RCADC Calendar of Events

Time: Noon

Location:  RCADC will meet at the District Attorney's Office located at 1008 Bradford Way, Kingston, TN 37763.

Pharmacide: Every 17 days, overdoses kill in Roane County

By Matt Lakin

KINGSTON — Pills killed more people in Roane County last year than guns, knives, car wrecks or plane crashes.

Twenty-one men and women died of accidental drug overdoses here in 2010, according to preliminary statistics from the county medical examiner. That's an average of about one death every 17 days.

The first died 18 days into the year, the last a week before Christmas. The youngest was 23, the oldest 60.

Last year's overdose rate registered at more than 38 deaths per 100,000 people — almost four times higher than the average rate in Tennessee's most populous county.

"We have more OD's per capita than anybody I know of," Roane County Sheriff Jack Stockton said. "They're from all ages and all walks of life. There's no family, no economic background the pill epidemic doesn't reach.

"The reason I know is because my son's a pill addict. He'll end up an overdose. I expect a call any day."

The sheriff hasn't seen or heard from his 30-year-old son in months.

"He was a red-haired, blue-eyed, all-American boy," Stockton said. "He looked like Opie Taylor. Now I don't know where he is. He got clean once and relapsed. I don't expect him to come around again."

The stories, the half-hearted apologies, the hollow excuses all start to sound the same after a while — whether told to a sheriff or a father.

"That's what hurts the most," Stockton said. "It's not them anymore. It's the pills. The pills are doing the talking. You can see it in the way they shy away from you. Most of them never even admit they have a problem."

The first month of this year brought five reported overdose deaths. A Rockwood couple died in the same room this spring after blowing their monthly check on pills, officials said.

"We had an 11-year-old a few years ago," said Dr. William Bennett, the county medical examiner. "Two times we've had patients caught chewing a fentanyl patch in the drugstore before they're even out the door. We've found up to 400 methadone pills at one death scene before.

"All these overdoses are from prescription drugs, but the great majority didn't have prescriptions for the drugs that killed them. It's not like people are bringing these pills in by the truckload from Mexico. These are legal drugs coming through legal channels."

For every death, more lives start down the road to addiction. The sheriff estimates his officers confront the problem on a daily, even hourly basis.

"The main thing we deal with is thefts to pay for the pills," he said. "About 30 percent of my jail population is in here for this. We're already over capacity and busting at the seams. When you've got middle-schoolers who can tell you where they can buy pills anywhere in their neighborhood, you know it's a problem. We've even got older people selling. You hate to put Mom and Pop in jail."

He and Bennett blame unemployment, overprescribing doctors and the easy accessibility of painkillers for the spread of addiction in their county. They don't see an immediate solution in sight.

"A lot of people after the textile mills left got into the business of being sick," Bennett said. "When it started, TennCare provided payment for narcotics. People were getting narcotics and selling them. Their job got to be being in pain. Now we're in Oxycontin central."

                                                                Knoxville News Sentinel, October 21, 2011

Binge Drinking Proves Health Inequalities and Similarities

A new study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Adult and Community Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, "Binge Drinking – United States, 2009," highlights some disparities among adults who binge drink. The study was released recently as an MMWR Supplement and is included in the first periodic CDC Health Disparities and Inequalities Report.

The study is the first to include data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The study provides more insight into the characteristics of the populations that are affected by disparities in binge drinking:

• More than 15 percent of U.S. adults report binge drinking during the past month and do so, on average, four times a month. 

• Among binge drinkers, the largest average number of drinks consumed by men (nine drinks) and women (six drinks) on any occasion far exceeds the limits that define this health risk behavior.

• Adults with more years of education and greater household earnings are most likely to report binge drinking at least once in the past month, after accounting for factors like age and gender. However, binge drinkers with less than high school education or household incomes under $15,000 reported the greatest number of binge drinking occasions per month (five occasions).

• Compared to other racial/ethnic groups, American Indians and Alaska Natives who binge drink reported consuming the largest average number of drinks (eight drinks) on a single drinking occasion. (This racial/ethnic disparity takes into account the age and gender distribution of the adults in the study.)

To assess binge drinking by sex, age group, race/ethnicity, education level, income level, and disability status at the individual level, as well as geographic disparities in binge drinking at the state level, the CDC analyzed data from the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System landline phone survey on binge drinking prevalence, frequency (i.e., the average number of binge drinking episodes), and intensity (i.e., the average largest number of drinks consumed by binge drinkers). 

Researchers suggested the need to implement such evidence-based population-level strategies to prevent binge drinking as increasing alcohol excise taxes, regulating alcohol outlet density, and maintaining and enforcing the age 21 years minimum legal drinking age. For specific high-risk groups – including American Indians and Alaska Natives – national, state, and local organizations can develop and evaluate culturally-appropriate prevention and intervention strategies to reduce overall binge drinking.

Dafna Kanny, PhD, the lead author of the study, said their research proves that binge drinking affects all Americans, no matter their cultural, ethnic, social, or economic background.

“As much as we’d like to use the tools of epidemiology for our study results, this issue really affects everyone,” Dr. Kanny says. “It’s a lifespan of behavior, a phenomenon, unfortunately, that we’re trying to bring attention to.”

Dr. Kanny and her team would like to see more alcohol environmental changes that wouldn’t focus so much on demographics, but, rather, on everyone. 

“Alcohol has become cheap, more marketed, and it has become the social norm to drink excessively,” she says. “If binge drinking is affecting everyone, wouldn’t it be wiser to try to address everybody, rather than tailor one intervention?”