The police officer who entered Mikaya Feucht’s Ohio apartment found it littered with trash, dirty dishes and plastic milk jugs full of the opioid addict’s vomit.

He also found two toddlers, aged 3 and 2, who watched as the officer uncovered the track marks on their mother’s arms and looked in vain for any food to feed them.

That was three years ago. By the time Mikaya overdosed and died from the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil this summer, her sons were living with their grandparents. But the chaos of watching their mother descend into addiction will burden them for years. They were often hungry and dirty in her care, and spoke of being hit with a belt by her boyfriend, according to their grandparents.
At the funeral home before Mikaya, 24 years old, was cremated, her younger son, Reed, clung to her through the open casket. “And it wasn’t just a quick hug. It was heartbreaking,” says Chuck Curran, his grandfather.

Widespread abuse of powerful opioids has pushed U.S. overdose death rates to all-time highs. It has also traumatized tens of thousands of children. The number of youngsters in foster care in many states has soared, overwhelming social workers and courts. Hospitals that once saw few opioid-addicted newborns are now treating dozens a year.

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A report released Wednesday calls out Allegheny County law enforcement officials and the court system for putting people in jail when alternatives would better serve the defendants and the taxpayers. Too bad it came out after James Marasco died of undetermined causes in the county jail while serving a 10-day sentence for loitering.

The report, by the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics, indicated the jail’s population had swelled to 2,200 despite falling crime rates. Many are locked up while awaiting disposition of their cases; 81 percent of inmates in the county jail are not serving sentences, compared with a national average of 62 percent. Only 19 percent of county inmates have been charged with violent crimes; the rest are there for drugs or the kind of lower-level crimes that landed Mr. Marasco behind bars.

Moreover, as many as 75 percent of inmates have mental illness, substance abuse problems or both. Mr. Marasco had mental illness and used drugs. Mental illness may be the underlying factor in a person’s crimes and should be taken into account before incarceration. The primary purpose of jail is correction, not treatment. It’s unlikely that a person’s mental illness will improve in jail. The illness is likely to worsen, and that is why mentally ill inmates often incur more disciplinary infractions and serve longer sentences than healthy peers.

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Colorado law is not currently clear on marijuana use in public, which has led to a range of local ordinances. Bar and restaurant owners in Denver may now choose to allow their patrons to use (but not smoke) pot indoors, with a possibility for some outdoor smoking areas.

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The question of whether pot should be legal is a big theme on state ballots this year. Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada are also voting on measures that would make the drug legal to possess and use in small amounts for people over 21. Four other states are voting to legalize medical marijuana: Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota.

According to the Atlantic, recent polls show that voters in the five states deciding on recreational marijuana are leaning toward legalization. If all the measures passed, marijuana would be legal for 25 percent of the country’s population, up from where it is currently, at 5 percent.

That echoes a national trend. According to a recent Gallup poll, public support for legal pot has climbed to 60 percent ”” the highest level recorded by the polling group in nearly 50 years. The move toward acceptance might mean more politicians will soon join Pelosi in openly supporting similar measures across the country.

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Here’s what the actual medical research you need to know about ”” from scientists, not lobbyists.

1. The research does not show that marijuana is harmless or OK.

2. Researchers at the University of Mississippi’s Natural Center for Natural Products Research have found that marijuana available today may be up to five times stronger than the stuff available back in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Comparing “hippie pot” to today’s pot is like comparing beer to a bottle of vodka.

3. Medical researchers at Columbia University found that drivers who had used marijuana were more than twice as likely to have a car crash.

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Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander, chairperson of the Health and Human Service Committee, and Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau offered the only votes opposing the measure.

“The D.C. City Council has taken another step toward passing a fatally flawed bill that would legalize assisted suicide in Washington, D.C.,” said Michael Scott, director of the D.C. Catholic Conference, which represents the public policy interests of the Catholic Church in the district. The conference joined a broad-based coalition of other groups in opposing the measure.

“This bill discriminates against our African-American and Hispanic neighbors, sick seniors, the disabled, the uninsured and all who are vulnerable in our community,” Scott said in a statement after the vote. “Our coalition will continue to fight this bill, which has few safeguards to protect the vulnerable and does nothing to help the thousands of D.C. residents desperate for access to better health care and improved social services, such as counseling.”

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The Centers for Disease Control deaths and mortality report for that year [of 2014] shows 2,626,418 total mortalities in the United States, with heart disease and cancer, both at approximately 600,000, lead-ing the way. Within this tabulation, drug-induced deaths would stand ninth amongst “leading causes,” just below influenza/pneumonia (55,227) and kidney disease (48,146), and just above suicide (42,773).

