As Billions Get Wasted in US Drug Addiction Battle, One County Proves Recovery Can Work

COMPASSION AND COMMUNITY –

Nov. 3, 2023 – It was 2007 when Stuby began hearing from officials about prescription opioids being misused. That was about the same time Jesse Johnson, then 14, was prescribed the painkiller Percocet.

The Findlay native was pregnant when she needed stents put into her kidneys as treatment for infections and kidney stones. After seven months on the opioid medication, she gave birth to a healthy daughter. Then she underwent an operation to remove the stents. The prescriptions stopped and she became sick from withdrawal.

“I remember not even being able to hold my daughter,” said Johnson, now 31. “It just hurt.”

Alcohol, marijuana and, a few years later, cocaine and opioids from the black market helped Johnson ease the pain.

By then, county officials were seeing the area’s fatal opioid overdose toll tick up. The recovery system then included only some outpatient services and Alcoholics Anonymous.

“We were grossly underprepared, like I think many places across the country were, for the opioid epidemic,” Stuby said.

From 1999 through 2020, 131 deaths in the county were attributed to opioids. Across the country, it was more than 500,000. The county’s opioid-linked death rate over that period paralleled the nation’s.

But the county took a path that many places did not.

Officials created a plan with the help of the federally funded Addiction Technology Transfer Center that stressed recovery and built upon a local recognition that “this is our family, our friends, our brothers, our sisters,” Stuby said.