good afternoon and welcome back to another segment of the edge my name is julia trying so and i'm here with senator camera bought a lotta of the forty six that's direct to pennsylvania we will be speaking about the opiate crisis that has taken arrived over the last decade in pennsylvania thank you for coming in thank you for being with us today can you tell me a little bit about yourself mr edwards thank you so much for talking about such an important issue because it's a real it's horrible across the whole country but particularly in pennsylvania it's really hit so many people  again as you said i'm a state senator for district forty six which includes green county washington county all municipalities except for peters township so it's kind of weird to be here but that's home and six municipalities in beaver county so i aliquippa all the way to the corner of west virginia or that a large footprint and it's a very diverse population absolutely and the opioid issue has hit everyone in some fashion yes from my understanding it's since about two thousand and six do you know why this might be the case well it's sort of the perfect storm i've been to so much on so many to task forces i've been in so many meetings i've been in hearings across all of pennsylvania when it comes to the opioid issue and i think a lot of it comes from the fact that we are a special washington county now two years ago watching county made national news i remember i was on the front page wall post i believe a guy has said one county seventy minutes eight overdoses those are the good old days it's our worst since then but we are at the crossroads of some major highway you know they were injured it were good we've got a lot of coal miners we've got a lot of really you know steel workers and people who've worked really hard through their lives and you put that with the fact that over the years big pharma has done with the  tobacco did with cigarettes way back when ok it's just a massive flood of overprescribing person having too many drugs for too long a period of time thinking that they were going to be safe when people if they're on heavily addictive  addicted within a week or two weeks and time yes so what are these use for if there are so many horrible consequences that can come from it why do we still continue to prescribe these and why is the abuse so prominent as well well it's actually almost like anything certain thinks and be a out great great asset to healing and to pain control but left unchecked or or left unmoderated or overprescribe that's when you lead to real real real trouble a few years back there since a statistic this of four out of five heroin addicts started with push prescription drugs and the average age now this was a couple years ago again these stats the average age of an those drugs then that's when they turn to street drugs they turn to heroin which is cheaper than beer and easier to get unfortunately do you think we could do anything to help this especially with prescriptions in the medical field you think there's something that we could possibly do the legislature has been looking at this issue and really sort of tackling it from you know a surround of troops and attack a problem from every side that you can imagine first we have to make sure people don't get addicted in the first place so there's legislation that requires physicians one of the bills that i'm a prime sponsor on is limiting the number of drugs in the days of prescriptions oka of a addictive drugs  that doctors can prescribe ok used to be thirty days now we've taken it down to seven ok i had some trauma doctor say make it three make it three days while he had more than three days of a heavy narcotic and you've got bigger problems ok but we took it down to seven and there are a lot of other bills out there right now making sure that even dentists and doctors talk to the parents and get their o kids absolutely at the numbers that are prescribed make sure that doctors are are trained to know and start using again all of those non addictive pain medications that we all get along with just huge span imagen there that we could probably fall on something in the middle exactly so how do you think we could possibly imagine some bills but like how would we be able to prevent people from getting addicted in the first place so that we kind of st would stop the problem before it got worse right i think especially with a lot of the young people that are out there having skills parties and colleges an if people don't know what that is it is a ludicrous practice that a lot of young people are dangerously participating in ok people go and they'll still medication from grandma's cupboard or you know you know dad had hip replacement or and they grap these pills and they toss them into a bowl which you do that with chemicals you find under the sink and take a great big swig of course not but some of these kids are taking pills that people bring in and dump in a bowl it is the most ridiculous people have died so it's almost lanced no big deal it's it's insanity so we really need to teach kids you know and young people you know don't even get started down that path yeah because there are opioid receptors in our brains were born with them yes once you get that opioid hit your good job later on because a lot of these people revert to crime to go and steal drugs or steal things to sell to keep feeding that habit and i've been talking with she's a wonderful wonderful woman she's been clean for thirteen years but because she robbed her grandma or her mom to get money for drugs she had a felony record it has taken this much time and a lot of work and a lot of a lot of issues yet she she couldn't get she couldn't get higher education a lot of colleges won't take you you can't get a job because you have a felony record you can't get housing if you want to buy a home if you want to get a better apartment someplace they'll have an also i actually have a very good friend who buried his nephew last year twenty three years old and here's what happened this is a kid at twenty three who was saying oh i don't do opioids i'm just here one that's crazy that's for not i don't do that those are drug addicts yeah i just know weed ok well the guy that he was buying his pot from yes thought i have an idea let's make it so that my clients become addicted to what i'm selling them and they'll keep coming back and i'll make a lot of money he put fenton all so marijuana yeah and he died instantly that was it was horrible so there's a lot of that out there fent hard there are all of these criminal aspects out there and so they go for something stronger and stronger and stronger with heroin you have to import it ok fentanyl you can make yourself ok so it's easier access right that's horrible it is so imagine young parents with their kids out at a park somewhere you know and little susie or little johnny are climbing the ladder what you know to the to go down the slide or they sit on a bench what happens if i say you know sometime  someone was dealing karf and all yeah and somebody sits on a park bench and it goes to their skin it's a whole reflect thing to worry about it really is so we're trying desperately to tackle this issue from all sides  i have legislation out there actually that makes it so that criminals who sell ok narcotics that result now right now we have laws on the books that punish dealers if their client dies from an overdose ok on the federal level ok they have laws that say if you cause great bodily harm injury or harm resulting in i mean you know if you basically if you die you need to be yes that's great bodily harm so i'm making it so that our d a s at the state level have the same ability as the federal level ok these dealers behind bars for causing great bodily harm ok so i have other bills that are along that line too so  good that's very good because it's stopping it before anything starts hopefully i hope how else do you think we could prevent this like locally in pennsylvania especially because it's such a big issue we have drug take back boxes and a fence all the time like i said you know when i'm an old we and when i was young you know our parents used to lock up the liquor cabinet ok ok we don't lock up our medicine cabinets so they're unfortunately there are people again they get a heard this recently and i've heard about it before but something this event happened to someone i know yes they were selling their home and they had an open house ok and there are people that literally flip through the classified section and look for open houses and they go house to house to house for their open house oh hey can't you restroom and they go into the bathrooms and they rifled through the medicine cabinets looking for any form of narcotics it's that bad so they're drug take back boxes of police stations you can call your local call my office if you're looking for one so it's to give the medicine ball on a used back don't flush them down the toilet don't put them down the drain we can't get these drugs out of our water system ok don't flush taken to a drug take back place pharmacies will do it some won't but you have to make some phone calls we can have a list at our office we can help you find a drug about call your local pharmacy and say do you have a drug a drug take back box so and if they don't have one they can tell you where it is i mean down in green county anyway r r fairgrounds every now and again they'll have drug take pennsylvania well there used to be is such a horrible stigma about drug addiction and nobody wanted to talk about it nobody wanted to talk about it but now it is so bad almost every single person that you know either has something in their family someone they know or someone that it's one degree of separation what comes to addiction ok and the more we talk about it the more we understand there's treatment out there yeah there's a lot of different kinds of treatment as a matter of fact one of the other bills i have mandates that any medically assisted treatment facility a suboxone clinic or methadone clinic they would have to tell their clients i have to provide the the therapy they have to tell them any f d a approved treatment that's out there  what we offer doesn't work for you and sometimes it does it ok you're not you know it doesn't mean that you can't be cured yes so here's all the other options they have to at least refer them to other treatment if they're articular plan doesn't work and that's not happening of possible things to help people with addictions we're just going to put it on pause ok and we're going to take a break we'll be right back with this episode of th my grandfather served in world war two spending time with him with the best memories of my life i became a physician in v a because of my grandfather so i can help others like him i can't imagine working with better doctors or more dedicated staff fulfilling my life's mission with the help of my team and thanks to these veterans i'm proud to be a doctor in v a and proud to honor my grandfather every day search v a careers to find out more prevent the actual use of opioids while a lot of the things that might really pertain to your audience in particular i'll tell you i sat at a lunch table two years ago when i first got involved really heavily with task forces and all of that and learning as much as i could about the whole addiction process and how it's affecting us this mom was sitting across the lunch table from me and she had just buried her nineteen year old son this was an a student an honor student he was he was on the football team he was you know looking forward to a football scholarship towards a c l and ended up getting surgery and he was given thirty days of oxycontin again the so that is so long and he took it like an antibiotic took it all thirty days and then by the end of it he his body desperately needed it and one of the ways that i can describe addiction and this was described at a at a rally that i was at one time by a former recovering addict and he said ok i want everybody in the room to hold your breath now hold your breath until you die you can't do it yeah your body kicks in and takes over and keeps you prevent you from dying right when you're addicted to opi your brain your body your everything is telling and screaming at you you're going to die if you don't get more ok so this kid was in that situation and he had friends that realized ok hey you know is he was reaching out to friends like you know i just can't take i can't stand it i need more and more you know hey your grandma had surgery do you have any pills and his friends were trying to help him out right but really what they were doing was causing him feeding his addiction it was making it worse and worse and worse and worse and then someone realized that and took advantage of that vulnerability and said hey i know where you can get some heroin it's a lot cheaper flood easier to get let me hook you up and that's that was the downfall where so it can happen to addiction sometimes recognize it know it don't be ashamed to reach out and go and tell someone just tell someone because hiding it and trying to handle it yourself typically results in a spiral downward and that's not where you want to be and if you've got friends you know if you're in school you see somebody oh maybe they got injured at some point or maybe they were a party maybe they're hanging out the wrong kind of people and you realize their personalities are changing  moody they stop showing up for things they stop participating in things you know there's something wrong reach out and ask him what the heck's going on what can you do what can you do for someone at that point well if they won't listen to you know to their friends and it's oh i can handle it i'm ok ok it's just you know it's just a couple percocet here or there or whatever it turns into a big issue really really fast ok so you know tell the parents to talk to the counselor talk to a teacher talk to the coach talk to anybody that maybe this particular person might listen to exactly ok and respect yeah i understand that sports injuries are definitely a big issue in the prescriptions have just seemed to be flowing so is there anything that you like that anyone that we could do especially