Editor’s note: this is the last in a five-part series about Chatham County’s response to the opioid crisis.
Just more than a month ago, the Chatham County Sheriff’s Office and Siler City Police Department administered naloxone a combined four times in one day.
Four times, in one day.
Four times in one day, law enforcement officials administered a drug designed to stop an overdose related to opioids, including prescription pain pills, heroin and fentanyl.
It’s evidence that the epidemic is alive and well in Chatham County.
Laura Mosca of Pittsboro knows the struggle well. After all, she was addicted to opiates for, as she describes, “many, many, many years.” But she’s clean now, and she says there’s a way out.
Getting off the hook
Mosca got hooked on Percocet, a pill that combines the opioid oxycodone and the painkiller acetaminophen. The latter is the active ingredient in Tylenol, while the former has similar effects to heroin.
She was in a bad marriage, she says, and got migraines as a result. She got a prescription for Percocet from a doctor.
“She would just tell me to go home and take more than I should have,” Mosca said. “I was in a bad marriage, so basically I would go home and fall asleep to not have to deal with my (then-)ex-husband, and I was getting bad headaches. When I realized they would make me forget things, I would go back to her and ask her for more. She kept writing me script after script after script.”
She ended up with five prescriptions a month, four for Percocet and one for Xanax. After a six-month break following a positive test for cocaine, Mosca got back on the pills. But eventually, she said, pills “got hard to find.” So she started using heroin.
“I did heroin for about three years, every day, got up to about a little over a gram a day,” she said. “I ended up in a place where I didn’t think I wanted to be. I just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
Mosca reached out to Chatham Recovery in Siler City for an appointment. They told her to wait for a week.
“I was ready for everything to end,” she said.
But someone canceled an appointment, so she got in the next day.
“They saved my life,” Mosca said.
Steps to overcoming
At an April 4 community event on opioid addiction in Goldston, Chatham County Public Health Director Layton Long stressed that the addiction is not a “moral failing,” but a disease, and one that those who suffer from it “can come out on the other side with a positive outcome.”
Mosca is an example of that. Three years clean, she works as a waitress at John’s Pizza in Pittsboro. It’s a career she said engenders itself to opioid addiction, and it’s hard to hide, especially when an addict makes the transition to heroin.
“You go to work, waiting tables, which is a really hard job, especially when you’re dope sick,” she said. “Your customers can see that you’re not feeling well. You’re sweating, your nose is running, and your customers can see it.”
Being an addict, she said, “is a job.” If she hadn’t started taking methadone at Chatham Recovery, she believes she “would have relapsed a million times.”
Mosca said she’d like to see other former addicts speak about their addiction and how they got clean, mainly to open up the conversation and kill the stigma around having a drug addiction.
“A lot of people hide what happened to them or what they went through,” she said. “If more people shared their story and people see that normal, everyday people were addicts too and overcame it, I don’t think people would be afraid to ask for help.”
Having that open conversation, even with those young in age, can help the community at large, according to Casey Hilliard, policy analyst at the Chatham County Public Health Department.
“We know that prevention starts very young with resilient and protective factors that are about home and the community you’re raised in,” she said. “They don’t begin and end with education, they begin and end with so much more. It’s important for us to start talking about it differently or else we won’t get there.”
Ditching the pills
Another practical step encouraged by experts is getting rid of prescription pills that aren’t being used anymore.
More than 83 percent of opioid prescription medications taken by new users are obtained from a friend or relative, according to a press release from Siler City Pharmacy. The business recently established a drug take-back program for leftover, unused and out-of-date prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs.
“We want to provide our community with a safe, secure opportunity to clean out their medicine cabinets in addition to making their homes and communities safer,” Angelynn Fox of Siler City Pharmacy said in the news release. “We want to remind people that they should not flush drugs down the toilet. Traces of drugs can appear in community drinking water. Our drug disposal unit, which is easily accessible in the pharmacy, is a great answer to that problem and it’s simple to do. All you do is come in, look for the receptacle and take it from there. Drugs can be dropped off with no questions asked.”
The pharmacy joined law enforcement agencies across the county — including the Siler City and Pittsboro Police Departments and the Chatham County Sheriff’s Office — in placing a bin where people can leave their pills without judgment or questions. The availability of such pills is of concern to the sheriff’s office.
“There’s a bunch of pills in a bunch of medicine cabinets,” said Sgt. Ronnie Miller of the sheriff’s office. “What we would like to see happpen, through education, is for people to realize how powerful and destructive these drugs can be.”
Moving on
Mosca said the people she used to use drugs with now go to Chatham Recovery and are getting help.
Anna Stanley, program director at Chatham Recovery, said she’d like to see the stigma around medication-assisted treatment be eliminated simply because, she believes, it helps.
“There’s all these myths out there that if you’re taking medication for an opioid disorder you’re not in recovery, and that’s just not true,” Stanley said. “The withdrawal syndrome is so severe that medications help in most cases.”
No other addictive drug has the effect opioid withdrawl has, she said — “basically like the flu, but times a million” — and “abstinence-only” treatment “doesn’t seem to work.”
“If you have the tool to help somebody,” Stanley said, “why wouldn’t you use it?”
Mosca has used it. Last year, she took pain pills after a hernia surgery, ignoring her internal resistance because of doctor’s orders.
“I kept thinking I was going to relapse,” she said. “I didn’t believe (the doctors). After my pills were gone, I didn’t want anymore. It didn’t do anything to me, it just made my pain go away from my surgery.”
Three years after being hooked on heroin, after “many, many, many years” of addiction, she’s clean and an example of what it looks like to overcome.
“I’m proud of myself,” Mosca said. “I made it.”
Reach Zachary Horner at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.
Want to learn more?
Chatham County Libraries is hosting the third edition of “It Started with a Script: Prescription Drug Misuse, Addiction, and the Opioid Crisis,” from 6-8 p.m. on Monday, June 3, at the Wren Memorial Library in Siler City. The program will provide an in-depth look at the local impacts of prescription drug misues, opioids and the science of addiction and treatment and recovery. Guest speakers will include Chatham County Sheriff Mike Roberson, addiction expert Dr. Joe Mancini and Chatham County residents Julie Cummins and Mary O’Donnell. The event is free and open to the public, and resource tables will offer free publications and displays.