getting paid to control pain. It’s a perfect recipe to increase the availability. But then three, four years ago we started calling back on that and states started putting some clamps down on the medical field not to prescribe so much. At the same time the Mexican cartel that has supplied mainly the marijuana supply to the United States and the heroin that came in, which is the same chemical makeup as other opioids from Mexico, it was an inferior grade.
The cartels in Mexico, they went and imported the scientist from Columbia. I don’t know if they did that with cash or with guns, but anyway they brought the scientist to Mexico and started making a much purer, better quality heroin. They already had the transportation links in place and so there was a great influx of heroin coming into the United States. At the same time, we were making it tougher to get prescriptions, pain medications. I might have someone that still has some pain, plus I’ve become physically addicted to the opioid pain medication that I’d been receiving. But now my doctor refuses to write it and the cost of the pain pill on the street has gone from $5 to $40. At the same time heroin, I can get a daily dose of heroin from 5 to $10 and it’s a better quality than it ever has been.
That’s the perfect storm Neil of how we’ve got to this point where most of the percept of people affected by alcoholism, which is still the number one drug abused, has remained constant in that it’s gone down a little bit from say in the mid-50% to around 50%. Cocaine and methamphetamine and marijuana have remained pretty stable, maybe a percent or two down. But the opioid addicts have more than doubled. I know here at Valley Hope, which is a pretty significant population number-wise has more than doubled. We’ve seen an increase, what used to be 13% of people that checked in presenting with an opioid problem to about 28% today. That happened over a six, seven year period.
Neil Howe: That really is amazing Neil. Let’s talk about some of the misconceptions, you touched on some there that I think some people think when it’s just a drug problem, somebody’s addicted to drugs it is the drugs on the street, which is the heroin, the coke and whatever else. But really it is a huge prescription drug problem.
Pat George: Huge and both at the state level and the state level they’re trying to get their arms around it. Some of the states have drug tracking whereas up until three, four years ago I might have three different doctors prescribing me a painkiller, none of them aware of that. I go to maybe ten different drug stores, pharmacies to get my prescriptions filled. Now many states either have or are in the process of instituting drug tracking through technology that would identify that Pat George already has one drug prescription for hydrocodone. If I go to the dentist, my dentist is not going to write me that description or if he does then the pharmacy will be able to quickly through the state data bank see that I already have a prescription and not go there. It’s sad that many of the opioid addicts that we treat here at Valley Hope, and I’m sure nationally it’s the same, got a start in the medicine cabinet from their home or their grandparents’ homes.
Countless cases of a teenager that is robbing grandma’s medicine chest because she has a prescription for painkillers. I’ve just recently had personal interaction with a young couple in their early 20s that have become addicted to painkillers. They know that they need help and I ask them their source and it was both sets of grandparents that were treating an arthritic condition with a type of painkiller, that they basically were blackmailing their grandparents into filling these prescriptions a lot more oftener than they would need them so they could satisfy not only their addiction but also use that as income. We are seeing an alarming number of those type of cases where the prescription drugs are abused.
Neil Howe: Pat, there are two main questions that come up when I search online and those are … And I want to get to these, we’re running out of time here. I want to get to these main questions because they’re big questions. First of all is how do you get somebody to rehab when they don’t want to go?
Pat George: Well, and that’s a great question and something that we deal with all the time. Me personally, I’ve made no secret of my challenge, my battle with addiction and having been in a public place I don’t mind publicizing that for the reason that it could help somebody. I get many calls from loved ones, parents, spouses, significant others that have a family member or friend that they know is slowly or rapidly killing themselves. Unlike the shows, Intervention, there’s a proper way to do it. But I always encourage people just to be honest. You know what? They might get mad, but why are you doing this? Why are you confronting them? Is it because you have some spite or is it because you love them? Just as if I had another chronic problem, a heart disease and you notice that I was maybe panting when we go exercise or walk you would caution me.
