Two-day conference draws 800 attendees, national officials

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller hosted the sixth-annual Indiana Prescription Drug Abuse Symposium in Indianapolis this week, Oct. 28 and 29, to focus on new challenges in the fight against prescription drug abuse, particularly in light of unprecedented HIV and Hepatitis C outbreaks this year triggered by intravenous abuse of diverted medications.

Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy Michael Botticelli and Deputy Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse Dr. Wilson Compton were keynote speakers at this year’s symposium, titled “In the Trenches, A Community Approach.” The symposium offered sessions on arming communities with strategies for curtailing abuse and providing treatment, and focused on collaboration between public health and public safety as well as among all levels of government.

The annual two-day symposium is the pinnacle event for the Indiana Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention Task Force, which Zoeller founded in 2012 and which he co-chairs alongside Dr. Joan Duwve, chief medical officer for the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH).

“This year, a small community in Southern Indiana saw an unprecedented spike in HIV infections and became the face of the national opioid epidemic,” Zoeller said. “This crisis was in addition to reports that show prescription drug abusers are turning to heroin, and the continued rise in heroin overdose deaths. Though the state’s efforts to stem the flow of prescribed opioids into communities are working, we now have new challenges to address in our ongoing battle to reduce abuse in Indiana and save Hoosier lives.”

According to a 2015 ISDH report, the number of heroin overdoses in Indiana more than doubled from 2011 to 2013. A 2014 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that approximately three out of four new heroin users report having abused prescription opioids prior to using heroin.

Setting record attendance with more than 800 registered attendees this year, the Indiana Prescription Drug Abuse Symposium is the largest statewide collaboration of professionals from local, state and federal agencies, academia, clinicians, pharmacists, treatment providers, counselors, educators, state and national leaders, and advocates impacted by prescription drug abuse.

“Meetings that bring together public health and public safety are critical to breaking down silos that impede our progress,” Director Botticelli said in his keynote. “This issue is personal for many of us in this audience today… It’s not somebody else’s kids; it’s our kids. The goal today is to shine a spotlight on this epidemic and make sure we all walk out of here committed to doing something about it, whether we are a faith leader, elected official, law enforcement or private citizen. We all have a role to play.”

Other prominent speakers at the symposium included Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Jerome Adams and Attorney General Zoeller. Symposium sessions covered the following topics among others:

• Lessons learned from the Scott County HIV crisis
• Naloxone (opioid overdose antidote) training
• Opioid abuse prevention strategies targeting youth
• Opioid addiction in vulnerable populations
• Syringe exchange programs

A full agenda for this year’s symposium is available here.

“Every community in Indiana has been touched by opioid misuse, addiction and overdose. Opioid misuse is preventable, opioid addiction is treatable, and opioid overdose is reversible,” Dr. Joan Duwve said. “This symposium is a way for all of us to come together to learn from one another, and from national experts, and then take what we’ve learned back to our local communities where families are struggling to keep children alive and get loved ones into treatment and recovery.”

Zoeller created the Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention Task Force in 2012 to reduce the abuse of controlled prescription drugs and decrease the number of deaths associated with these drugs in Indiana. The Task Force has grown to approximately 100 members including legislators, state and federal regulators, clinicians, pharmacists, treatment providers, educators and law enforcement. The Task Force holds quarterly meetings in addition to meetings held by the following individual committees: Education, Enforcement, INSPECT (state prescription drug monitoring program), Treatment & Recovery and Drug Take Back.

The Task Force has advanced a number of initiatives to reduce prescription drug abuse in Indiana. A key achievement was developing safer prescribing guidelines for physicians and working with the Legislature and Medical Licensing Board to adopt new rules consistent with the guidelines. Within six months of these rules taking effect, there was an 11 percent decrease in the amount of opioids prescribed in Indiana.

Significant legislative accomplishments include providing more oversight for pain clinic operators, stronger reporting requirements to the state’s prescription drug monitoring program INSPECT, greater access to addiction treatment services and to the overdose antidote naloxone, and – most recently – allowing communities with an HIV or Hepatitis C outbreak to establish syringe exchanges that discourage shared needle use and direct people to treatment options. Other key legislative successes from the 2015 legislative session include ensuring that Medicaid and the state’s Healthy Indiana Plan cover addiction treatment services and appropriating new funds for the growth of mental health and addiction services.

Letter to the Editor by Laura Blackburn

Most years about this time, I start to feel a sense of anticipation and exhilaration. It isn’t because of the crisp fall air. I don’t like cold weather. No, it isn’t because of Halloween. I’ve never been a big fan of costumes and Jack O’Lanterns. My excitement stems from a politics geek’s anticipation of “the most wonderful day of the year” – Election Day. After all, it is the day that we have a chance to celebrate America with something far better than parades and fireworks, we get to VOTE. We have a voice in our future, and all we have to do is cast a ballot.

This year is no exception, but I feel like so much more is at stake for my hometown this time around. Always before, I had the sense that if my candidates won, great. If they didn’t there would always be another chance in four years. This time, I’m not so sure that Evansville will have another chance to “get it right.” Four years ago when Lloyd Winnecke narrowly beat the late Rick Davis, my first thought was that the voters had made a terrible mistake and they would clearly understand it very early-on into the Winnecke administration. Now, four years later, I truly do not believe that our great city can withstand four more years like the last four. I believe we will be on the verge of bankruptcy and we will have lost the great sense of community that has always made Evansville feel like “home.”

We’ve all seen how freely the tax payers’ money has been spent and our children’s futures mortgaged for a “value engineered” downtown hotel to serve phantom conventioneers. There is a medical school planned downtown at a cost of sixty million dollars, although it will not include the Ivy Tech students that would have comprised the bulk of the student body. Like the hotel, the cost stayed the same while the product we bought shrunk significantly. Those things, along with the dire financial straits we find the City in and the disregard those in power treat the struggles of everyday people with are all “old hat.”

Those issues speak to the judgement of the Mayor, but I am also concerned about the integrity of our current mayor. One of the things that alarm me most about the position we find ourselves in is that for the first time in Evansville history, a mayoral candidate has raised more than a million dollars for a campaign. Most of that money comes from outside of the city, and even from throughout the country. Those very generous donations are coming from individuals and businesses that want to do millions of dollars’ worth of business with this administration. It appears that the City of Evansville is on the radar of a lot of businesses that are willing to spend a lot of money to curry favor with our Mayor.

Another,  example of how willing Lloyd Winnecke is willing to compromise the well-being of our city for his own purposes is the way in which he attempting to used the heads of the non-profit organizations that lost public funding because of the financial mess he has created. Does he not understand that by enlisting them to “politic” for him, he is placing their 501 (c) (3) standing? When these people put their organizations into the political arena they stand to have their non-profit status revoked by the IRS. I hope that any CCO readers who find their votes being solicited through non-profits that they support will remind those doing the politicking that they are endangering the very existence of their organizations. I believe that they would make better use of their time looking for alternate sources of funding. The City can no longer afford to support them. The Mayor spent their funds on the hotel and raising his own property values.

I won’t deny that I am especially excited about one other, more positive historical aspect of this election, too. I confess that I am anxious to see if Evansville will elect its first woman mayor. The thing that would make the Gail Riecken’s victory next Tuesday even greater for me is not that a woman won, but a qualified woman of high moral character won. We just can’t give up on Evansville and let it go down into the maelstrom that is the Winnecke administration.

Sincerely

Laura Blackburn

Evansville

FOOTNOTE: This letter was posted without bias, option or editing.