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Heroin and Prescription Drug Summit in Virginia

Surprised by a growing epidemic of heroin and pain killer abuse, state officials held a summit meeting today to talk about why 900 Virginians lost their lives to opiate-based drugs last year and what should be done about it.  

Honesty Liller was not the girl you’d expect to be a heroin addict.  She grew-up in a middle-class household near Richmond in a two-parent family, graduated from high school at 16 and had an after school job.  She also started drinking and using drugs at the age of 12.

“I resorted to heroin at age 17. After I started it just got a grip of my brain, my body, my soul – the shame, the physical  withdrawals.  I couldn’t stop.  That’s just the insanity of the disease, especially with an opiate.  The receptors in my brain just loved it so much, and  then eventually  I was getting sick and having withdrawal, so I had to use heroin to be normal every day.”

At the age of 26, she hit bottom.

“I was practically living out of my car.  My car was in a title loan.  I didn’t  have a job. I didn’t have my daughter.  My mother had her.  I was with a boy, and he was actively using.”

So she went into a residential program run by former addicts, and finally kicked her habit.  Now, she runs that program, and she shared her story with about 150 people from around the state – police, public health experts and politicians.  Michael Boticelli heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He drove down from D.C. to explain that cheap heroin has flooded the nation from Mexico, and doctors are prescribing pain killers at a record rate.

“Physicians are prescribing enough pain medication to give every adult American a bottle of pain medication.”

He says some of them don’t know any better.

“Physicians in a four-year curriculum are getting, in a four year curriculum, eleven hours of training on pain prescribing, and veterans actually get more training on pain prescribing than the average physician.”

He promised new federal resources to battle the epidemic of addiction in 11 cities around the state and Tazewell County.  The goal is to better educate doctors and the public, to increase safe disposal of unused prescription drugs,  to get medical offices on board with a database that will tell them which patients are going from doctor to doctor to get prescription painkillers, and to help police better enforce the law.

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief