Background cover painting by Robyn Anderson Watercolors
Background Music by CarlyThomas.com
Photography by Jennifer Mao Jones
Noah Latzer works as a recovery support specialist at the Minnesota Recovery Connection, working individually with clients, helping run groups with Virtual Addiction Care at Allina Health and running inclusive, weekly ALL recovery meetings – and he'll tell you more about what that means later in this episode.
I first heard Noah speak at an education event at Hastings High School – it was called One Pill Can Kill organized by United Way of Hastings. He was on a panel discussing the ways drugs get into schools and how we might prevent addiction and fentanyl overdose by educating kids about how it is being pressed into pills in lethal doses. Noah has a daunting story. Drug dealers in school are humans with pain and fear that they're trying to escape from. There's a lot more going on in that persons life. I wonder what would happen if we approached these kinds of people with compassion and curiosity about their pain?
I work at a small hospital in a small town on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin – on a bluff where horses graze overlooking the Mississippi river. as an addiction assessor in an inpatient mental health unit, emergency department and medical units. I see a sample of the firing lines of addiction related circumstances that bring people into the hospital. It was interesting to have the opportunity from United Way to go out into the community and discover how these new potent drugs were harming the families of this town in the school system. I usually work with people after the drugs and alcohol have done their damage – and sometimes in the hospital it's too late to treat their addiction – so it was a new perspective to think about the problem of addiction from a prevention standpoint. Looking over some old local news articles, I noticed that Hastings has had a long history of opioid overdoses – higher per capita than the surrounding areas – and the town has been trying to figure out what to do about it for decades. What could the solution be? What is really going on in our communities? Let's take a broader look around at the data from the state as a whole:
Aaccording to the MN dept of health - Opioid-involved overdose deaths among Minnesotans increased 43% from 2020 to 2021, and the number of deaths has more than doubled since 2019.
Nonfatal emergency department (ED) visits for opioid-involved overdose continued to increase from 2020 to 2021. This increase was driven by nonfatal overdoses involving opioids other than heroin, whereas nonfatal overdoses involving heroin decreased.
Use and Misuse Among Youth
Among Minnesota students surveyed, the percentage of 8th and 9th graders who reported inappropriate use of pain medications (e.g., OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin) in the past 12 months has continued to increase. Inappropriate use among 11th graders remained steady from 2019 to 2022.
In 2021 there was a bump in admissions to treatment for opioid use disorder.
The number of patients who have completed their treatment at the time of their discharge has been decreasing.
In 2021, seven out of ten patients had not completed their Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) treatment at the time of discharge.
Understanding the central nervous system's response to pain: A patient's pain sensitivity increases with long-term opioid use; the central nervous system's alarm system is no longer sending accurate signals. Part of recovery from long-term opioid use includes addressing the central nervous system's response and teaching the body that life can be safe again. Health systems that are skilled in trauma-informed practices are beginning to explore holistic healing from long-term chronic pain and/or long-term opioid use.
Looking at this problem from all angles, I want to explore if my initial opinion that total abstinence – preventing drug experimentation among young people through education and changing the social culture of inevitability – which is accepting the inevitable that all young people will go through a right of passage of exposing themselves to addictive substances for fun – is the only way to solve this problem.
Can we do better?
Can we take a look around at the bigger picture of what's causing these fentanyl overdoses, and cultural drift towards ever more potent psychoactive substance addictions?
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