When the founders of Moms Surviving Our Ultimate Loss first learned their sons were using heroin, they didn’t know where to turn.
Monica Rancatore just picked the closest treatment facility to home, which wasn’t working for her son when he died of an overdose two months later. Laurie Clemons’s son cycled in and out of rehab facilities and an out-of-state recovery center trying to find the right fit before his fatal overdose. Penni Pelow recalls “fumbling” through three years of uncertainty with her son’s addiction before he died.
“When I found out about my son I was handed one little card and it was like, ‘here, you might want to get him some help, there you go,’ and you’re just like, what do I do now?” Ms. Pelow recalls of her experience. “I felt cheated, like nobody gave me that chance to help him.”
The group has crafted a new resource bag to remove the guesswork and point users and their families in the right direction. The bag contains resources for 35 area agencies covering all facets of addiction — recovery, treatment, grief support, human trafficking, mental health, and more.
“It is basically us giving back to our community, taking our pain and our worst day ever and turning it around and giving it back as love so another mother doesn’t have to join our group,” Ms. Pelow said. “It’s giving them what we never had.”
The bags are available through Moms SOUL or by contacting the Toledo Fire Department at 419-377-4551.
An alarming trend
The resources come at a critical time for Lucas County, as overdoses are spiking at an alarming rate.
Back in March and April, the county was celebrating record low overdose rates, especially as other cities across the state were reporting surges. Then May hit, and everything changed.
“May was really a turning point for overdoses,” Mahjida Steffin, opioid prevention program coordinator for the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department, said. “They were lower up through April, compared to 2019, but May, I’m not sure what happened but they really did skyrocket.”
Records from the Lucas County Sheriff’s Drug Abuse Response Team, which connects with victims following an overdose, reported a 40 percent increase in overdose calls in May over the previous month, from 144 calls to 201. The numbers include overdoses for all drugs, including prescription pills and alcohol, but DART officer Sgt. Steve Rogers said the majority are opiate related.
Though numbers fell slightly in June to 179 reported overdoses, they were on par with June figures from 2018 and 2019, suggesting that drug use may be leveling out again.
No one can explain why, but it seems to be tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I personally thought we’d see an uptick in overdoses (during the stay-at-home order) so it was unexpected that it went down,” Sergeant Rogers said. “Looking at this year specifically, there’s definitely an anomaly in the months of March and April, when COVID was making an appearance in our community.”
The coronavirus impact
Mapped out, the impact of coronavirus is pronounced.
In previous years, overdose trends created a stair effect, rising and falling inconsistently over the course of the first six months of each year. This year’s pattern is a striking U shape, diving during the state’s months of coronavirus lockdown and climbing steeply in May as the state opened up again.
Based on conversations they’ve had with users, Sergeant Rogers and Ms. Steffin hypothesize that job loss, financial strains, and travel restrictions starting in March disrupted the supply chain, leading to less product on the streets and therefore fewer overdoses.
But as stimulus checks trickled in, and people returned to work and started moving about again, drug use has resumed in a big way, and it’s having catastrophic effects.
Fire department figures show that though reported overdoses were down through April 2020, compared to the previous year, fatalities had nearly doubled. There were 21 fatal overdoses reported in the first four months of 2019 and 41 in the same time frame in 2020.
Preliminary numbers from May are just as alarming, with deaths actually doubling from 11 in 2019 to 22 in 2020, Ms. Steffin said.
“May really was upsetting,” she said.
Finding hope
Amid the dark cloud, though, one small ray of hope is emerging, Sergeant Rogers said: more clients and families are starting to reach out seeking help in their battle with addiction.
And now agencies have something useful to give them, something endorsed by mothers who have lived the worst of the outcomes and have advice to share.
“We want them to have the information at their fingertips because [when you hear about your child’s addiction] you’re brain dead; you can’t even think,” Ms. Pelow said. “So it’s like, if I have it here in front of me, I don’t even have to think; I can just call. Just call.”
TFD Battalion Chief Daniel Brown-Martinez, who worked with the Moms group to make the bags available, praised the effort as the practical resource he’s been waiting for to potentially help turn the tide in overdose trends for good. Because he recalled constantly being confronted by family members on overdose calls looking for information about how to get help, but the department had nothing to give them other than Narcan for the next time their loved one overdosed.
“As a fire department, we have more of a duty to serve, treat and leave,” Chief Brown-Martinez criticized.
“This is the extended care that I think is owed to the public,” he said of the bags. “This information will save lives.”
First Published July 8, 2020, 9:52 p.m.
