HAMILTON, Ohio (AP) — Rachel Snelbaker fought the lonely
battle against her daughter’s heroin abuse for years, trying to get her
into treatment and trying to track her down when she went missing to use
drugs.
It ended suddenly and sadly when the 21-year-old died after a heroin overdose four months ago.
"Nobody wants to think that it’s going to be their child," Snelbaker said. "That day,
everything changed in my life forever."
Now, working alongside others whose lives have been torn apart by heroin, she’s fighting back against the
scourge.
Multiple
efforts are underway in southwest Ohio’s Butler County, where Snelbaker
lives and where this year’s heroin-related deaths are already running
at a pace far ahead of last year’s alarming 55 dead.
Some are
modeled after anti-heroin campaigns mounted in other states, with town
halls, Facebook pages, and poster-waving rallies with simple messages
such as: "Honk If You Hate Heroin!"
One recent night, Snelbaker
joined Tammie Norris, whose daughter just emerged from drug treatment
incarceration, at a meeting of the Butler County Opiate Abuse Task
Force, a loosely knit group of dozens of social services officials,
addiction experts, educators,
parents of addicts and other community
activists that started meeting late last year.
"I think everybody
recognizes that the problem is bigger than what we thought it was," said
Susan Cross Lipnickey, an attorney and a Miami University associate
professor leading the sessions. "It is a 360-degree problem. It is
impacting everybody."
Lipnickey set up participant teams to
strategize, including educational door hangars, lobbying lawmakers, and
organizing school and community forums.
"We can’t change the world
overnight, but we can begin to make incremental changes," said
Lipnickey, who said the local effort in this community about 25 miles
north of Cincinnati can follow approaches used in northern Kentucky.
There,
Dr. Jeremy Engel, seeing the accelerating rise of heroin overdoses in
the St. Elizabeth Healthcare system, helped create the Northern Kentucky
Heroin Impact and Response Workgroup in 2012. It includes business
leaders, treatment experts, law enforcement representatives and
concerned residents.
It pushed successfully for Kentucky’s new law
last year expanding availability of naloxone, a heroin overdose
antidote credited with saving lives if administered quickly. Ohio this
year passed a similar law. The Kentucky measure was on an ambitious list
of goals in a detailed plan for preventing overdose deaths, and for
offering more addiction treatment, family support, education and youth
outreach.
Van Ingram, executive director of the Kentucky Office of
Drug Control Policy, called the plan "a blueprint for communities
across the Commonwealth to develop their own response."
Ohio
Attorney General Mike DeWine said grassroots efforts, "community by
community, neighborhood by neighborhood," will be crucial: "We can’t
arrest our way out of the problem." He and Gov. John Kasich have
launched initiatives to spur drug discussions around the state.
In
the St. Louis area, authorities have organized nearly 50 town halls in
three years and say they are seeing signs of progress after a steep rise
in heroin overdose deaths over the past decade.
"It’s going to
take some time to turn it around," said Jared Opsal, public awareness
specialist for the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse in St.
Louis. "But we’re seeing some progress."
The sessions organized by
the agency cover prevention efforts and resources, usually with law
enforcement, school, and community representatives. The agency created
an online site called "Not Even Once" aimed at children and has run bus
and radio ads.
"Especially if they can get on it early, they can
save lives," Opsal said of community efforts. "Not to sound hyperbolic,
but that’s what it’s really about."
The Butler County task force
hopes to have a large forum later this spring, while Norris and her
childhood friend Candy Murray Abbott, whose son used heroin for years
until stopping last summer, continue to push their own Heroin Control
campaign. They have organized demonstrations in Hamilton.
They
started a Facebook page to allow families and people battling heroin
addiction to network and share information, and realized they weren’t
alone.
"Even though I knew it, I couldn’t admit it," said Norris.
"You’re in denial. If I could buy a house in Denial World, I would just
go there and live."
The two women talk of starting a nonprofit
support organization. Even though their own children appear to be on the
right path for keeping heroin out of their lives, they don’t plan to
stop.
"We’re mothers, and there’s always going to be another
mother out there who needs help," Norris said. "We do it because we know
how lonely it is."
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