The needle brought euphoria,
numbness — and disease. But Brett craved heroin so desperately he
ignored the danger and shot up anyway.
“There’s this insanity that goes with addiction. I pretty much wanted to die. I had no self-esteem. I was dope-sick,” said the 30-year-old recovering addict from Louisville, who shared syringes with other addicts and now must live with hepatitis C.
Thousands of area addicts suffer the same fate. This region of the country — one of the hardest hit by intravenous heroin and painkiller abuse — is being ravaged by the diseases that follow in their wake: hepatitis and HIV. And the danger reaches far beyond addicts and their families, threatening a wide swath of the population.
A drug-fueled HIV outbreak in Southern Indiana struck 191 people last year, giving its epicenter, Austin, a higher incidence of the virus that causes AIDS than any country in sub-Saharan Africa. A subsequent report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 220 U.S. counties are at high risk for a similarly rapid spread of HIV and hepatitis C among drug users. About a quarter of those counties — 54 — are in Kentucky.
Other recent CDC research shows hepatitis, an insidious liver disease, is already skyrocketing in the region.
Acute hepatitis B rose 114 percent in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia from 2009-2013, even as incidence remained stable nationally, one study said. Another found the rate of new hepatitis C cases among people 30 and younger more than tripled from 2006-2012 in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. More recently, cases of acute hepatitis B and C in Kentucky reached 281 last year, up from 120 in 2003; and cases in Indiana reached 243 in 2014, the latest year for which numbers are available there.
Health experts worry the region could be a harbinger for the nation as the opioid epidemic grows. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said hepatitis C is now the No. 1 cause of death from reportable infectious diseases nationally, and Southern Indiana’s HIV outbreak “was a wakeup call” about that virus for communities across America.
Dr. William Cooke, a physician at Foundations Family Medicine in Austin who treats dozens of patients with HIV and hepatitis, said many communities are ill-equipped to handle the threat. All over the region and nation, he said, there’s too little substance abuse treatment, too little emphasis on the poverty that often accompanies addiction and too little compassion.
“(Austin) has a rural, impoverished, drug-using population. There are places all across America that look like this …Other places are at the same risk,” Cooke said. “The lesson in Austin is we can’t ignore people … If we let a group of people struggle and don’t help them, it affects all of us.”
From addict to liver patient
Growing up in a middle-class family in Bullitt County, Brett never envisioned he would spiral into addiction and illness.
Like many of his peers, he began drinking alcohol and smoking pot as a young teenager. After trying pain pills in high school, he abused them on and off in early adulthood, eventually favoring Opana as his drug of choice. But when Kentucky cracked down on prescription drug abuse, he said, Opana became difficult to get and very expensive. Heroin was a quarter of the price or less, and widely available on the street.
“I stopped doing Opanas and started doing heroin,” said Brett, who didn’t want his last name used because of the stigma surrounding hepatitis C and drug abuse. “At first, I was just trying to get an opiate fix. But once I started doing heroin, it was about getting heroin.”
Snorting the drug would delay its effect, so he chose to shoot up. Soon the quest to get high gave way to a quest to just feel normal and stave off withdrawal.
Brett knew about the dangers of blood-borne diseases, and at first did what he could to avoid them, buying his own needles every day. But eventually he stopped caring about contracting diseases — although he tried to protect others by telling anyone who wanted to share needles with him, “I probably have hepatitis C.”
His lowest point came in spring 2014, when he was living with his mom, went into the bathroom to shoot up and passed out on the toilet from an overdose. An emergency worker revived him with naloxone in an ambulance on the way to the emergency room.
Brett’s mom urged him to get help, which he sought at the Jefferson Alcohol and Drug Abuse Center a few days after his overdose. While there, he had an HIV test that came back negative. It wasn’t until that fall that he finally got tested for hepatitis.
“Until then, I didn’t want to get tested because I wanted to keep the possibility of doubt,” he said. “I knew there was a 98 percent chance that I had it. But I still remember being in shock, almost, when I heard that I actually did. It was a heavy thing.”
Now two years sober, Brett has been seeing a doctor who specializes in hepatitis, getting regular blood tests and trying to live a healthy life to keep the disease from progressing. Brett’s doctor last year wrote him a prescription for a medication called Harvoni that can potentially cure the disease. But it costs more than $1,000 a pill and his Medicaid managed care plan denied it.
