By Rich Lord
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — Scores of the region’s top law enforcement, health and data experts are six weeks away from detailing a joint attack on the opioid epidemic that has driven overdoses to record levels, said participants in a meeting Monday.
The 75-member advisory group working under U.S. Attorney David Hickton, which issued a 2014 action plan on opioids, has since then quietly developed data and ideas that the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Politics will craft into a plan, to be issued in early October.
“Our goal has been to stop overdose deaths,” Mr. Hickton said of the group that has grown from 18 members at the time of its September 2014 report. By integrating public health and law enforcement, he said, “we’ve actually set in motion a way to try to stem the epidemic, as opposed to watch it, identify it and prosecute.”
Monday’s meeting of the group drew 30 of its members to Mr. Hickton’s office in Pittsburgh.
Terry Miller, director of the Institute of Politics, said the emerging report will catalog every effort to address the opioid epidemic in the region, highlight gaps, include about eight major recommendations which she did not detail, and feature “mini case studies” of effective programs.
The gist: Law enforcement must share broad intelligence on drug markets with the public health people who can fight addiction and head off overdoses, and vice versa.
“That can allow us to move resources to deal with those spikes” of overdoses that occur especially when fentanyl-laced heroin hits the streets, Mr. Hickton said. Pitt has some of the nation’s best disease data experts, he said, and they can help government to respond to overdoses much like it contains a measles outbreak.
His office will keep prosecuting dealers — especially those whose products cause overdoses — but the new effort aims to “catch the problem before it becomes a criminal case, or catch the problem before it becomes an overdose death.”
Participants at the meeting bemoaned continued resistance by some police forces to the anti-overdose drug naloxone; the proliferation of cash-only rehab doctors; public opposition to needle exchange; and slow movement in the Legislature, which has not set a date for a promised special session on opioids.
But they also hailed recent victories, like last week’s launch of the state’s patient drug history database that doctors must now check before they start a patient on narcotics. Washington County District Attorney Eugene Vittone closed the meeting by noting that he had just received news on his cell phone that Donora police had saved someone using naloxone.
The report will precede, by about a month, the closeout in Pittsburgh of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 360 Strategy, in which that agency pressured doctors who wantonly prescribed narcotics; enlisted the aid of pharmacists; and reached out to community groups. After a year, that pilot program will be merged into the new approach.
The group’s 52-page report in 2014 called for training police and paramedics in how to use naloxone to save overdose victims; raising public awareness; helping released prisoners to get addiction treatment; and influencing medical providers to curb painkiller prescribing, in part through implementation of a drug database. Many of its recommendations have been fully or partially implemented.
Since then, though, a painkiller problem has morphed into a plague of heroin and fentanyl addictions and overdoses, fueling a record 3,383 fatal overdoses statewide last year.
Copyright 2016 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette