Tempe hospital: Surge in heroin overdoses sets a state record
Source: Wrangler News
Special report by Joyce Coronel
Tempe is like many college towns: a sprawling campus, lively nightlife and a network of bike lanes. But there’s something else going on here too, something that often goes unseen. Not far from the center of town stands Tempe St. Luke’s Hospital, a community facility that’s been serving the area for 60 years.
Last year, Tempe St. Luke’s had the state’s fourth-highest number of admissions for heroin overdoses. The most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control indicate heroin use in the U.S. has jumped 90 percent from 2002-2013.
Chip Coffey, director of therapy services at St. Luke’s Behavioral Health Services, spoke to Wrangler News about the myth that heroin addiction doesn’t happen to “nice people in nice neighborhoods.”
“What we’re doing is projecting an image,” Coffey said. “We don’t want the people who are using heroin to look much like us.”
Many addicts, Coffey said, start out on prescription opiates like OxyContin. That includes teenagers swiping pills from their parents’ medicine cabinet and adults who were prescribed the drugs and then got hooked. Once their doctor won’t prescribe anymore, they transition to heroin.
He recalled a woman he described as a “PTA mom” who became a heroin addict after a back injury that led to an addiction to prescription painkillers. Eventually she graduated to heroin, but never saw herself as “one of those people.”
“Part of the issue in treating her was that she could not see that she had a problem,” Coffey said. St. Luke’s keeps recovery groups mixed, he said, with blue collar laborers sitting beside professionals. “People need to see that.”
“In the Tempe area, in Guadalupe, it’s a matter of a few minutes and you can find some heroin,” Coffey said.
Paul, a Tempe man in recovery for heroin addiction, said he began using the drug at 19, launching a decade-long ordeal, becoming homeless at one point and landing in jail on numerous occasions. He was in and out of area hospitals for years to treat overdoses and the infections that result from dirty needles pushing through dirty skin. At one point, he almost lost his arm to an abscess.