The continuing rise of overdose deaths in New York and Massachusetts underscores the need for access to effective drug rehab for opioid addicts.

The Northeast states, including New England and New York, have been especially hard hit by the opioid epidemic, and recent numbers from 2016 show that opioid deaths are continuing to rise substantially.

In Massachusetts, for example, opioid overdoses rose 16 percent in 2016, driven in large part by more fentanyl in the heroin supply, according to a report by the Boston Globe.

“It provided maybe an extra boost in the effects of heroin. As a result it became popular with those who use heroin,” Colonel Richard D. McKeon, the Massachusetts State Police superintendent, told The Boston Globe. “We’ve seen them chasing fentanyl.”

The 877 opioid overdose deaths in Massachusetts didn’t include numbers from the state’s largest cities, including Boston, Worcester, Springfield and Pittsfield. Because of this the number is likely to be higher when the final data is in.

Joanne Peterson, executive director of Learn to Cope, a Massachusetts nonprofit support network for families, said that 2016 was the worst year for overdose deaths since she began in 2004.

“My wall is covered in obituaries,” she said. “It could be wallpaper if this doesn’t get better.”

Massachusetts is not alone. New York state had one of the most significant increases in the overdose rate between 2014 and 2015, and the trend was expected to continue when 2016 data is released. However, there is positive news about recovery in the Empire State. A June 2016 report from the New York State Comptroller found that residents of the state are more likely to enter New York treatment and rehab centers than people in other states. The comptroller promised that New York state would continue to invest in access to addiction treatment centers.

“For the sake of our children and families, it is imperative that we strengthen access to support and treatment services in every community and target resources to combat this epidemic in all its forms,” New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said last year. “Supporting New Yorkers struggling with substance use is critically important. In some cases, families have fought for years to free their loved ones from the grips of addiction.” Read more “the fix”…

Autumn didn’t realize she had PTSD when she found her daughter near death on the floor. She realized it when she tried to kill her daughter’s dealer.

“I think back to what I did and it’s so irrational. It sickens me.” Autumn (requested first name only) knows the exact moment she developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from her daughter’s drug addiction. It wasn’t heading upstairs to where her son and daughter shared a room, and seeing her daughter Sara* near death, lying on the carpet and making a rasping, gurgling noise. Autumn’s son had been lying in bed, trying to ignore his sister calling his name. He was inured to her random, erratic behaviors fueled by drugs, and wanted to sleep. It wasn’t until Sara, desperate and unable to speak, crawled out of her bed and began banging her head against the door that he leaped up and screamed for their mother.

It wasn’t calling 911 while she tried to wake her unresponsive daughter that sent Autumn over the edge. And it wasn’t pulling Sara down the stairs and knocking a can of paint over from an unfinished project, so that when she lay her daughter on the hard ground, the paint pooled around her body. It was after Autumn had done all of this, and could do nothing more.

“Just seeing her laying there on the floor, so lifeless, it made me just lose my mind,” Autumn says during a phone interview with The Fix. The ambulance arrived, and a paramedic told Autumn that 20 minutes longer and Sara wouldn’t have made it. Instead, Sara was revived by a shot of Narcan and sent home. She lay on the couch, her mother sitting with her, stroking her hair. “I thought I was going to lose her,” says Autumn.

Sitting on the couch while her daughter slept, Autumn heard Sara’s phone ping and checked the messages. Other drug users were texting, asking Sara for drug hookups, and then a dealer texted, demanding $300 that Sara owed him for drugs. Autumn was thinking of how to respond when the phone rang. She answered and impulsively pretended to be Sara. “I played it off as if I were her; I sound like her. I asked him to meet me at 5th street, outside of town.”

Autumn, a single mother in suburbia who worked full-time, picked up her two guns—a 35 and 380—took her phone and Sara’s, and drove her car to the designated meeting point on a dirt road to wait. Soon, a car pulled up noisily in front of her and parked. A young man got out of the driver’s side and came over to Autumn’s car, opened the passenger door, and looked in, startled. “You aren’t Sara,” he said.

Autumn leaned over, pumped full of adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones of rage and suffering, and asked, “Do you want your money or not?” The young man shrugged and leaned into the car, sat down.

Autumn says, voice shaking, “I pulled my 35 caliber out and put it in his face and said ‘My daughter almost died last night, and all you care about is your money.’ I jumped on him and bit him, scratched him, attacked him.” Autumn felt nothing but sheer rage.

“He got the gun from me and took the bullets out. I grabbed my 380 and put it in his face and it was another struggle. He disarmed me again, and then got out of my car and grabbed the bullets off the ground and threw them in the back of his truck. I jumped in the back of his truck to grab the bullets. He took off and I jumped out and threw the bullets at him.” The car spun off, shooting rocks at Autumn as she screamed toward him, and a life she no longer recognized. Read more “the fix”…

Even after I got sober, I still relied on my father’s money to get me out of trouble. It was demoralizing and eventually I drank.

