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Date: 8/24/2022
LUDLOW – In partnership with Ludlow CARES Coalition, the Hampden County District Attorney’s Office, the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office and the Hampden County Addiction Taskforce, the town of Ludlow hosted a Preventing Accidental Poisoning seminar at Ludlow High School on Aug. 16.
Hampden County District Attorney Anthony Gulluni began the seminar by discussing the work his office does to prevent tragedies related to drugs.
“What we do as an office and through our community safety and outreach unit, is to figure out what is coming for our communities, figure out what threats are down the line for the public that we serve and particularly for the young people in our communities,” he said.
Gulluni said one of the most important branches of the office is the Youth Advisory Board.
“They inform us of what’s happening, they are our eyes and ears on the ground in places like Ludlow High School. We have kids from almost every high school across Hampden County and there are more than you might imagine,” he said. “All of those places are different and consequently have different issues and different threats that are very serious for that public, for that community and for the young people in those schools.”
Through the advisory board and law enforcement efforts, Gulluni said his office has learned that overdose deaths are rising.
“In 2021, we had almost 2,300 fatal overdoses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which represents a historic high in our commonwealth. Each one of those people is a loss to a family, is a loss to a group of friends, is a loss to a community, is a tragedy and a preventable tragedy,” he said.
Gulluni said the advisory board and the Hampden County Addiction Taskforce were groups made specifically to combat and prevent the increase in fatal overdoses. He added that there was also a 37 percent increase in overdoses for the 15-to 24-year-old age group since 2017. In 2021, Gulluni said fentanyl was involved in 93 percent of the total deaths.
“It’s because of two things coming together, this trend of counterfeit pills and narcotics and accidental poisoning. The idea behind that is people are taking things they don’t know, unsuspectingly they are taking opioids and in particular fentanyl in pill form,” he said.
Gulluni said many of the counterfeit pills on the market contain fentanyl, which is why it is a common factor in overdose fatalities.
“Fentanyl is a huge problem we have been talking about for years, and it’s a growing problem. These pills very often contain amounts of fentanyl, and for an unsuspecting user who thinks he or she is taking something like Xanax or Adderall, when there’s fentanyl in this counterfeit pill, that person’s system may react very adversely to that substance,” he said.
While the issue began more predominantly in eastern Massachusetts, it has worked its way into Western Mass.
“This is here, it’s not a scare tactic, it’s not for you to go home and lock your doors, but it’s an important message to our parents and young people to not take this for granted, to understand that these threats exist. Opioids are here, they’re in your community whether it’s Longmeadow, Ludlow, West Springfield or Springfield, it’s here,” Gulluni said.
Following Gulluni’s introduction, members of the Youth Advisory Board discussed how many of the drug sales among the youth are made online using social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.
Morgan Murphy, a member of the advisory board, said much of the social media drug dealing happens through private stories on Snapchat.
“With this feature, sellers can add people to their private story who they know bought drugs in the past or who may be interested in them in the future. A buyer can add anybody from their contact list to the private story,” she said.
Many of the posts include direct photos of drugs or menus with different flavors available for purchase. The board also highlighted some emojis typically included in drug posts, including the snowflake emoji representing cocaine, leaf emojis representing cannabis and the plug emoji referring to a drug dealer, the gasoline and fire emoji also tend to represent large amounts of cannabis.
During the advisory board presentation, statistics were also shown for the number of overdose deaths in 2021 in local communities including 84 in Springfield, 25 in Chicopee, seven in Ludlow, 18 in Westfield, 23 in Holyoke, four in Wilbraham and eight in Agawam.
Mark Klee, a pharmacist with Baystate Health, said the increase in the use of painkillers rose beginning in the 1990s because “we were doing such a bad job of treating pain, we weren’t adequately treating patients.” He added this change in mentality led to a four-time increase in the prescription of opiates and a similar increase in overdoses.
Klee said opiates are broken down into three different categories: opiates, semi-synthetic opiates and synthetic opiates. The opiates category includes drugs like morphine, semi-synthetic includes heroin and synthetic includes carfentanil. Each category progressively includes more fentanyl, becoming more deadly with carfentanil being strong enough to be used as a tranquilizer for large animals like elephants.
“The fully synthetic are structurally dissimilar from the opiate medications but still work at the receptors, these drugs are very potent. When we talk about fentanyl, we are talking about a drug that is 50 times more potent than heroin or morphine. When you look at carfentanil, which is a large animal sedative, that’s on the order of 10,000 times more potent than morphine,” he said.
While drug prevention efforts have been helping make young people make better decisions on using drugs, Klee said the potency of the drugs means “fewer students are trying, but more are dying.”
One issue Klee brought up is that the counterfeit drugs look more similar to the true prescription drugs than ever.
“In terms of how do you identify a counterfeit, there’s no way to do it. The distributors have gotten much more sophisticated. They’re using commercial pill presses to make exact replicas of the tablets that get dispensed out of the pharmacy and there is no way, other than a chemical analysis, to determine what’s in a tablet,” he said.
One of the best ways Klee said to reverse an overdose while waiting for medical help is by using Narcan.
“What this can do is if somebody is not breathing because of an opioid, it blocks those receptors the opiates can find and decrease respiratory rate. It’s up to greater than 90 percent effective in reversing overdoses,” he said.
In communities where Narcan was more readily available, Klee said the number of overdose deaths decreased by 11 percent. Klee said Narcan is available at pharmacies across the state and is covered by many insurance policies.
Klee cautioned that Narcan will not completely reverse the effects of the overdoes and the person will need more severe medical assistance immediately as the Narcan lasts only between 60 and 90 minutes.
As a word of advice to parents, Klee suggested that parents keep all prescription drugs or recreational drugs like alcohol or cannabis locked away to prevent tampering.
Following Klee’s presentation, local law enforcement officials including Ludlow Police Chief Daniel Valadas, Detective Lt. David Kornacki and Deputy Fire Chief Jeff Lavoie discussed the importance of law enforcement in an overdose situation. Valadas said it was important to call 911 if someone is experiencing an overdose as the police are there to help.
“I implore all of you to use police as a conduit. When we go on these calls, overwhelmingly we are the caregivers and the first people that get there. We are policing as a guardian mentality,” he said. “When you call, we go there.”
Both Kornacki and Lavoie highlighted the Good Samaritan Law, which prevents someone from being charged with drug or drug paraphernalia possession in the case of an overdose. Under the Good Samaritan Law, bystanders are also free from charge if they work to help the person experiencing an overdose in good faith.
To wrap up the seminar, representatives from the Hampden County Addiction Taskforce, a part of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office, described their work, which includes outreach to people after an overdose and connecting people to the resources they need to fight alcohol and drug addiction.