ADAMS TWP — The second Butler County Health and Safety forum on the opioid epidemic Thursday night at Mars High School featured presentations by two doctors, a U.S. Attorney and the second in command of the county sheriff’s office, but it was the words of two former addicts that proved hope lives among the ashes of addiction.

“I didn’t see hope,” said Jason, who has been sober for 18 months. “I didn’t see an avenue to get out. But God did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.”

Jason said he was injured playing football in Florida, and received OxyContin for his pain.

As explained earlier in the evening by presenter Dr. Bryan Negrini, the pain medication he became addicted to soon became insufficient.

Jason turned to heroin, and began a destructive cycle of being arrested, going to jail and running from his probation requirements once he was released.

“I existed on a daily basis to get high and escape reality,” Jason said.

His thoughts told him he would never amount to anything and he continued using heroin to numb the pain of those thoughts.

“If I died, it would have been ‘whatever’ because the life I was living was worse than death,” Jason said through tears.

Finally, Jason entered the county’s drug court program and has been sober since June 2015. There, he learned that he had a disease and needed a solution.

“They helped save my life,” Jason said.

Another addiction survivor who shared her experiences on Thursday night was Amanda, who began using drugs at age 14.

Amanda said she earned her sobriety at age 23 in September 2012.

She too found herself in and out of jail for burglaries she committed to fund her heroin addiction. Upon being jailed at the county prison on one occasion, she neglected to tell officials she was carrying 13 Xanax and a Clonopin.

That added two years in state prison onto her sentence of six months in the county prison. In state prison, she entered a six-month recovery program.

“They made me look at the deep-down core issues I was trying to avoid,” Amanda said.

Today, she has a two-year-old child, a job, apartment, driver’s permit and fiancé.

“My family wants me to be in their lives and be around,” Amanda said.

Both Jason and Amanda received hearty rounds of applause from the crowd, including the county district attorney and several police officers.

One of those police officers was Mark Peffer, the chief deputy sheriff.

Peffer said in 1987, when he began as a cop on the beat in Butler, alcohol was the biggest substance being abused.

“We didn’t really encounter these life-ending drugs that are so prevalent now,” Peffer said.

He called the opiate overdoses police are facing a “shocking community problem” that is ending the lives of otherwise healthy young adults.

“So how can we step up?” Peffer said. “One small way is Narcan. It’s very simple to use, it’s nasally injected and it gets in there and blocks the effects of what’s going on.”

He said police in the county have reversed 19 overdoses using Narcan, which cancels the effects of heroin.

The worst spate of overdoses he recalls saw he and his fellow officers use Narcan nine or 10 times in one 10-hour shift.

“I’d love to say Narcan is the cure, but it’s the parachute on a crashing plane,” Peffer said. “This is only temporary.”

He cautioned citizens from taking on the mindset that addicts made poor choices and should not be revived with Narcan.

Peffer said a car crash on the way home could necessitate pain medication and cause him to become an addict.

Negrini, the medical director at the Ellen O’Brien Gaiser Addiction Center in Butler, and Dr. David Rottinghaus of the Butler Memorial Hospital emergency department gave presentations on how the brain becomes addicted to opiates and how the emergency room responds to opiate-related hospital visits, respectively.

Conor Lamb, an assistant U.S. Attorney, discussed the “three Ds” being targeted by the Office of the U.S. Attorney’s Western Pennsylvania District.

He said dealers, deaths and doctors prescribing pain medication are the areas of concentration in the office’s relentless pursuit of an end to the opiate crisis.

Lamb said anyone who supplies an opiate to a user who dies can be arrested and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison.

He said local dealers facing that prison term often identify suppliers two levels up from themselves.

Regarding doctors providing prescriptions, Lamb said a nationwide database is now in operation that details where and to whom opioid pain medications were dispensed.

A question-and-answer session with the presenters followed the presentations.

The next opioid forum will be held Feb. 23 in Slippery Rock, at a venue to be announced.