While all opioid overdose deaths for 2014 totaled nearly 29,000, heroin deaths contributed at least 10,500 to that total, almost exactly the same as the toll from gun murders. And while the number of drug overdoses is increasing, overdose deaths caused by diverted prescription opioids””the illegal activity the Post’s investigative piece highlights””have been overtaken in raw numbers by deaths from heroin and illicit synthetic opioids like fentanyl. All signs indicate that it is the supply of these illicit opioids that has accelerated most steeply since 2010 and that has driven deaths sharply higher in the months since the last reported mortality data from 2014.

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Farmers in Northern Cameroon told the researchers that they take double or triple the safe dosage, and feed tramadol to cattle to help them pull plows through the scorching afternoon sun.

“I have to use it,” says Mamadou, a 35-year-old cotton-factory worker in Garoua. He pulled a red pill from his pocket and washed it down with warm pineapple soda. He started using tramadol five years ago, and says he now takes about 675 milligrams daily””more than double the recommended short-term dosage. “Everyone consumes it here,” he says. His mother, his brother, “even the old people.”

Fueled by cut-rate Indian exports and inaction by world narcotics regulators, tramadol dependency extends across Africa, the Middle East and into parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. Tramadol is abused in Guangzhou, Chinese researchers found. The Egyptian government is waging a crackdown within communities including Cairo’s cabdrivers. Saudi officials in May confiscated several thousand pills smuggled in a shipment of frozen meat””one of dozens of busts around the Persian Gulf. A documentary by Pittsburgh filmmakers last year showed tramadol abuse among street children in Ukraine.

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The number of illicit drug deaths in British Columbia surpassed last year’s death toll after just nine months.

The Ministry of Public Safety says in the first nine months of this year there were 555 deaths because of illicit drug overdoses, compared with 508 for all of 2015.

The ministry says fentanyl remains the major contributor to the high number of deaths and in more than 60 per cent of them, the drug was detected.

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Occasionally, I would try to get off the drug. Each attempt began the same way. Step 1: the rounding up of all the pills in my possession, including those secret stashes hidden away in drawers and closets. Debating for hours whether to keep just one, “for emergencies.” Then the leap of faith and the flushing of the pills down the toilet. Step 2: a day or two of feeling all right, as if I could manage this after all. Step 3: a bleak slab of time when the effort needed to get through even the simple tasks of a single day felt stupendous, where the future stretched out before me like a grim series of obligations I was far too tired to carry out. All work on my book would stop. Panic would set in. Then, suddenly, an internal Adderall voice would take over, and I would jump up from my desk and scurry out to refill my prescription ”” almost always a simple thing to achieve ”” or borrow pills from a friend, if need be. And the cycle would begin again. Those moments were all shrouded in secrecy and shame. Very few people in my life knew the extent to which the drug had come to define me.

Over the years, I’ve been told by various experts on the subject that it should not have been so hard to get off Adderall. The drug is supposed to be relatively quick and painless to relinquish. I’ve often wondered whether my inability to give it up was my deepest failing. I’ve found some comfort in seeing my own experience mirrored back to me in the dozens and dozens of disembodied voices on the internet, filling the message boards of the websites devoted to giving up this drug. One post, in particular, has stayed with me, a mother writing on QuittingAdderall.com:

I started taking Adderall in OCT 2010. And my story isn’t much different than most. … The honeymoon period, then all downhill. I feel like I cannot remember who I was, or how it felt, to go one minute of the day not on Adderall. I look back at pictures of myself from before this began and I wonder how I was ever “happy” without it because now I am a nervous wreck if I even come close to not having my pills for the day. There have been nights I have cried laying my daughter down to sleep because I was so ashamed that the time she spent with her mommy that day wasn’t real.

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Ms. Weber had to get a medical marijuana card to buy products for her dog Emmett. That led her to an awkward conversation with a physician who solely prescribes medical marijuana for people.

“I went to the weed doctor and said, ”˜I need a card so I can get it for my dog who had cancer,’” said Ms. Weber, who said she doesn’t smoke pot or drink. “He said, ”˜I don’t have a solution for that.’ So I told him I had insomnia.”

Maureen McCormick, 54, lives in Newport Beach, Calif., and was persuaded of marijuana’s benefits after relatives used cannabis products for their own aches and pains. She thought they would benefit her 14-year-old cat, Bart, who has arthritis in his front legs. “I told the doctor I had a knee that aches, and my shoulder, too,” she said. “I also said I want to use it for my cat.” She got the card in July.

Ms. McCormick is using a tincture by Treatwell, a California company that also makes edibles for humans.

