Heroin epidemic can be fought with existing tools

Drug users don’t give much thought to anything but getting high. They feel invincible and never consider that the drugs they put into their systems can kill them.

That seems to be particularly true of heroin users. Heroin has become a drug of choice because it’s cheap and it produces a high from which users never want to come down. It’s highly addictive — you can be hooked after using it just once.

It’s also very deadly.

From January through November 2014, the most recent date for which figures are available, the Winnebago County coroner logged 87 overdose deaths -- 55 heroin-related. Earlier this year, Winnebago County recorded 11 suspected drug overdose deaths in one week alone -- Jan. 28-Feb. 3 -- and nine of those are believed to have been caused by heroin.

The heroin epidemic has been growing so quickly that Illinois legislators are stepping in.

House Assistant Majority Leader Lou Lang, a Democrat, and GOP Rep. John Anthony have sponsored legislation to spend $25 million to combat heroin and prescription drug abuse. The legislation is the result of the work of a task force that has traveled around the state in recent months to hear testimony from doctors, coroners, pharmacists, treatment centers, addicts and family members on heroin use and its correlation to prescription drug abuse. The task force visited Rockford in July.

The legislation would require all state and local government agencies that employ law enforcement officers and firefighters to possess drugs to combat heroin overdoses, such as Narcan, the brand name for the opiate antidote naloxone. It also would require that the state Board of Education develop a heroin and opiate drug-prevention program for schools.

Local agencies surely would welcome state money to help them obtain potentially life-saving antidotes such as Narcan, and $25 million in a budget of more than $30 billion is not a lot of money.

However, given Illinois' budget deficit, that money will be hard to get, especially since it’s targeted to help people who don’t have an army of lobbyists working for them.

Even without the state’s help, local communities can do plenty to fight the heroin epidemic.

Winnebago County deputies have been administering Narcan since June. So far they’ve given the heroin antidote to 25 people, saving 23 of them. Smaller police departments in the area also carry the antidote.

Rockford police officers do not carry Narcan, but paramedics, who usually are first on the scene of an overdose, have been administering the antidote for years.

Those who administer the antidote do so because it’s the right thing to do. They didn’t need legislation to compel them.

There are laws in place that need to be publicized in places where drug users and abusers congregate. Too often, drug users are reluctant to call 911 when one of their friends has OD’d because they fear prosecution.

The Emergency Medical Services Access Act, also known as the Good Samaritan Law, protects friends, family members and the overdose victims themselves from prosecution for possessing a small amount of drugs or paraphernalia when they seek medical care, assuming none of the friends or family members supplied or injected the drugs.

The Overdose Prevention and Naloxone Expansion Law allows the public to administer naloxone without legal jeopardy.

Even those who blatantly abuse their bodies deserve a second chance. Flirting with death could provide the impetus for them to turn their lives around. State help would be welcome, but much can be done without it.