like as a student what can we do with sports injuries because they're so rampant well knowing that you know if it as talk to your doctor if your doctor prescribe something for you because you've been injured ask them is this an addictive substance is this an opioid is this something that i could get addicted to if i take it for too long and if the answer is yes you you have a little bit of control there you can say hey doc i'm really worried about this can you give me three days ok of it and they'll call you back and if i'm still in excruciating pain then maybe we can talk about you know refilling it ok i mean you you know your body you know if you're hurting so much that you can't tolerate it that's another problem with this whole opioid thing few years back the hospital started this whole scale the satisfaction survey and i'm sure some people have been to the emergency room or or you know the hospital and their smiley faces on that chart and smile is oh are you you know pain free or you feel terrible and hospitals were getting more federal funding with the higher satisfaction rate that they got ok so how better to get a great satisfaction rate than to them to make you completely numb to everything when you go home and that's a nice pain is a good thing yeah pain tells you you know you better not run a mile today so it's not a bad idea what can students do because i know it's a big problem in schools and there have been lots of overdoses and everything like that and i know we're informed about it but how else can students maybe get involved or help with locally  taking drugs to help this well you know it might not be a bad idea to to have have a school task force and opioid task force and bring in speakers on the subject bring in former addicts they're the ones who know what it's like or they know how they got started and they can tell you what the signs are and what to avoid there's nothing wrong with talking to somebody who's in recovery yeah they're the best teachers sometimes get get you know get a group together and let people know where there are drug take back programs when they're happening you know police departments are a great asset for that bring the police to the school to do a drug take back program at the school and have students tell their families clean up the the the medicine cabinet you don't need to have that stuff hanging around that's better safe than sorry can you tell me a little bit more about the take back programs like where could they where could we find those like close to us well again there's the police department can as workers one pharmacy but you know talk to the police because they are more eager than anyone i guarantee you in getting the opioids off the streets and the fewer there are out there to misuse the fewer times you're going to be called to respond to give nor can to somebody who overdosed and is this close to death so they would be thrilled to have school kids reach out to them and say we want to help in this situation and we want to participate yes absolutely what about when you're if you're worried about a friend like you said that you told me about story about the boy he overdosed and his friends were maybe worried about him what could you possibly do is there anything that you can like i know you said report it to maybe a friend or teacher is there anywhere you could go is there something that you could possibly do that it's a little bit higher up well i mean if they can go to an emergency room or and they can say i i have a problem when they can be evaluated there are all kinds of community organizing organizations out there dealing with recovery right there are places i mean you just again go on your computer and search for addiction recovery there's a meetings for alcoholics on there and a narcotics anonymous groups that meet weekly some meet daily and you just get yourself there talk to people and say i think i have a problem there are more than happy to reach out to almost every church around the district these days has some kind of a group that meets there for recovery there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there readily available willing to help you yeah and very easy to talk to there's teen outreach programs so i mean it's not just a bunch of old folks t wrong but there's a lot of teens out there that are in recovery themselves and help pull people through the this mess ok so they're not alone is there a certain group of people is it one certain age group or is this o crisis affecting a wide variety every age group is affected there are there are seventy year old people who've had surgeries ok and have gotten addicted to painkillers and are functioning some of them some of them don't spiral into using heroin and fenton all those other illegal drugs because you know again they can probably afford to keep the habit going right more and more doctors now those are signals and those are signs like a red flag absolutely what can possibly be done in the medical field do you think there's anything that even like locally like local businesses anything that we could do well right now there's a lot of legislation out there that that or tell that are basically stating doctors and dentists and things when they go for continuing education ok they learn about addictive behavior they learn the signs of another patient who's coming to them  possibly addicted and how to first prevented by offering things that aren't so addictive limiting the numbers of those drugs that are and then recognizing the signs and trying to get these people into recovery ok is there anything locally that we can do like kids activists anything well just be aware and just you know be aware of the kids that you see every single day as a matter of fact a lot of kids don't realize this but you see  classmates more and then parents see rahm on times yeah so you are their best advocate you are their best source of support sometimes ok so recognize if someone's having a hard time recognize of someone is depressed or pennsylvania anyway may be able to spend example for elsewhere because like from what i'm talking to you are making a lot of effort to try and help this well this this issue has gotten so severe and so bad you know i we went from maybe seven or eight deaths a week in pennsylvania to one hundred twenty i mean it was just just spiraling yeah but now i've heard recently that that number is slowing down a bit is it because people are realizing that opioids are bad and you should be taking and heroin is bad or is it because a lot of those people that were in addiction are dead that's a horrible thing to  we need to we need to stop the stigma we need to talk about it we need to tell people look if you've got a problem with each out let's fix this there's a lot of places that have a long term recovery plan program those are the ones that people need to get into ok is there any final advice that you would give to people locally that you could possibly do well the best way to not be addicted to opioids is to not take them in the first place ok well thank you so much for joining me it was wonderful talking to you that's all we have time