Heroin and painkillers go hand-in-hand

SHEBOYGAN - Medical professionals and law enforcement are working together to address one of the main contributors to the growing opioid epidemic: prescription pain killers.

Pain killers often provide a pipeline to heroin addiction, and as many as three in four heroin users become addicted to the drug after first becoming addicted to prescription pain killers, according to statistics cited by Kurt Zempel, a sergeant in the Sheboygan Police Department's drug unit.

“When we talk to heroin addicts, the vast majority of them found their way to heroin through prescription drugs. Once those are in the body, they behave essentially the same,” Zempel said. “So when someone is prescribed something and, whether they are genetically predisposed to those things or they use it to self-medicate, it creates that addiction.”

Sheboygan medical professionals met with law enforcement officials in a closed-door meeting Thursday to collaborate and discuss how the entities could work together to combat the drug problem locally.

“Last year in the United States 21,000 people died from prescription overdoses and 14,000 people died from heroin," Jeremy Scarlett, the medical director at Advance Pain Management, said. "It was a lot of people that were on prescription drugs that, for whatever reason, lost access to the pain medication and switched to heroin.”

The discussion centered around new Center for Disease Control guidelines for prescribing opioids for pain and a statewide Prescription Drug Monitoring System, which allows medical professionals and law enforcement to track patient pain medication dosages and potential red flags for patients who may be abusing or selling prescriptions.

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Doctors are now able to better watch for patients who jump between physicians to get multiple pain medication prescriptions, and law enforcement can use the program to enter information on drug offenders so doctors can be better informed about their patients.

“Doctors and pharmacists can refer to that and find the red flags of either abuse, risks of overdose, or diversions, where people are maybe giving their prescription medications to others,” Zempel said.

Officials are also trying to change the way physicians prescribe pain killers. In the past, treating pain with opioids was an "easy fix," Scarlett said, but patients often did not understand the potential risk with those pain medications.

The challenge now is to break the public perception that prescription pain medications are an "easy fix" to managing pain.

“When you go in and get your wisdom teeth pulled, which almost everyone does, you very commonly walk out of that doctor’s office with a prescription for an opioid, which is essentially synthetic heroin,” Zempel said. “Do people really understand that, by taking that home, and taking it as prescribed that there is a risk of addiction and overdose?”

“With better educated physicians and better educated patients, we can reduce those risks,” he added.

Scarlett said the transparency and communication between police and medical professionals is promising, but there is still much to be done to combat the problem.

“The second step has to be better access to mental health professionals that treat the addiction," he said. "I think we’re going to stop a lot of people coming to us through better transparency, but the other part of this is figuring it out for people where the cat’s already out of the bag.”

Zempel said he believes Sheboygan County is ahead of the curve in its response to the problem. The drug treatment court begins next month, a resource guide has been developed to help people seeking treatment find resources for recovery, there is a smart recovery program in the county jail, and there is talk of developing more sober living homes in the community, he said.

“This is something everybody across the country is confronting,” Zempel said. “I think it’s easy for people to feel that nothing is being done, but I think just the opposite is true.”

Reach reporter Phillip Bock: 920-453-5121, pbock@sheboyganpress.com, or @bockling on Twitter