“There’s this insanity that goes with addiction. I pretty much wanted to die. I had no self-esteem. I was dope-sick,” said the 30-year-old recovering addict from Louisville, who shared syringes with other addicts and now must live with hepatitis C.
Thousands of area addicts suffer the same fate. This region of the country — one of the hardest hit by intravenous heroin and painkiller abuse — is being ravaged by the diseases that follow in their wake: hepatitis and HIV. And the danger reaches far beyond addicts and their families, threatening a wide swath of the population.
A drug-fueled HIV outbreak in Southern Indiana struck 191 people last year, giving its epicenter, Austin, a higher incidence of the virus that causes AIDS than any country in sub-Saharan Africa. A subsequent report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 220 U.S. counties are at high risk for a similarly rapid spread of HIV and hepatitis C among drug users. About a quarter of those counties — 54 — are in Kentucky.
Other recent CDC research shows hepatitis, an insidious liver disease, is already skyrocketing in the region.
Acute hepatitis B rose 114 percent in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia from 2009-2013, even as incidence remained stable nationally, one study said. Another found the rate of new hepatitis C cases among people 30 and younger more than tripled from 2006-2012 in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. More recently, cases of acute hepatitis B and C in Kentucky reached 281 last year, up from 120 in 2003; and cases in Indiana reached 243 in 2014, the latest year for which numbers are available there.
Health experts worry the region could be a harbinger for the nation as the opioid epidemic grows. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said hepatitis C is now the No. 1 cause of death from reportable infectious diseases nationally, and Southern Indiana’s HIV outbreak “was a wakeup call” about that virus for communities across America.
Dr. William Cooke, a physician at Foundations Family Medicine in Austin who treats dozens of patients with HIV and hepatitis, said many communities are ill-equipped to handle the threat. All over the region and nation, he said, there’s too little substance abuse treatment, too little emphasis on the poverty that often accompanies addiction and too little compassion.
“(Austin) has a rural, impoverished, drug-using population. There are places all across America that look like this …Other places are at the same risk,” Cooke said. “The lesson in Austin is we can’t ignore people … If we let a group of people struggle and don’t help them, it affects all of us.”
From addict to liver patient
Growing up in a middle-class family in Bullitt County, Brett never envisioned he would spiral into addiction and illness.
Like many of his peers, he began drinking alcohol and smoking pot as a young teenager. After trying pain pills in high school, he abused them on and off in early adulthood, eventually favoring Opana as his drug of choice. But when Kentucky cracked down on prescription drug abuse, he said, Opana became difficult to get and very expensive. Heroin was a quarter of the price or less, and widely available on the street.
“I stopped doing Opanas and started doing heroin,” said Brett, who didn’t want his last name used because of the stigma surrounding hepatitis C and drug abuse. “At first, I was just trying to get an opiate fix. But once I started doing heroin, it was about getting heroin.”
Snorting the drug would delay its effect, so he chose to shoot up. Soon the quest to get high gave way to a quest to just feel normal and stave off withdrawal.
Brett knew about the dangers of blood-borne diseases, and at first did what he could to avoid them, buying his own needles every day. But eventually he stopped caring about contracting diseases — although he tried to protect others by telling anyone who wanted to share needles with him, “I probably have hepatitis C.”
His lowest point came in spring 2014, when he was living with his mom, went into the bathroom to shoot up and passed out on the toilet from an overdose. An emergency worker revived him with naloxone in an ambulance on the way to the emergency room.
Brett’s mom urged him to get help, which he sought at the Jefferson Alcohol and Drug Abuse Center a few days after his overdose. While there, he had an HIV test that came back negative. It wasn’t until that fall that he finally got tested for hepatitis.
“Until then, I didn’t want to get tested because I wanted to keep the possibility of doubt,” he said. “I knew there was a 98 percent chance that I had it. But I still remember being in shock, almost, when I heard that I actually did. It was a heavy thing.”
Now two years sober, Brett has been seeing a doctor who specializes in hepatitis, getting regular blood tests and trying to live a healthy life to keep the disease from progressing. Brett’s doctor last year wrote him a prescription for a medication called Harvoni that can potentially cure the disease. But it costs more than $1,000 a pill and his Medicaid managed care plan denied it.
No comments:
Post a Comment