I always we knew we had a bit of money tucked away somewhere. It was the type you don’t really know about. The reason I didn’t really know we had it was because my father, who got sober when I was eight, was obsessively modest. He’d been enabled something awful by his own father, who bailed him out of jail again and again, kept the stories out of the papers, replaced the cars, and even the French doors at my aunt’s house when my father drove through them after a long night out.

There was the convertible he’d driven into a pool—only to sit on the trunk with his friend afterwards and have another beer—and the embarrassment he described when the white-gloved chauffeur carried his surfboard down to the beach. His favorite movie was Arthur, and when he got sober he decided he did not want me to live like that. He wanted to protect his children from the trappings that had enabled him to avoid hitting bottom.

With my dad sober, we moved to a modest house in a good part of town, but not the best. We went mostly to the local public schools. When the time came, I went to the good-enough prep school, not the prestigious one he’d been to. My parents drove used cars, bought us secondhand clothes. My dad always said, “I want you to stand on your own two feet, my boy.”

Things went well until I started drinking at 14. I was at a friend’s place out at the beach the first time I drank. They were all a bit older, so drank with ease and moderation. I blacked out. I vomited all over the place. I touched someone’s boob. I told someone else I was gay. The next morning, my friend’s father told me this was the way of my people.

“There’s something about you guys,” he said, “you just can’t drink.”

And I couldn’t. He’d been through this with my dad and his brother so he knew, as I started off to the races again that afternoon. I drank to excess again that night and returned to the new school year determined to organize my life entirely around booze.

“I’ll be a diplomat,” I pronounced grandly.

I studied French and German. I cultivated a sophisticated circle of friends with whom I could party. I worked my way through the stock of wine we had at home, through my friends’ parents’ wine cellars, started smoking, and eventually stopped playing school sports because I was too hungover. Initially there was little in the way of consequences. I had an allowance, there was a cleaning lady. My parents were lenient and were always out. When I needed more money to keep up with my new friends, I got a job and my grades fell off. My first consequence was that I was politely asked to leave my high school. I went to another that specialized in the troubled children of the well-to-do. Then I went to another. I crashed a motorbike. Then a car. Each time I was bailed out without question. But when it was time for me to go to college, my dad was worried.

“I’ll put you through college,” he said, “but then you’re on your own.”

To prove his point, he had me sign a contract agreeing to his ending my financial support upon graduation. And he did! I saw college as a blank check, a cloistered environment in which I could drink with impunity. I saw no reason to leave and because I liked it, I did well. The terrible thing is that my father, judging my escalating drinking, did exactly as he said when I graduated. The results were dramatic. It was clear I had no idea how to manage my life. I washed up in AA ten months later. I was 24.

I waited till I had 90 days to tell my dad I had stopped drinking. He was heartened, and the doors to his financial support started to open again. It started with an international trip, but eventually I was creating situations where I needed to be bailed out. Health costs. Credit cards. Overdrafts. We’d sit down every few months and look over my disastrous finances. He’d write a few checks, bail me out, and then I’d be “standing on my own two feet” till we met again. It was demoralizing and I wasn’t finding my way towards reality. I didn’t do the steps or get a sponsor either, and eventually I drank. Read more “the fix”…

MONDAY, Feb. 20, 2017 (HealthDay News) — People addicted to opioids treated in a hospital emergency department do better when they receive medication to reduce opioid cravings, researchers report.

“The ED [emergency department] visit is an ideal opportunity to identify patients with opioid use disorder and initiate treatment and direct referral, similar to best practices for other diseases, such as high blood pressure and diabetes,” said study co-leader Dr. Gail D’Onofrio in a Yale University news release.

D’Onofrio is chair of emergency medicine at the university.

The study looked at 290 people addicted to opioids who went to an emergency department. They received one of three treatments: a referral to addiction treatment services; a short interview including discussion of treatment; or a brief interview and the medication buprenorphine.

The patients given medication also continued treatment with their primary care doctor.

After two months of follow-up, patients who received buprenorphine were more likely to be in formal addiction treatment and to report reduced opioid use than those in the other two groups.

The United States is currently in the throes of an unprecedented opioid epidemic. More than six out of 10 overdose deaths involve opioid drugs, and 91 Americans die every day from prescription opioids or heroin, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Deaths from prescription painkillers — such as oxycodone (Oxycontin) — as well as heroin and methadone have more than quadrupled since 1999, according to the CDC.  Read more…

“Once I was shown what to do—making all this easy money with no repercussion from it, greed took over.”

Disgraced ex-cop Ken Eurell, who was memorialized in the 2015 documentary, The Seven Five, just published a memoir about his nefarious years as a police officer in one of the most corrupt police departments in the United States. The book, Betrayal in Blue: The Shocking Memoir of the Scandal that Rocked the NYPD, was co-written by Edgar Award winning author Burl Barer and journalist Frank C. Girardot Jr.

“It was like the heyday of crack,” said DEA special agent Mike Troster in the documentary. East New York in Brooklyn was a war zone, and according to Troster, “It was a hotbed for crime in New York City.”

