Overdoses continue to rise locally and all across the state of New York

By Ken Tingley

Since 2021, 29 people have died from drug overdoses in Warren County. It would be a lot higher if it wasn’t for the wide availability of Narcan to reverse overdoses.

Last November, New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli released a report that showed overdoses were up during the pandemic by 68 percent.

“Too many New Yorkers have died from the misuse of drugs, but the jump in these numbers is alarming,” DiNapoli wrote. “It is a tragedy that devastates families and impacts our communities in countless ways. The data shows our battle against drug overdose deaths is far from over.”

If Rep. Elise Stefanik really cared about her constituents, this would be her top priority.

Like many, I believed we had the drug problem licked until I read Beth Macy’s book “Dopesick.” It chronicled the devastation heaped on rural communities in Southwest Virginia while reporting for the Roanoke Times over the past 20 years.

Her reporting mirrored what The Post-Star found locally in 2013 when Will Doolittle led a team project to evaluate the extent of the problem..

Doolittle found himself sitting in a Kingsbury trailer in 2014 as a woman told him the horrific story of how her three nieces had been abandoned by their parents.

The girls - just 15, 12 and 10 at the time - had been alone in their Poultney, Vt. house for three days, eating whatever they could find, sleeping with four dogs for warmth and using a garden hose for water.

The pipes and furnace had already been torn out of the house by the parents and sold as scrap so they could buy drugs.

Will wrote this in June 2014 at the start of the “Heroin Hits Home” series:

“The girls were abandoned by parents drawn to other, darker places.”

David Saffer, the local executive director for the Council for Prevention at the time, had sounded the alarm about a new local drug threat to Post-Star editors. It had started with pain pills prescribed by doctors who were told they were not addictive.

None of us had ever heard of Oxycontin, Purdue Pharma or the Sackler family then.

It’s what the author Macy was seeing in Roanoke, Virginia too. Her book later became a miniseries on Hulu.

The Post-Star series on addiction in Hometown, USA and beyond was shocking. A reporter was told by the Washington County undersheriff that the overdose deaths were likely much higher because the police often left out that drugs were suspected on the death certificate so it would not embarrass the family.

Washington County Sheriff Jeff Murphy told of affluent parents going to pawn shops to buy back items their addicted children had stolen and sold.

Just two weeks after we published the “Heroin Hits Home” series a group of community leaders held a public forum to address the problem. What followed was a parade of regular people in the community talking about the devastation that addiction had left in their lives.

I was optimistic the series had a made a difference.

We learned doctors were prescribing fewer pain pills. 

Saffer pulled together a group called “Hometown vs. Heroin” to educate the public and mobilize a response.

The public was educated about the benefits of Narcan in saving lives.

Saratoga County hoped to establish “recovery community centers” to help the addicted.

An opioid diversion program was established with an 87 percent success rate in its early stages and by 2016, just four people had died of overdoses locally. That climbed to 11 in 2017.

When I read obituaries today, if they say “died unexpectedly,” I figure it must be either a suicide or an overdose.

Brian Mann, the North Country radio journalist who has covered the opioid crisis nationally for NPR believes it is still a big problem.

“I think it's pretty bad,” Mann wrote to me. “I haven't done a focused story on the North Country but there are hotspots (Plattsburgh, Saranac Lake...) where according to my sources there's a lot of fentanyl available and a lot of use.”

According to the television station in Watertown, there were 32 overdose deaths in 2021 and 21 more in 2022, although toxicology reports have not been completed on eight deaths that could bring that figure higher.

Closer to home, the statistics are not encouraging.

In 2021, Warren had 49 overdose incidents where 14 people died. But Narcan was used 27 times to save a life.

In 2022, there were 54 incidents and 11 people died. Narcan was used 37 times to save people.

Nearly 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2021. That’s an increase of 781 percent since 1999.

Drug overdoses peaked in New York in 2017 at 3,921 and went down slightly in 2018 and 2019. But the pandemic led to another surge. There were 4,965 in 2020 and 5,841 in 2021.

The “Heroin Hits Home” series in 2014 was an eye-opener for our communities.

But the problem is now worse than ever.