2017-10-03 Huntington
Opioid script and fonts
911 Operator: Burger King … Station 3, Station 3…
911 Operator: 3210 Washington Boulevard for an overdose. Advise that
female is outside on the ground.
0:10 HARI SREENIVASAN: It’s not even 10:30 in the morning in Huntington, West
Virginia, and it’s happened again. Another overdose. This time just outside a
fast food restaurant. A woman is unconscious and turning blue on the sidewalk.
First responders move
in with an anti-overdose medication, naloxone. A few minutes pass. She revives,
as if waking from a nap. The needles she used go in a sharps container. The
woman goes in an ambulance.
It’s become a
well-choreographed dance in this city on the banks of the Ohio River and at the
heart of America’s opioid epidemic.
0:42 JAN RADER, Chief, Huntington Fire Department: I bet you I have been to
20 overdoses in that house.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Jan Rader is the fire chief in this city, a place now
defined by both the scope of its struggle and its attempts to fight back.
JAN RADER: We have no fear of failure. If we try something and it
doesn’t work, let’s move on to something else.
1:00 HARI SREENIVASAN: Of the 100,000 people who live in Huntington and
surrounding Cabell County, officials estimate that 10,000 of them have become
addicted to opioids like heroin and pain pills.
Officials say there
have been more than 100 deaths in Cabell County so far in 2017, with more than
2,000 overdoses expected by year’s end.
Steve Williams is the
mayor of Huntington.
1:21 MAYOR STEVE
WILLIAMS, Huntington, West Virginia:
The level of addiction is beyond anyone’s comprehension. I have never known
anything that was so all-consuming. It is affecting everybody in this
community.
HARI SREENIVASAN: That means slowed-down traffic at businesses like
Roll-A-Rama, open since 1962.
LEVI HOGAN, Owner, Roll-A-Rama: It’s just running the neighborhoods
down. Running the business off. Running the people who would spend money here,
who are trying to do good here, running them all off.
1:52 HARI SREENIVASAN: Trouble at the regional pharmacy chain, in the parking
lots and inside the stores.
LYNNE FRUTH, President, Fruth Pharmacy: It’s difficult to hire
employees. It’s difficult to find people who can pass the drug screens.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Needles scattered in the parks.
TERRY WATTS, Greater Huntington Park & Recreation District: We have
found them … in the past, we have found in the playgrounds, different things …
bathrooms, edges of parking lots, boat ramp. I mean, the floods, the floodwater
brings a bunch of them in down there, believe it or not.
2:17 HARI SREENIVASAN: Needles clogging stormwater
catch basins and threatening sanitation workers.
WESLEY LEEK, Director, Huntington Sanitary Board: They may actually
have to physically reach down and pull debris out. We use a needle-proof,
cut-proof gloves to protect our employees from being stuck.
HARI SREENIVASAN: And bacterial infections tied to I.V. drug use now common
throughout the city.
2:38 DR. JAMES BECKER, Marshall University School of Medicine: Some of them go to
the bone, some of them go to the kidneys, some of them go to the brain. Things
that, you know, you didn’t expect to see very often, because they were
described as rare in your medical textbook. And now you see them all the time.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The health consequences are deeper still. At Cabell
Huntington Hospital, one out of every five babies delivered has been exposed to
drugs before they were born.
2:59 SARA MURRAY, Nurse Manager, Neonatal Therapeutic Unit: We are a 15-bed
unit, and, today, we have 18. Last, week we had 26.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Sara Murray helped create a unit specifically for these
newborns.
You’re keeping this
place dim for the babies’ sake…
SARA MURRAY: Yes. We try to keep a low-stimulus environment. And that
means we keep the lights low and we keep the unit as quiet as possible.
3:22 HARI SREENIVASAN: Babies here go through withdrawal for drugs like
painkillers and heroin, and more often these days, other substances being cut
into the heroin supply, like fentanyl and the anti-seizure medication
gabapentin.
SARA MURRAY: It’s just devastating for these babies. Neurological
symptoms that we’d never seen before, we’re seeing now. And they have rapid eye
movements just different than anything I have ever seen. They roll down, they
roll up, back and forth. And they tongue-thrust. I mean they’re thrusting their
tongue all the time. And they’re very uncomfortable.
3:58 HARI SREENIVASAN: It’s still not clear what the long-term impacts on these
children will be. But in the short-term, many of them are entering the foster
care system.
4:08 STEPHANIE ADKINS, Adoptive Mother: Olivia was born addicted to cocaine,
heroin, marijuana, and a pain pill that contains snake venom.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Some children, like two-year-old Olivia, are being placed
with foster families in other parts of the state.
STEPHANIE ADKINS: We’re going on a bear hunt…
HARI SREENIVASAN: Olivia now lives an hour-and-a-half from Huntington with
her adoptive mother, Stephanie Adkins, Stephanie’s husband and their
5-year-old, Ethan, who came to them after similar circumstances.
The system, Adkins
says, is stretched dangerously thin.
4:38 STEPHANIE ADKINS: You’re going to have children that are just sitting in a
group care home, with no family to speak of, because there’s physically nowhere
else to put them. That’s where I see us going if we don’t figure something out
to try to stop the flow of children just flying into the foster care system.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How did West Virginia get to this point?
In some ways, it was a
state with a target on its back. One heavily dependent on manual labor jobs
like coal mining and manufacturing. Jobs that leave workers prone to injury and
chronic pain.
When a new group of
painkillers emerged in the mid-90s, pharmaceutical companies and distributors
saw a ripe market.
