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02/25/2019 11:00 PM“I want to show you something,” Lisa Deane told the group gathered at the Guilford Community Center on Feb. 19 for a roundtable on the opioid crisis.
Deane reached into her bag and pulled out a man’s vest, carefully unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the table in front of her.
“This is the vest that my son was wearing the night he was brought into the hospital,” she said.
Her son, Joe, died on Dec. 7, 2018 from a pure fentanyl overdose at the age of 23. Deane said her son was found in a McDonald’s bathroom in New Haven and was then transported to the hospital. Deane pointed to the cut in the jacket, made by a paramedic or a doctor trying to save her son’s life, and she said it was lucky that the jacket was cut where it was, lucky because bags of pure, deadly fentanyl were stuffed in another section of the garment.
“There were seven bags of heroin—or pure fentanyl as we came to find out. They were right there,” she said. “Now, had the EMT or hospital personnel cut here, and cut into those bags by mistake, God only knows what would have happened.”
Deane said there is no protocol for hospital staff to check addicts’ belongings when they are brought into the hospital and the drugs weren’t actually discovered until several weeks after her son had died.
At the Roundtable
Deane spoke openly about her son and the nightmare families of the addicted find themselves in. She has since founded an organization, Demand Zero, which aims to provide law enforcement with the supports it needs to fight the drug trade in New Haven, the point of entry for most opioids in the region.
Her story was one of many shared at the roundtable. The stories and the vest were evidence that the opioid crisis still has a firm and unforgiving grip on too many in the population.
The Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz and State Representative Sean Scanlon (D-98) hosted the opioid roundtable discussion. Numerous parents whose child had died or are currently in recovery attended, along with local and state politicians, medical professionals, and members of law enforcement.
Scanlon said over the past several years, the state has taken steps to try to curb the opioid epidemic and while he said there have been many accomplishments, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Scanlon said the good news is that the state medical examiner is predicting that the number of overdose deaths this year will not exceed last year’s total.
“That is the first time since 2012 that has happened. It is certainly not a cause for celebration; I think it’s a cause for us to keep our foot on the gas pedal and keep going in the right direction.”
The group of shoreline legislators—Scanlon, State Senator Christine Cohen (D-12), State Representative Noreen Kokoruda (R-101), and State Representative Vincent Candelora (R-86)—have all written or sponsored new bills this year to help fight the opioid crisis.
One piece of legislation focuses on ensuring mental health parity by not allowing insurance companies to penalize those seeking substance abuse treatment and another would provide for substance abuse treatment programs in correctional facilities. However, the bills that sparked the most discussion involved increasing the number of tools people have when trying to help an addicted loved one.
House Bill 5900 and 6131
House bill 5900 would allow “police officers to take a person with a substance use disorder and who is a danger to himself or herself or others or gravely disabled into custody for treatment,” according to the bill language.
Many of the mothers at the roundtable spoke of the need for parents to have a greater ability to help their child and a few specifically pointed to a Massachusetts law, Section 35, that allows a parent or another qualified person to ask for someone to be civilly committed and treated for an alcohol or drug problems, even if that treatment is involuntary. Candelora said this bill in Connecticut would be similar.
“There is a piece of legislation that myself, Sean, Noreen, Christine, we all introduced similar to the Section 35 to try to get our probate courts involved to let parents have somewhere to get control over a loved one in order to address their needs,” he said.
The other piece of legislation is House Bill 6131, a bill that would require an automatic transfer to a hospital after a person “receives an opioid antagonist by an emergency medical services provider.”
Kokoruda said when naloxone (Narcan) started to become more prevalent, a lot of people saw it as the miracle cure to save someone from an overdoes. However, she said after speaking with mothers who have lost their children, legislators have realized that it is not that simple.
“It was the moms that told us that addicts are at their lowest point after Narcan. The addiction is so bad there is nothing else they can do,” she said. “We haven’t provided anything and that is the side that we need to have a place they can go, we need laws that will get them there, and we have to find a way to allow families to know what is going on.”
Kokoruda said that opioid withdrawal has been described as the flu times 100, which is why hospitals will see addicts keep coming back after receiving Narcan. Deane said because of that withdrawal, she knows that if her son had been revived that day at the hospital, he would have lunged for the vest containing the fentanyl.
“The bag of clothes was right next to his bed at Yale New Haven,” she said. “Had my son been Narcaned back to life, I know my son would have grabbed that bag… This is why a 72 hour hold is important and also to work with all of our hospitals in the state in order to create some protocols of what could be done in order to save these patients.”
Discussions went on for more than an hour and touched on people’s experiences with those battling addiction, barriers to treatment, better education, what the potential legalization of retail marijuana could to this issue, and many more topics.
Bysiewicz said the administration in Hartford is committed to doing everything in its power to address this issue. She said the effort will take a lot of people but specifically thanked the parents in the room.
“I want to say a special thank you to the parents that are here,” she said. “I am a mom and I can’t even imagine what some of you have gone through, but I admire this positive energy that you have put into making sure that people understand that we have to work really hard to continue to address these issues.”