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Just months after London researchers found the two major chemicals in marijuana serve dueling roles towards mental health — one good and one bad — another group of scientists say their work paints a darker finding.

Those who use marijuana when they are young may be at risk of abnormal brain function and lower IQ, they say.

That’s the finding of a team that included Dr. Elizabeth Osuch, a scientist at Lawson Health Research Institute and medical director of the First Episode Mood and Anxiety Program in London

“Many youth in our program use marijuana heavily and, despite past research, believe it improves their psychiatric conditions because it makes them feel better momentarily,” said Osuch.

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Put it on your list if you have not seen it. It should be required viewing for all High School Youth Groups–KSH.

Jackie Semper Orcutt, a Myrtle Beach resident who also was present at the campaign launch, said her son, 21-year-old son SeanMichael died June 11, three minutes after experimenting with a cocktail of drugs that turned out to contain fentanyl, cocaine and heroin.

“He made a devastating choice in a weak moment and it took his life,” Orcutt said. “That’s why I’m here. Just one time can be deadly.”

Parents need to be aware of the prescription opioids’ deadly effects, she said.

“It’s raw, it’s ugly and it’s real,” Orcutt said. “I am the face of this new epidemic and it’s spreading faster than we can have these gatherings.”

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Prescription drug prices continue to climb, putting the pinch on consumers. Some older Americans appear to be seeking an alternative to mainstream medicines that has become easier to get legally in many parts of the country. Just ask Cheech and Chong.

Research published Wednesday found that states that legalized medical marijuana ”” which is sometimes recommended for symptoms like chronic pain, anxiety or depression ”” saw declines in the number of Medicare prescriptions for drugs used to treat those conditions and a dip in spending by Medicare Part D, which covers the cost on prescription medications.

Because the prescriptions for drugs like opioid painkillers and antidepressants ”” and associated Medicare spending on those drugs ”” fell in states where marijuana could feasibly be used as a replacement, the researchers said it appears likely legalization led to a drop in prescriptions. That point, they said, is strengthened because prescriptions didn’t drop for medicines such as blood-thinners, for which marijuana isn’t an alternative.

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A Minnesota medical examiner says Prince died of an accidental fentanyl overdose.

The report from the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office was issued Thursday, more than a month after the music superstar was found dead at age 57 at his Paisley Park mansion.

The single-page report said Prince “self-administered fentanyl,” referring to a synthetic opioid many times more potent than heroin.

Read it all and Get Religion asks pertinent questions about it there.

After years of relentless growth, the number of opioid prescriptions in the United States is finally falling, the first sustained drop since OxyContin hit the market in 1996.

For much of the past two decades, doctors were writing so many prescriptions for the powerful opioid painkillers that, in recent years, there have been enough for every American adult to have a bottle. But for each of the past three years ”” 2013, 2014 and 2015 ”” prescriptions have declined, a review of several sources of data shows.

Experts say the drop is an important early signal that the long-running prescription opioid epidemic may be peaking, that doctors have begun heeding a drumbeat of warnings about the highly addictive nature of the drugs and that federal and state efforts to curb them are having an effect.

“The culture is changing,” said Dr. Bruce Psaty, a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies drug safety. “We are on the downside of a curve with opioid prescribing now.”

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All over the country, employers say they see a disturbing downside of tighter labor markets as they try to rebuild from the worst recession since the Depression: They are struggling to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test.

That hurdle partly stems from the growing ubiquity of drug testing, at corporations with big human resources departments, in industries like trucking where testing is mandated by federal law for safety reasons, and increasingly at smaller companies.

But data suggest employers’ difficulties also reflect an increase in the use of drugs, especially marijuana ”” employers’ main gripe ”” and also heroin and other opioid drugs much in the news.

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When his son fell prey to America’s latest drug scourge, Joel Murphy, a funeral-home worker, knew his family had plenty of company.

He could see it in the faces of the dead.

Many of the corpses he picked up on the job were men in their 20s, with close-cropped hair, baseball caps and gaunt frames. They made him think of his youngest son, Joseph.

“I see him sometimes, I see him in a lot of them,” he said.

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The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications.

On the strength of that promise, OxyContin became America’s bestselling painkiller, and Purdue reaped $31 billion in revenue.

But OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.

The problem offers new insight into why so many people have become addicted to OxyContin, one of the most abused pharmaceuticals in U.S. history.

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Almost half of all Americans personally know someone who has been addicted to prescription painkillers ”” and most people feel the federal government isn’t doing enough to stem a growing epidemic of opioid addiction, a new survey shows.

