Virginia’s congressional delegation is wrestling with how the federal government can help states combat the heroin epidemic spreading across the east coast.
More than 25,000 people across the nation die from heroin or other opioids annually. In the commonwealth last year, more people died from opioids than from car wrecks. That’s partly why Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine is trying to make it easier for people to get the drug Naloxone, also called Narcan.
“It’s easy to administer and it’s safe not only if you’re having an overdose but it’s safe even if you’re suffering from some other condition. It can bring you back to life from an opioid overdose without posing any significant harm to you if that’s not what you have.”
Kaine’s approach is to start by getting doctors at numerous federal agencies to establish a uniform approach to prescribing the lifesaving drug.
“If the VA does one way and the DOD hospitals do it another way and the federally chartered community health centers do it a different way, that’s inferior to trying to have some sort of uniform set of standards. And if the feds do it, which is what our bill requires, it will set the standard for states and for private industry as well.”
Kaine has been trained to administer the drug and wants more people to be trained.
“It’s in the hands of fairly limited groups, medical professionals, EMTs, and law enforcement will carry it. I think it should be made more widely available.”
Kaine says another part of the problem is that doctors are overprescribing pain killers, which then leads to addiction. He says he’s seen the problem of over prescription in his own medicine cabinet after his wife broke her shoulder a year and half ago.
“The prescription was so much pain killers, she used it for a couple of days and got nauseous but it’s just sitting there in our medicine cabinet with all this, you know, extra that she doesn’t need. And that’s where you know kids will go and pull stuff out of parents medicine cabinets because the numbers are often over prescribed. So I think it’s used wrongly and quantities are often too high.”
While Kaine’s latest efforts are focusing on rehabilitation and stemming overdoses, other lawmakers are calling for beefing up law enforcement resources. Here’s Virginia Republican Congressman Randy Forbes.
“One of the things we’ve worried about for a long time is kind of the curve lines we see with a lot of things in our country. Drug use is one of the things, the other thing we’ve been worried about is gang activity and the interconnectivity of the two those things you know?”
Virginia Republican Congressman Morgan Griffith is a fiscal conservative who doesn’t like to spend federal dollars, but he says more resources are needed to combat the sale of heroin. He says federal agents are needed in spots identified as High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas.
“You can send in undercover agents from different parts of the state or from the federal government into areas where there’s a problem and shut down the dealers a lot more effectively.”
Griffith says that’s especially important in rural parts of the state where everyone knows everyone, including the local police force.
“It’s federal money. Send in some officers who are unknown to that particular region, cooperating with the local police, and you can catch the bad guys a lot more effectively.”
While different lawmakers are focusing on different approaches, the Virginia delegation is united behind routing the drug, and the death it leaves behind, out of local communities.