In the late 1980s, the 75th precinct was the deadliest in the country. It handled the most homicides, including the most police shootings. “It was the highest murder rate in the country,” said Kenny Eurell, who worked there from 1982 to 1990. It was a time of 3,500 homicides per year in the city.

Eurell’s crimes escalated from drinking on the job to robberies, extortion, and selling cocaine after he’d retired on a cop’s pension. His book tells the story of being sucked into a world of crime and free money through his dirty cop partner, Michael Dowd.

While the doc focused mostly on Dowd, Eurell’s book reveals everything that was left out when much of the movie “ended up on the cutting room floor.”

The Fix landed an exclusive interview with the infamous criminal.

Eurell told us he wanted to set the record straight on his years of working with coked-out Dowd. Yes, they robbed unsuspecting citizens, moved on to selling cocaine and finally went into free-fall after ripping off drug dealers. “It was greed,” said Eurell, “pure and simple. The money was so easy to make. It was impossible to turn away.”

“I became a cop at age 20 and was on the job for seven years before being partnered with Mike [Dowd]. It never occurred to me to go on a burglary call and grab the stuff that the burglar missed. It was not in my mindset until I was partnered with Mike. I don’t want to say I was brainwashed, but let’s just say, I was introduced to a different way to do police work.”

I asked him why he’d used the word “brainwashed.” He said, “I say ‘brainwashed’ because when we got in the [squad] car together, Mike talked about making money about 98% of the time. The other 2% of the time he talked about women. Once I was shown what to do—making all this easy money with no repercussion from it, greed took over.”

Does Eurell have regrets about what he did? “I absolutely have regrets,” he said. “I wish I’d never took that first bit of money that Mike threw at me. I wish I had the courage to say to myself, ‘This is wrong. Don’t take the money.’ Even though that would’ve cut my own throat and ruined my career.”

He explained, “You can’t turn somebody in while you’re on the job because the word ‘rat’ will follow you around and destroy your career. There were guys when I was working—cops just suspected them of being a rat or a snitch—and every day, all the tires on their personal car would be cut. They go into work and their lockers would be in the shower, turned upside down, the locks broken open, all their stuff dumped out. Dead rats from the neighborhood were thrown onto the hood of their car. It makes a working situation absolutely impossible.”

“It sounds like the Mafia,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Eurell. “It’s that mentality.” Read more “the fix”…

Opening up about your sobriety can be scary, but you’ll probably reap numerous benefits as a result.

For many people, sobriety is something that at first is scary, stressful and even a little shameful. There can be a lot of guilt associated with the need to enter recovery, and it can be difficult to tell people that you have decided to be sober. Sometimes it seems as if admitting that is also a way of disclosing that you had a problem in the first place. One of the scariest parts of being open about your sobriety is not knowing how people will react to the fact.

For myself, coming out of the sobriety closet was something I didn’t think I’d ever do in the beginning. I was ashamed of myself for even being in a situation where I had to get sober, and sharing that with the world was the last thing I wanted to do. But as time progressed, I realized how weighed down I felt by my secret. So one day I decided to be honest—with everyone. I posted on Facebook about my sobriety and braced myself for the backlash. But to my surprise, there wasn’t any. People were kind and understanding, and it made me feel like sharing my experience was the best thing I could have done.

There are numerous benefits to coming out of the closet with your sobriety. These are just a few.

1. If people know you are sober, they won’t unknowingly pressure you to drink. For me, this was a huge benefit. Since I had posted on social media about sobriety, most people in my life knew about my choice—even people who weren’t close friends. This was beneficial because when I went out with friends, no one asked if I wanted a drink or tried to get me to partake in the night’s festivities in that sense. People knew about the choice I had made and were respectful of my decision to remain sober. In early sobriety, it would have been easy to take a drink if someone unknowingly offered me one. But because I had spoken up about sobriety, I never had to deal with that situation.
2. You’ll feel as if a huge weight has been lifted. I know that being open about sobriety is scary for some people, or they feel as if it is a private matter. But carrying a secret is draining. It starts to weigh on you, and it can be harder and harder to shake the feeling that you’re not being honest with the people in your life. But once you tell people about your sobriety, it feels as if you can breathe again. Maybe this just means telling one person, or a few close friends, or even announcing it on social media. That part is up to each individual. But once you begin to let go of the shame and guilt associated with being sober, you’ll find that you feel like a lighter and more genuine version of yourself.
3. You may be able to help people. When I first got sober, I had people who helped me. They shared advice, and told me how they had stayed sober over time. I admired them for being strong and able to share their stories because it helped me in my own sobriety. I never dreamed that I’d one day be doing the same for people; through coming out with my sobriety, I’ve found myself giving advice to many people. Some of them are friends, and some are strangers. But it doesn’t matter because addiction is addiction, and people who need help are people who need help. Being able to use my own experiences for good and to give back to others has been one of the most rewarding aspects of sobriety. It is also what keeps me sober. Read more “the fix”…