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A newly released report from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration reveals the scope of a worsening heroin crisis in Pennsylvania, with overdose deaths spiking in local counties even as state officials push for solutions.
The July report, published last week by the DEA’s Philadelphia Field Office, tallies 3,383 drug overdose deaths in the state last year – a 23 percent increase from 2014. Cambria County holds the state’s third-highest death rate, while Blair and Huntingdon counties have seen increases.
“Heroin remains a pervasive drug of abuse,” the report stated, noting that prescription opioids also pose a threat. The new data comes as Gov. Tom Wolf prepares a new program to treat addicts, with the recently approved 2016-17 state budget providing $15 million for antidrug work. Combining that with $5.4 million from the federal government, Wolf’s administration hopes to establish at least 20 centers to treat thousands of users across the state, spokesman Jeff Sheridan said.
“This is a crisis that’s only getting worse,” Sheridan said. “We need to continue to find ways to combat this crisis.”
Cambria County’s overdose death rate is among the highest in the state, with 58 deaths translating to 42.5 per 100,000 residents.
That rate is well over twice Blair County’s and more than four times Centre County’s.
Like most of the state, Blair County’s death rate increased as well from 2014 to 2015, the DEA reported.
Its increase is eclipsed by Huntingdon County’s, however, where overdose deaths more than doubled from three to eight in one year.
“I was rather surprised when I saw Huntingdon had jumped,” said Kelly Maffia, a counselor and social worker at Mainstream Counseling, which contracts with the county government. “It’s hard to completely capture what’s overdose-related, what’s drug-related.”
If the crisis has had a positive effect, Maffia said, it’s that doctors, drug users and the public at large have become more aware of the problem and its public health implications.
“I think we still have work to be done in that area, to help make services more accessible,” she said. “But I think, because we’re having the conversation, certainly that enables individuals to recognize the problem much sooner and hopefully break some of the denial.”
Most obvious among the overdose trends is the sharp and deadly rise in fentanyl, a powerful opioid painkiller sometimes combined with heroin to ramp up potency. Fentanyl is mentioned in more than a quarter of coroners’ overdose reports statewide, the DEA said, nearly doubling the 2014 statistic.
Those numbers are borne out in central Pennsylvania, where fentanyl appears with increasing frequency in autopsy reports. From 2014 to 2015, the drug’s mentions increased by 179 percent in Blair County, 197 percent in Cambria County and 160 percent in Centre County, the agency reported.
These numbers – repeated in cities and towns across the state – have spurred a multi-million-dollar effort in Harrisburg to address opioid abuse.
Wolf announced last month that he would call a special session of the state Legislature this year to handle the crisis.
His call makes the 35th time in history that a Pennsylvania governor has issued such an order.
And while his original request for $34 million was whittled down to $15 million during budget negotiations, Wolf’s administration enters the 2016-17 fiscal year with funds to establish an archipelago of government-approved treatment centers across the state.
The first 20 so-called Opioid Use Disorder Centers of Excellence have already been contacted, Sheridan, his spokesman said. With federal money and an additional $5 million in state Medicaid funds, Wolf hopes to announce more centers later this summer, he said.
The centers are intended to treat thousands of addicts in a push to treat the opioid crisis as a medical, rather than a criminal, problem. Sheridan said Wolf has worked closely with Republican lawmakers, including on a new legislative push to tighten regulations on drug prescribers.
In a broad analysis of the newly released data, DEA officials said the key is to prevent people from using drugs in the first place, praising community groups that include schools, police and religious leaders.
Use of the overdose-response drug naloxone remains important, the officials said, stressing that information and training on the medicine needs to be provided wherever possible. That’s the case in Blair County, where officials planned two naloxone training sessions, one last Friday and one set for 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Blair County Drug and Alcohol office.
The anti-overdose drug, DEA officials wrote, has “undoubtedly saved many lives” in Pennsylvania, particularly since health officials expanded its legal use last year. But it remains one of many routes to address the growing crisis.
“This is an initiative that affects every community in Pennsylvania: urban, rural, suburban,” Sheridan said.
Mirror Staff Writer Ryan Brown is at 946-7457.