Eric Eyre of the
Charleston Gazette-Mail recently uncovered documents exposing the extent of the
pharmaceutical campaign between 2007 and 2012.
5:31 ERIC EYRE, Charleston Gazette-Mail: There had been 780 million
hydrocodone and oxycodone doses shipped to West Virginia over those six years.
We’re one of the
smallest states in the country. We have 1.8 million people. So, that comes out
to roughly about 430 pills per person.
HARI SREENIVASAN: An eventual crackdown on pain pills caused many to switch
to heroin and fentanyl, far more potent cousins of drugs like hydrocodone and
oxycodone. Overdose deaths spiked.
In March, a state fund
to pay for burials for the poor ran out of money five months before the end of
the fiscal year.
6:06 STEVE WILLIAMS: The drug dealers are going to pay for this, just the way
that I see the pharmaceutical companies are going to pay.
HARI SREENIVASAN: In Huntington and Cabell County, officials have resolved
to respond to every overdose case aggressively… ramp up treatment and
accountability programs, when appropriate through drug courts that have a
strong track record of leading people toward recovery, instead of
incarceration.
6:30 WOMAN: Do I understand that you have four months and two days
clean?
WOMAN: I do.
(APPLAUSE)
HARI SREENIVASAN: And by giving young people incentives to steer clear of
drugs in the first place.
Every middle and high
school student in this district is randomly drug-tested if they want to
participate in any extracurricular activities, like play sports, or even drive
their car to class.
At this high school,
700 of the 1,700 students take part in the program. Almost every one of them
tests clean.
But all that, Fire
Chief Rader says, hasn’t been enough. The overdoses keep coming, the same
people over and over, with seemingly few lessons learned.
7:18 JAN RADER: They refuse treatment. They go right back out on the
street, typically get high again.
HARI SREENIVASAN: How dispiriting is that? You literally brought someone
back to life, and they’re choosing — or they’re not — it’s not a choice, but..
JAN RADER: It’s very frustrating on every level. But that doesn’t
stop us from saving the life.
7:41 HARI SREENIVASAN: Rader’s crews responded to 3,500 calls in 2015. Last year,
4,500. This year, they’re on track for more than 5,500.
One out of every four
times a fire truck leaves this station, it’s for an overdose case.
7:57 LT. JAMES MULLINS, Huntington Fire Department: It messes with your mind. I
mean, I’m not going to lie to you. It hurts.
HARI SREENIVASAN: On one of those calls last year, Lieutenant James Mullins
was pricked by a needle. Months of tests and treatment followed.
How’d your life change
after that?
LT. JAMES MULLINS: My personal life at home changed quite a bit, because of
not knowing, the unknowns, that I — if I had a disease.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The fallout changed the way he views the city’s attempts
to save people who repeatedly overdose. He wonders if these programs might
actually be attracting more drug users to the area, fueling the cycle.
8:33 LT. JAMES MULLINS: I believe, to a point, that we don’t need to be going to
the same houses over and over again and keep giving these people chances.
Because it’s a waste of resources.
8:41 JOSEPH CICCARELLI, Chief, Huntington Police Department: You have to keep
telling yourself that, you know, this has been a 20-year decline, and it’s not
going to be fixed in a year or two.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Police chief Joseph Ciccarelli says all of this will
probably get worse before it gets better.
JOSEPH CICCARELLI: You see abandoned buildings, abandoned houses. And these
were neighborhoods that were, you know, working-class neighborhoods 30, 40
years ago, because there were jobs here.
9:04 HARI SREENIVASAN: Neighborhoods that have become the scenes of devastation.
9:10 HARI SREENIVASAN: And the drugs, he says, keep flowing in from Detroit,
Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio, despite the high number of arrests his force
makes.
JOSEPH CICCARELLI: We have got 10,000 heroin addicts here. There’s a market
here. It’s basically supply and demand. We have a demand, and there’s going to
be a supply.
9:25 MAYOR STEVE
WILLIAMS: It is the best of times in
Huntington, yet the worst of times.
HARI SREENIVASAN: The best of times, Mayor Williams says, because
collaboration in the city has never been stronger. Lessons are being learned
every day that are spreading to other parts of the country.
9:43 MAYOR STEVE
WILLIAMS: I believe that we will end up
on the right side of it.
What I am constantly
trying to do is lift people up. ‘Square your shoulders. We are from Huntington,
West Virginia, and we’re showing an example to the rest of the country how you
can defeat this.’
And then, as soon as I
do that, then we will end up hearing the fire trucks going by. And they’re
going after another overdose.
10:07 HARI SREENIVASAN: For the PBS NewsHour in Huntington, West Virginia, I’m
Hari Sreenivasan.
FONTS:
___1:26-1:31 Mayor
Steve Williams QUICK!!
Huntington,
West Virginia
___1:43-1:49 Levi Hogan
Owner,
Roll-A-Rama
___1:57-2:00 Lynne Fruth QUICK!!
President,
Fruth Pharmacy
___2:38-2:41 Dr. James Becker QUICK!!
Marshall
University School of Medicine
___3:21-3:25 [LL] Courtesy: Cabell Huntington Hospital QUICK!!
___3:43-3:53 Sara Murray
Nurse
Manager, Neonatal Therapeutic Unit
ALT:
Cabell Huntington Hospital
___4:38-4:43 Stephanie Adkins QUICK!!
Adoptive
Mother
___5:30-5:35 Eric Eyre QUICK!!
Charleston
Gazette-Mail
___7:18-7:22 Jan Rader QUICK!!
Chief,
Huntington Fire Department
___8:11-8:16 Lt. James Mullins
Huntington
Fire Department