Overdoses Prevented by Treating Addiction as Health Problem

SICK PEOPLE NEED HELP –

Jan. 2, 2024 – Kenneth Purnell knows what it’s like to fight “the monster of addiction.” So does Jerome McNutt. Both men got clean in recent years after multiple stints behind bars and just barely skirting death.

They credit treatment programs, support groups, counseling and family members who wouldn’t give up on them for helping get them on the long road to recovery.

Too many people — likely close to 2,000 in Cook County once the numbers are finalized — died in 2023 from opioids. Even if 2022’s record of 2,001 deaths remains intact, more people will have died from opioid-related causes than in vehicle accidents and homicides combined, as Natalia Derevyanny, spokeswoman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office, told us.

Thousands more escaped death in 2023 but still live precariously because they’re not ready for, can’t find or can’t afford treatment.

Purnell remembers the moment in spring 2020 when he finally, after 15 years, off and on, of getting high, wanted to get sober. Dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing a few days earlier, after surviving a near-fatal overdose that landed him in the hospital, Purnell returned to his aunt’s home, where he had been sleeping on the couch. He got into a fight with his uncle over who could smoke the last bit of a cigarette. Not the whole cigarette, just one piece.

“That’s when I came to the decision that I had to change,” Purnell told us.

He called his mom, who immediately took him to Haymarket Center, where he did several days of detox and a rapid stabilization program. He then completed a 60-day in-patient program at the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center.