Overdose problem threatens region

Fred Brason, II, CEO and President of the Lazarus Project, speaks in Clay County

• Listen to the audio of the entire meeting.

The CEO of Project Lazarus, Fred Brason II, spoke with members of the Coalition for a Safe and Drug-Free Clay County Monday to discuss the rapidly growing drug overdose problem in Western North Carolina.

“We didn’t get into it overnight, we’re not going to get out of it overnight,” he said.

Of the sixteen North Carolina counties with the highest unintentional and undetermined intent poisoning death rates, ten were in the mountain region. Five were in the piedmont and only one county in the costal region had a high death rate.

“Our problems are worse than their problems and yet where does most of the money get funneled to?” Brason said. “I’ve rattled cages in Washington D.C. and I’ve rattled cages in Raleigh and I will continue to do so [until] we get some eyes focused on us.”

Steve Hudson, the chairperson of Coalition for a Safe and Drug-Free Clay County, expressed his frustration with government assistance.

“If Washington won’t come to us, we’re going to Washington,” he said. “We sent 58 certified letters to our state legislator trying to get help regionally and you know how many responses we got? Zero. I’m a Vietnam veteran, volunteer, stayed over there 28 months, because I believe in my country and what it stands for… and not one response.”

Brason stressed that the solution was on the local level, not the national level.

“Don’t look to Washington and don’t look to Raleigh to be the end all because it’s not going to be,” he said. “It’s got to happen here. It’s got to happen where the rubber meets the road, where the community can make a difference. Because Raleigh’s not going to write a check right now. There’s nothing to write it on.”

Across the state death rates for unintentional and undetermined intent poisonings per 100,000 residents have risen from 3.5 deaths in 1999 to 11.5 in 2008.

Sheriff Joe Shook said he requires autopsies of anyone who dies alone or is under 60.

“It costs the county a thousand dollars,” he said. “But then we know exactly what happened to that person.”

The latest data available states that 45.4 percent of all drugs dispensed in North Carolina are narcotics.

“Clay County is not one of the worst but is in the upper echelon,” Brason said, noting that the effort against substance abuse must be fought across county lines. “If we don’t do this regionally, we’re really just spinning our wheels.”

Shook said that drug abuse is currently the biggest problem facing Clay County.

“This problem will never be fixed until we get our parents or grandparents to admit, ‘My child has a problem,’” he said. “Sometimes your child is better off in jail.”

Brason said that 4,146,484 prescriptions for Hydrocodone were written in North Carolina last year. That’s number is only slightly less than half of the state’s 9 million population.

Data showed that Cherokee County dispensed more outpatient prescriptions for controlled substances in 2008 than any other county in the state except for Wilkes. Brason said there was a direct correlation between more prescriptions and higher death rates.

“We can’t say, ‘you must dispense less,’ but we do need more education,” he said.

In Wilkes County, where Brason began Project Lazarus, accidental poisonings are recorded daily due to frequency. In contrast, Clay County’s 2009 poisonings would not be databased until this August, Brason said.

“It seems like substance abuse has gone up since the decline of the economy,” Clay County Schools resource officer Tony Ellis said.

Brason noted that both crime and drug abuse have both surged since the recession began.

“We’ve got people in [Western NC] who died because they did not listen to their doctor and they took their pain medication incorrectly,” he said.

From 1999 to 2003 the entire state experienced a 134 percent increase in accidental poisonings.

“The schools didn’t create the problem but it’s showing up on their doorstep, so they have to deal with the issue,” he said.

Brason said he warns pastors about the plight of drug abuse in the faith community as well.

“If you have 100 people in your congregation I guarantee you there’s addiction in there,” he said.

Hudson said he didn’t know how to increase awareness across the board.

“I can’t even wake up the preachers here to get them together,” he said. “This is a huge problem.”

More than 60 percent of people who try drugs for the first time do so because they’re curious, Brason said. Therefore, he said the first step is to increase community awareness.

While teaching continuing medical education in a local hospital, Brason said he asked the physicians if they knew where to send a patient if a substance abuse issue exists.

Clay County doesn’t have the money to pay someone to coordinate the effort against drug abuse, Hudson said.

“Appalachia is going to be the first to solve the problems where other communities haven’t been able to,” Brason said. “My agenda is that we fix the problem in Western North Carolina… My agenda is to save lives.”