Winston-Salem Journal
North Carolina’s hospital emergency departments experienced a nearly 40 percent increase, to 5,745, in opioid overdose cases from 2016 to 2017.
The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday the majority of cases involved individuals who were white (85 percent), male (62 percent) and between the ages of 25 and 34 (39 percent).
By comparison, there were 2,879 cases in 2009, which means there has been a near doubling in cases in the past eight years.
North Carolina is averaging nearly four deaths each day from opioid overdoses, state health officials told legislators in November. The latest data shows that for each opioid overdose death, there are about three hospitalizations and nearly four emergency-room visits.
Dr. Christopher “Crick” Watkins, an emergency-medicine physician at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, said the hospital has experienced “a steady increase in people being treated for opioid overdoses, both in our adult emergency department and in Brenner Children’s Hospital’s pediatric emergency department.”
The opioid-overdose cases that are handled by emergency department are tracked as part of North Carolina’s Opioid Action Plan, developed in 2017 with community partners.
Stokes and Yadkin counties were ranked among the top-10 counties for cases, having at least 100 visits per 100,000 individuals.
Forsyth County was listed in the lowest data point, at between 15.2 and 29.9 cases per 100,000, while the statewide average was 56.9 per 100,000.
Heroin accounted for 68 percent, or 3,924, of the cases, while the others were comprised of opium, other opioids, methadone or other synthetic narcotics.
“We are seeing progress in some areas, but the latest numbers show that we still have a long way to go to stem the tide of this crisis,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, North Carolina’s health secretary, said in a statement.
“We must continue to develop and implement innovative approaches to address the issue, working closely with our partners on both prevention and treatment,” Cohen said.
For 2016, there were 79 overdose deaths from medication and illegal drugs in Forsyth, including 62 listed as unintentional. That’s up from 14 opioid-overdose deaths in 1999.
Overall, the 14-county region of the Triad and Northwest North Carolina had 398 of these drug-related deaths in 2016, including 345 listed as unintentional.
By comparison, there were 247 deaths overall — 216 unintentional — in Wake County for 2016, along with 166 overall — 151 unintentional — in Mecklenburg County and 33 overall — 29 unintentional — in Durham.
Nearly 15,000 opioid-overdose deaths were reported in North Carolina from 2005 to 2016.
The DHHS will begin making quarterly opioid reports available, as well as preliminary monthly , at www.dhhs.state.nc.us.
The DHHS said that in the past year, several measures have been put in place to help stem the opioid crisis. They include:
The law limits the public supply of opioids to no more than five days for first-time prescriptions, and no more than seven days after a surgical procedure.
The DHHS said 60 percent of unintentional opioid deaths in 2016 involved heroin or other synthetic narcotics, compared with less than 20 percent as recently as 2008.
N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein has said that just 10 percent of addicts in North Carolina receive any opioid-addiction treatment.
Laurie Coker, the president of N.C. CANSO and a local and statewide behavioral-health advocate, said that “it is very troubling that because of stigma and funding, our communities do not sufficiently consider that these (opioid-overdose) events are related to the mental health of the individuals.”
“We must remember that mental-health challenges are not just biologically based, but by the vast majority are also the repercussions of unhealed trauma. There is so much research that validates this,” Coker said.
Watkins said Wake Forest Baptist’s peer-support program, begun in 2017 through a grant from nonprofit Hanley Family Foundation, is demonstrating “that patients who have received this type of intervention have a lower incidence of returning to the hospital than those who haven’t.”
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