Milwaukee Opioid Crisis Solutions Discussed at UWM Fireside Forum

While the Fireside Lounge offers a calm, relaxing atmosphere with its dimmed lights, cozy chairs, and relative silence, the issue being discussed was anything but peaceful, and for some, incredibly close to home: Opioids.

“A young lady I know, I took her off the streets from prostitution and drugs, she got cleaned up and was involved with the church,” said Laura Manriquez, a nurse of 25 years and healthcare business administration student at UWM. “She relapsed and two weeks ago, about four or five days after she was cleaning up, her organs shut down.”

UWM students and community members gathered in the UWM Union Fireside Lounge February 22 to hear a forum on the opioid crisis in Wisconsin, addressing local and national solutions.

Speakers Hannah Hetzer of the Drug Policy Alliance based in New York, and Jon Richards, coalition director of Take Back My Meds MKE and former Wisconsin State Assembly member, led the discussion, touching on local efforts as well as approaches tested by other countries.

The discussion was a part of the Fireside Forum, a lecture series held by the UWM Institute of World Affairs and co-sponsored by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The purpose of the lectures is to bring together local and international experts to address how local community issues fit in with a larger global scale.

“This is such a terrible problem that’s wreaking havoc in Milwaukee County,” said Richards. “All of us have a role to play.”

The number of opioids deaths in Milwaukee County has increased 500 percent since 2005, according to Richards, and it hasn’t shown any signs of stopping.

“That number is not going down. We have not peaked yet,” said Richards. “We have double number of overdose deaths than homicides in this county… Job one is reducing that death rate.”

According to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner, there were 336 narcotic deaths in 2017. Media Milwaukee had previously reported on the rising rates of overdoses in August of last year. As of March 7 there have been 36 reported drug deaths in Milwaukee in 2018 so far, 26 of them from opiates.

This is compared to 117 total homicides in the city of Milwaukee last year, according to Milwaukee Police District statistics.

“The people who use drugs problematically are only 10 percent of the people who use drugs overall,” said Hetzer. “And those are the people that we need to be focusing our support for.”

Hetzer, with her background as senior international policy manager at DPA, presented many different solutions to the opioid crisis, most of them approaching the issue as one of public health, emphasizing harm reduction first and foremost.

“We don’t want to throw people under the bus regardless of their choices, because lives are still important,” said Hetzer

The dire effects of the war on drugs on Latin America and global human rights has led her to advocate for more compassionate, evidence-based strategies. While she acknowledged some of her solutions may seem radical, she cited countries such as Canada, Switzerland, and Portugal where they had been implemented to great effect.

In her talk and in a companion opinion piece in the Journal Sentinel, she emphasizes five main programs aiming to minimize harm: expanding access to naloxone, a life-saving opioid overdose antidote; opioid substitution therapy (OST); heroin-assisted treatment (HAT); supervised consumption services (SCS); and “drug checking” services, allowing users to test the make-up of their drugs for any additives.

Fentanyl, a more potent synthetic opioid, is one of the main culprits in these situations and a factor in many overdoses. Fentanyl was a factor in over half of the opioid deaths in Milwaukee in 2017.

With all of these, she stresses that it is hard to implement good prevention efforts without decriminalization. Her focus is on minimizing harm first and foremost, even if it means allowing some drug use.

“I think it requires a big cultural shift, or ideological shift, perception, or just very brave leadership, that is willing to do things that might feel a little unsettling to people,” said Hetzer.

Back in September, The City-County Opioid, Heroin, and Cocaine Task Force said that drug addiction was an epidemic. Richards has worked extensively with the task force through his work with the Take Back My Meds MKE coalition.

Richards emphasized unused medicine as a major issue, and cited a statistic from the Milwaukee Health Department that 80 percent of heroin users have used unused medicine to get high.

He also stressed that unused medicine should not be flushed down the toilet under any circumstances.

“We’re having a growing problem, in addition to this human tragedy, which is very real, of an environmental tragedy that is going on, where people are flushing unused medicine and its ending up in Lake Michigan.”

Keeping unused medicine out of homes, off the street, and out of Lake Michigan is the primary focus of Take Back My Meds MKE. It does so through promoting and raising awareness of free, no-questions-asked drop boxes located throughout the city for people to return unused prescription medicine to. A map of locations can be found on their website. Locations include pharmacies, police and fire stations.

But now it’s not just the cities that are plagued by the drug epidemic, it’s the entire nation. Not even rural Ozaukee County, one of the wealthiest counties in the state, are safe from the problem.

Judy Mazuer was a parole and probation officer in Milwaukee before she transferred to Ozaukee County in 2006.

“And when I got there, we were already having young people die all the time from opiates,” Mazuer said, “They got their parents’ pills, and then they can’t afford the pills, and heroin was very popular.”

One UWM student, Daniel King, thought that part of it was a generational divide.

“My father, he always talks about how the younger generation is a sensitive generation, but I feel that maybe that is how we need to address the opioid crisis, with sensitivity,” said King.

“If the next generation has that attitude, I think we’re heading in a really good direction,” said Hetzer.