To mark Charlie Baker's first full week on the job, WGBH News is examining a quartet of deeply problematic challenges facing the new Massachusetts governor. Our second installment, Baker's pledge to tame runaway addiction.
Near Central Square in Cambridge, a women pulled her overcoat tighter to her body, her eyes squinting under gray clouds. Susan is a recovering addict and said she welcomes Gov. Charlie Baker’s pledge to take on the scourge of opiate addiction.
"I lost too many friends and a couple of family members to overdoses," she said. "So it would be great if he did do something about the epidemic."
Cambridge Police Department Deputy Superintendent Stephen DeMarco* last year said that the number of opiate overdoses in the city were more than for the same period in 2013.
"Of those 14 overdoses," DeMarco said, "four involved heroin."
Since that interview, overdoses in Cambridge have decreased. But Cambridge Needle Exchange program manager, Jamie Zimmerman, said she understands Baker’s urgent appeal.
"There’s definitely been an upsurge (state-wide)," she said. "I mean, this has been a ticking time bomb. We’ve seen a massive increase over the past decade in the number of prescription opiates that have been flooding the market."
When the painkiller OxyContin came on the market in 1995, back, knee and hip sufferers cheered. Prescriptions were written at rapid pace, from nearly half a million in 1992 to about 4.5 million 10 years later, according to the Massachusetts Prescription Monitoring Program.
One of the patients was Robert Vellery, who was severely injured after a truck tire fell on top of him and trapped him for six hours. He couldn't walk for months and started taking Oxycontin after his doctor prescribed it to him.
"And of course if your doctor says take it, you're going to take it," he said. "And I took it and I got addicted to it. I couldn't get off of it."
Standing outside the one-story needle exchange office, Vellery said he never used heroin. But many others are turning to it because Oxycontin is harder to get, said Zimmerman.
"Since that’s been drawn back, people have been switching over to heroin." he said.
And it’s cheap and abundant.
"Oxies or anything on the street, you’re talking about $80 to $100 a pill," said Zimmerman, "whereas a bag of heroin will cost you $10 to $15 dollars for the same effect."
Oxies and the explosion of heroin, some of it tainted, are leaving a trail of bodies and overdoes across the state, including 19-year-old Evan Greene of Easton, referenced by Baker in his inaugural address. The governor got the details wrong, but his parents said the conclusion was sadly, accurate. The young man died.
Responding to overdoes and heightened heroin use is keeping emergency responders all over the state busy. And in the words of Boston Police Department Superintendent William Gross, “It’s affecting every community in every class: it knows no names, it knows no colors; it just knows victims."
In upper middle-class Hingham, Rev. Timothy Schenck of St. Johns Episcopal Church said addiction is a huge issue.
"It might be a little bit more visible in areas that are less affluent, but it’s all there," he said.
Riverside Outpatient Center program director Jason Moscato, who works with people in Cambridge, Somerville and Wakefield, said opiate addiction cuts across class and color lines and is tearing families apart. He explained one case:
"This is a person who still is functioning but is addicted to opiates," he said. "So she still might be bringing her kids to soccer practice. She is still married. Still maintain things, but she is addicted."
So are thousands of others across the state, from the Cape to Pittsfield. In a study, Cambridge-based Overdose Prevention and Education Network found that over a 10-year period beginning in 1992, treatment for non-heroin opiate abuse increased by 950 percent, affecting about 40,000 people. That number would rise to more than 50,000 by 2012.
Zimmerman said she hopes Baker will also adopt former Governor Deval Patrick’s drug task-force proposals to strengthen prescription monitoring and to make widely available the anti-overdose medicine known as Narcan, described by people on the street as a wonder drug. Zimmerman said it saves lives.
"Since the beginning of the pilot program, it's been well over 2,000 people, actual live, have been saved because of Narcan," Zimmerman said. "And we've done about 120 last year alone, rescues. That's 120 lives."
But numerous police departments, including Cambridge*, have refused to assign Narcan to officers, even with the successful launch of programs in Dedham and Quincy. So the onus is now on Baker to make it more widely available to police, said Zimmerman.
Outside the Needle Exchange on Cambridge, Susan said she hopes Baker will also see the value of this program.
"It helped me when I was using to get clean supplies," she said. "A warm safe place off the streets, someone to talk to, getting tests for HIV, hepatitis C. It’s great to have the needle exchange because you don’t want to use dirty needles, dirty cookers."
But the question now is whether Baker’s pledge to help opiate and heroin addicts recover conflicts with his pledge to wipe out a more than $700 million budget shortfall. This number is why some substance abuse administrators they they will wait and see if the governor’s pledge is matched by action.
*UPDATE: A previous version of this article failed to note that Cambridge Police Department Deputy Superintendent Stephen DeMarco's remarks were made last year, and since then the number of overdoses in the city has declined.
*UPDATE: In Cambridge, Narcan is administered by Pro EMS as well as the Cambridge Fire Department.
Jonathan Scott, the longtime president of Victory Programs, a nonprofit that provides mental health and recovery services, discussed on Greater Boston whether he thinks Baker will follow through with his promise to battle opiate addiction:
