Grim local reports out of southwestern Ohio are shedding light on how the opioid epidemic is hitting communities between the coasts.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review took a trip to Montgomery County, Ohio, this month to capture a glimpse into what may be heading east towards its readers in Pennsylvania. The findings were ominous.
The epidemic’s latest wave, one that involves synthetic opioids, is driving an even sharper spike in death totals. In an interview with a coroner whose office oversees roughly two dozen rural counties in the region, the Trib reporters uncovered a painful reality. “I’m looking at 2,900 autopsies, 2,000 of them overdoses,” Dr. Kent Harshbarger said, projecting totals for 2017. “I can’t operate at that capacity.”
Harshbarger described regularly running out of space in his facility’s cooler, even sending bodies to funeral homes and renting refrigerated trailers to cope with overflows brought on by the worsening epidemic.
“We had 13 (bodies) yesterday,” Harshbarger explained, “and 12 of them were overdoses.”
One expert described watching the carfentanil trend (a fentanyl derivative) “make its way down Interstate 71” last summer, moving from Cleveland to Akron to Columbus. “On one Saturday night,” the article said, “Cincinnati police had 22 officers on the streets, and 20 were responding to overdoses.”
Officials in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where 70 people who died of overdoses this year were determined to have fentanyl in their bodies, are taking precautions to deal with the challenges posed by this new wave as it crashes harder into their community.
But it’s already there.
The Trib paraphrased Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Patrick Trainor, as reporting, “that when all is said and done, the death toll for Pennsylvania last year will be near 4,500, with fentanyl and, increasingly, its offshoots, driving the deaths.”
“That total is more than the number of Americans killed during 14 years of the war in Iraq,” Trib reporter Megan Guza wrote.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
