Photo courtesy of Flickr
BY THEA BURKE ’20
Mount Holyoke’s “Be Well” initiative hosted a fo- cus group on opioids on Feb. 8. AmeriCorps Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) Lucy Bolognese ’18 and Hampshire alum Charlie Hailey, a VISTA Community Opioid Epidemic Specialist, led the group. The pair cited their mission as an assessment of what college students already know about opioids and how they can more effectively disseminate information on the dangerous painkillers.
An opioid is a type of drug prescribed for acute pain. Examples include oxycodone and hydrocodone. These are drugs that a doctor may prescribe after injuries, for the treatment of a terminal illness such as cancer and after surgery. Opioids also include the drugs heroin and fentanyl.
Opioids are highly addictive and expensive. Often, a person will become addicted to the pills and begin to require an increasingly stronger dose to feel high. This habit becomes financially unmanageable, with a single Percocet tablet costing upwards of $80 on the street. Heroin, on the other hand, can be as cheap as $5.
Heroin is often laced with fentanyl, a highly potent and extremely deadly opioid. When used legally, it is often administered in patch form to ease the pain of hospice patients. Lacing heroin with fentanyl is an easy way to make heroin 50 to 100 times more potent, using less product. Just two to three milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal.
The focus group discussed Narcan, the medication designed to bring users out of opioid overdoses.
In an overdose, opioids bind to receptors in the brain and spinal cord, suppressing the respiratory system to the point that the person stops breathing. Narcan rips the opioids off of these receptors, temporarily replacing them and bringing the person out of the overdose. Many law enforcement officials now carry the medication, but it is not yet a federal requirement.
Narcan is also available for public purchase at pharmacies across the country. Hailey encouraged students who are interested to “purchase Narcan from Tapestry Health at 16 Center St, Suite 415 in Northampton.”
A clear message that the focus group conveyed was the need for compassion and structural change surrounding opioid use.
“Nothing is going to change if we don’t address the structural problems that lead people to use,” Hailey said.
The leaders cited criminal records, overcrowded homeless shelters, food insecurity and the criminalization of addiction as factors that do not support a culture of rehabilitation, instead keeping those dependent on opioids in a cycle of addiction. Hailey emphasized that there is a particularly harsh critique of addicted mothers.
“There’s this sense that they’re choosing heroin over their children, but from their viewpoint they are doing their best to care for their kids within the confines of their substance use disorder,” she said. “A lot of these mothers are coming from a place where they can’t even begin to care for their children if they’re dopesick — they’ll be violently ill. So, for them, getting drugs is the quickest thing they can do in order to be healthy enough to do things most of us take for granted, like feeding their kids breakfast or taking them to school.”
Bolognese described a concept she labelled “compassion fatigue,” defined as “indifference felt towards others’ suffering, experienced as a result of the frequency or number of such exposure.”
“The prevalence of opioid addiction and the media hype surrounding it has contributed to the rise in compassion fatigue among recovery specialists, prevention professionals, and many more,” Bolognese said. “By definition, the more one is exposed to others’ suffering, the more their compassion fatigue will grow and the longer it will last.”
Bolognese wants students to know that there are alternatives to using opioids when a doctor prescribes them. It is within a patient’s rights to ask for an alternative, or to discard the prescriptions, following proper disposal methods, if they so choose.