Family 'dismantled' by deaths
BUTLER TWP — A panel of county, state and federal officials and experts spoke to a crowd of hundreds Thursday night on the opioid crisis, as Butler County begins a push to combat the epidemic.
Their argument, given over a two-hour event at Butler Intermediate High School, was simple: It could be any of us.
That's how things kicked off Thursday night, with Jason Snyder, a former Butler resident now a special assistant to Ted Dallas, the secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, telling his family's story of addiction and loss.
Snyder grew up like most other Western Pennsylvania children, with his father holding down a blue-collar job and providing for the family while his mother stayed home to raise Jason and his brothers, Todd and Josh. And life progressed as people might expect — the boys grew up, went to college and started building their own lives — until it suddenly didn't.
It was early 2005 when Jason, who was living in Pittsburgh near Todd at the time, got a call from his brother's girlfriend. She couldn't wake Todd up, and he wasn't breathing. Jason rushed over to the couple's home, but by the time he arrived it was apparent that it was already too late.
At 28 years old Todd — a college graduate with a good job at Alcoa — had died of a heroin overdose. Snyder said making the call that morning to his parents and brother, Josh, to tell them the news, was the worst thing he's ever had to do.
The family had known of Todd's struggle with addiction for some time, Snyder said, but a common preconception kept them from acting on their fears.
“It didn't happen to families like ours, so we held out hope that it would get better,” Snyder said.
It didn't. Two years later Josh was dead as well — another heroin overdose. He was 25. This time it was Snyder's parents making a call to him. This time the family welcomed Josh's son, Peyton, into the world under circumstances that, to them, had seemed unimaginable months before. Peyton was born two months after his father's death at the hands of heroin.
It wasn't yet over for the Snyders, who, Jason said, had been “dismantled” by their sons deaths. In 2011, Jason himself entered rehab for what he said was “years of drug and alcohol abuse.” Snyder, who said Thursday he has been clean for about five years, had developed an addiction to prescription pain medication.
Experts and law enforcement officials who spoke at the Resilience and Hope: We Will Survive! The Heroin/Opioid Epidemic in Butler County and Beyond forum on Thursday, including Dr. Mark Fuller, the CEO of Value Behavioral Health of PA, say Snyder's story isn't unusual. Certainly not anymore, as prescription opioids and now high-potency heroin from western Mexico have flooded the region's illicit drug marketplace.In 2015, nearly 3,500 Pennsylvanians died as a result of accidental drug overdoses — about 10 people per day. More than 80 percent of them involved an opioid or a combination of opioids, said Connor Lamb, the assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The wave of deaths has made overdose the leading cause of accidental death in the Commonwealth, far outpacing previous leaders like car accidents, which kill about three people per day.What Butler County and the region in general are doing to stem the tide of addictions and deaths is widespread and multifaceted. Law enforcement agencies like the Butler County Sheriff's Office are pushing the effectiveness of the life-saving treatment Narcan — a drug that gets into an overdosing addict's brain and blocks the effects of opioids and opiates, which kill by overloading the brain and shutting down the center which regulates involuntary activities, such as breathing.Mark Pfeffer, the office's chief, said Thursday that police in Butler Township had saved an overdosing person that same night along New Castle Road. Overall, since departments began stocking the treatment more than a year ago, officers have saved some 15 people. He said 95 percent of Butler County departments have access to the drug.But saving people often doesn't happen if police don't know an overdose is occurring. Pfeffer urged people to come together in their own neighborhoods, and to call in the life-threatening situations when they see or suspect something happening.“It is house-to-house combat,” Pfeffer said. “This is the only way this can be defeated. The only way.”At Butler Memorial Hospital, which has been designated a Center for Excellence under Gov. Tom Wolf's anti-opioid initiative, the focus is on getting addicts into treatment and helping them stay clean, said Ruthane Durso, the supervisor of behavior health programs for the hospital system. Durso said the hospital was in the midst of developing teams of professionals that can help expand access to the region's overburdened inpatient treatment systems. The teams would also educate people on the effects of opioids and opiates, which Fuller said overload and hijack the brain's natural pain-relief centers. The resulting chemical imbalance produces the kind of impaired decision-making and focus on getting high that nonaddicts often mistake for lack of will or poor character, Fuller said. That's why prescription pain pills helped jump-start the heroin epidemic, Fuller said. They're chemically almost identical to the illicit drug, and they work exactly the same way once a person ingests them.“It takes a very small mechanism in the brain, overwhelms it and hijacks it,” Fuller said. “Your brain doesn't care (if it's OxyContin or heroin). It all works the same.”What prescription pills do accomplish, Snyder said, is allow people to feel different from heroin addicts. Crushing up and snorting a high potency painkiller like Oxy may feel and look different from buying a stamp bag of heroin and shooting up in an alley. But it's actually the exact same thing.It's getting people to realize that fact that's proving difficult, the experts said. That's a problem Snyder warned will likely lead to more overdose deaths, and communities such as those in Butler County struggle to change people's preconceptions of drug addiction, addiction treatment, and the substances that are driving the overdose epidemic.“If we do not change what we are doing, we are going to continue to see a body count that rises,” he said.
