Article “OxyContin a gateway to heroin for upper-income addicts” observes:
“As addicts move from legitimate prescriptions to the black market of pure, precisely measured narcotic pain pills to the dirty world of dealers, needles and kitchen table chemists, health officials and police are noting sharp increases in overdoses, crime and other public health problems…
In Minnesota, one in five people seeking treatment is addicted to opiates, says Carol Falkowski, the former drug abuse strategy officer for Minnesota and a member of the Community Epidemiology Working Group at the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which tracks trends in drug use.
“Heroin is huge. We’ve never had anything like it in this state,” she says. “It’s very affordable. It’s very high purity. Most people did not believe that heroin would happen here in Lake Woebegone, but it really has a grip, not only in the Twin Cities, but all around the state.”
WATCHDOG: Heroin is “huge” here in Lancaster County also, with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 heroin addicts. For the past decade we have had a methadone clinic and physicians can now be readily certified to prescribe Suboxone, both displacing heroin and enabling addicts to function normally and return to families and to gainful employment.
Syringe exchanges are indispensible for both preventing the spread of social diseases and also for befriending addicts, encouraging them to be tested for HIV / Aids, and, when they are ready, expediting their access to detoxification and long term treatment.
The Lancaster Harm Reduction Project is the newly established local syringe exchange.
