A national emergency.
Via NY Post:
Bart Strickler drank his first beer at 9, smoked his first joint at 10. By the time he was in middle school he’d already done acid, cocaine, LSD, Quaaludes and anything else he could get his hands on.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he says numbly. He takes a deep breath as the past flutters across his face.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
The 52-year-old Strickler sits at the end of a long table in a rehab center on Main Avenue, backlit by a single window.
His arms are covered with “jail tats” from his 15 years in federal prison on aggravated assault and weapons charges. “I am trying to beat meth before meth beats me.”
He fiddles with a scar on his left wrist: “That was from the second time I tried to kill myself. The first time I had a shotgun, cocked and in my mouth and getting the nerve to pull the trigger when my damn neighbors came to the house.”
In October 2018, President Trump signed a breakthrough bipartisan bill aimed at dealing with the country’s drug-addiction epidemic, which most people associate with opioids. And for good reason: In 2017, there were 70,237 opioid overdose deaths in the United States — a 9.6 percent uptick from the previous year, according to the CDC.
But meth is claiming lives at a rapidly increasing rate as well.
In 2017, 10,000 Americans died from an overdose involving psychostimulants (meth as well as ecstasy and some prescribed stimulants) — a 33.3 percent jump from 2016, the CDC reported.
And, in Ohio, overdose deaths involving meth have seen one of the steepest rises in the country, jumping 5,000 percent from 2010 (nine deaths) to 2017 (509 deaths), according to a report by the Ohio Alliance for Innovation in Population Health.
The rush of meth into the state from the border is overwhelming: “It is raining drugs,” said Taylor Cleveland, an Ashtabula County sheriff’s officer assigned to the task force for the US Drug Enforcement Administration.