The survey released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation also found that a large majority of Americans believe that lack of access to care for people suffering from substance abuse is a problem in the United States.

The findings come as abuse of opioids ”” including prescription painkillers and the illegal drug heroin ”” has significantly increased in recent years.

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Even Svante L. Myrick, the mayor of this city, thought the proposal sounded a little crazy, though it was put forth by a committee he had appointed. The plan called for establishing a site where people could legally shoot heroin ”” something that does not exist anywhere in the United States.

“Heroin is bad, and injecting heroin is bad, so how could supervised heroin injection be a good thing?” Mr. Myrick, a Democrat, said.

But he also knew he had to do something drastic to confront the scourge of heroin in his city in central New York. So he was willing to take a chance and embrace the radical notion, knowing well that it would provoke a backlash.

And it has.

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The Church of England has today released its film marking Easter 2016 featuring a passion play which features individuals who have struggled with drug addiction, crime and homelessness on their journey to faith.

The film is based on Psalm 22 and contains the lines “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” words spoken by Jesus on the Cross.

The striking imagery in the film includes a re-enactment of a passion play with Christ’s Crown of Thorns being replaced with a crown of syringes to reflect the struggles of addiction faced by those who have recently come to faith in a Halifax Church called “The Saturday Gathering”.

Read it all and follow the links.

Susan Kubicka-Welander, a short-order cook, went to her pain checkup appointment straight from the lunch-rush shift. “We were really busy,” she told Dr. Robert L. Wergin, trying to smile through deeply etched lines of exhaustion. “Thursdays, it’s Philly cheesesteaks.”

Her back ached from a compression fracture; a shattered elbow was still mending; her left-hip sciatica was screaming louder than usual. She takes a lot of medication for chronic pain, but today it was just not enough.

Yet rather than increasing her dose, Dr. Wergin was tapering her down. “Susan, we’ve got to get you to five pills a day,” he said gently.

She winced.

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As snow began to fall outside, Deb Button snuggled up on her couch, fired up a joint and spoke of the nature of Christ.

“Even if Jesus didn’t smoke weed, he’d still be a stoner,” she said, exhaling a white cloud.

Her kitten sniffed the air curiously.

“Jesus was peaceful and loving. He went from house to house and was always accepted,” she explained. “Only a stoner could do that.”

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It started about three years ago with briefs about vigils for people who died from heroin overdoses. Terry DeMio saw them now and then. One day, a coworker at The Cincinnati Enquirer mentioned that someone in her neighborhood had a heroin addiction.

“I just remember thinking there was something to this,” said DeMio, who was then a general assignment reporter.

So she called a hospital system in Northern Kentucky, St. Elizabeth Healthcare, and told the spokesperson about what she was seeing. He connected DeMio with a physician. On one particular day, that doctor told her, about a third of his patients were addicted to heroin or linked to someone who was. It was the first time DeMio heard the term “heroin epidemic.”
She started writing about heroin for both the Enquirer and its northern Kentucky edition, unsure at the beginning if the term epidemic even applied.

Three years later, she’s quite sure.

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There is no precise diagnosis. There is no cure. There is no way to scientifically prove that a disorder allegedly affecting more than 6 million Americans even exists.

Joseph Helpern and his colleagues at the Medical University of South Carolina have made significant progress studying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder through innovations in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Still, he’ll be the first to tell you that there’s so much they don’t know about ADHD.

He hopes that will change. Helpern believes MRI testing will one day be the tool for doctors to diagnose ADHD.

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Deaths from drug overdoses have jumped in nearly every county across the United States, driven largely by an explosion in addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin.

Some of the largest concentrations of overdose deaths were in Appalachia and the Southwest, according to new county-level estimates released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of these deaths reached a new peak in 2014: 47,055 people, or the equivalent of about 125 Americans every day.

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About two million Americans are hooked on prescription painkillers. In 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written — that’s one bottle for every American adult. CBS News went to West Virginia, a state that is attempting a drastic solution: allowing addicts to sue the doctors who got them hooked….

“We are talking in a certain sense drug traffickers. They are doing nothing but writing and cranking out prescription after prescription after prescription,” said DEA agent Gary Newman.

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Heroin is no longer only an inner-city problem.

Users are young, educated and often fighting an uphill battle to stay clean while deep in the clutches of a disease that is far from free of stigma.

And the highly addictive drug’s increased use and potency have led to overdose deaths rising dramatically in the nation, state and Lowcountry.

Reported opioid deaths across the state jumped 118 percent from 237 in 2013 to 516 in 2014, a trend mirrored in the tri-county area, according to data from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Read it all from the local paper.