ROCKINGHAM — North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein held a meeting Thursday with a slew of Richmond County leaders, law enforcement officials, medical professionals and school staff to discuss the intersecting challenges presented by the opioid crisis.
Professional experience often went hand-in-hand with personal experience, with many in the room recounting stories of loved ones who struggled with opioid addiction or overdosed.
“Opioids stole everything from me,” said Mark Christopher, a recovering addict who has now dedicated his life to helping others. “What happened was opioids snuck up on me and it happened so slowly and so gradually that it demoralized (me) slowly over a period of time.”
Christopher said that what helped him get his life going in a positive direction was getting arrested. He couldn’t pay his bond but was able to be put on house arrest so he could get treatment at Samaritan Colony. If getting treatment required making bond or paying to get into Samaritan Colony, he said, “I wouldn’t be standing here today.”
Based on his experience, Christopher suggested the county could giving an addict who’s been arrested a high bond so they can’t go home where they could get into more trouble, but be willing to let them out pre-trial if they go get some help.
These are the kind of suggestions that Stein will include in a database to be released on Nov. 21.
“It’s an online resource where we’ve identified 45 or 50 innovations, different types of innovations, and we’re just putting those descriptions online so that people can say, ‘Well, you know what, that’s an idea I may want to try here in Richmond County,’” Stein said.
Stein said that he sees three elements that are central to fighting the opioid crisis:
• Prevention: focusing on at-risk young people, stopping the over-prescription of opioids, some of which is due to patients “shopping” between doctors to get more pills than would normally be prescribed.
• Treatment and recovery: looking at addiction as a disease. Stein said one in 10 people with addiction got any effective treatment last year, a statistic which he said would not be tolerated if addiction were treated the same as something like heart disease.
• Enforcement: holding traffickers and dealers responsible for spreading this “poison” within communities.
Richmond County is Stein’s 19th stop on his tour around the state to learn more about efforts to confront the opioid epidemic. He said that has heard similar stories in every community he’s visited.
State Sen. Tom McInnis worked with Stein on passing the Synthetic Opioid Control Act, which closed a loophole that tied law enforcement’s hands in preventing the use of an opioid that is as much as 50 times more potent than heroin and which killed 77 people in North Carolina last year. McInnis highlighted the need for bipartisan solutions to the crisis.
Stein said that the unique insight he got from the meeting was the idea to divert addicts whose criminal activity is “clearly a reflection of their addiction” away from prison and towards treatment, calling this a “long-term solution.”
“There is a lot of passion and caring in this community,” Stein said. “At the same time, there are just vast needs and I think we all need to come together — not only as a county ,but North Carolina as a state and as a nation — and ask ourselves, ‘Do we have the resolve to do the work we need to do to address this problem effectively?’”
Richmond County District Attorney Reece Saunders said he heard many things said in the meeting that have been mentioned in previous years but never materialized.
“I hope that the conversation continues and I think it will,” Saunders said. “It’s so important.”
Reach Gavin Stone at 910-817-2674.