Heroin has been a scourge in many parts of the United States in recent years, but perhaps nowhere has been hit harder than Marion, OH. In a 12-day period of time in Marion there were 32 cases of heroin overdose and two fatalities. Emergency services personnel have been dealing with a heroin overdose a day there for the last year, but nothing prepared them for the recent surge of overdoses.
The surge is being blamed on a type of heroin called "blue drop" that came into Marion from Chicago starting around May 20. Blue drop heroin was found to have been mixed with the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl. The death toll might have been worse if not for the fact that paramedics in Marion carry naloxone, a drug that can reverse a heroin overdose.
At one point, the situation was so severe that the police in Marion called for help from state and federal agencies. Emergency personnel were being called out almost continuously.
"We were going from one to another to another, sometimes going back to the same house twice in one day for two different people," Police Chief Bill Collins told the Associated Press.
The small city of 37,000 is trying to help its drug addicts, but there are not enough facilities that treat addiction.
The heroin epidemic is an outgrowth of the epidemic of addiction to pain pills like Oxycontin that started several years ago. Officials cracked down on pill mills, which meant that the prescription pills were harder to get, but heroin is cheap and easy to obtain, so pill addicts turned to heroin.
Heroin and use of other intravenous drugs is taxing emergency services personnel severely throughout the Midwest and Appalachia. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of deaths due to heroin overdoses quadrupled from 2000 to 2013.
