Steven Woodruff remembers the day he bought heroin off the street in Tupelo.
He didn’t even know what it was. But he knew it was bad, and he knew the seller was about to be arrested.
That was in 2011, when he was an undercover narcotics agent in Tupelo, he told the Columbus Exchange Club at its weekly meeting at Lion Hills Center Thursday. Since then, Woodruff has become an investigator for the 16th Circuit District Attorney’s Office — and, he said, opioid narcotics and heroin have become a bigger problem than ever in the country and in Mississippi.
“For the first time in history, pain pills are killing more people than guns are,” he said.
The state went from having one heroin death in 2011 to 24 in 2015. The same year, 99 people were admitted to the hospital on heroin overdoses, and the state saw more than 400 heroin seizures by law enforcement.
The national death toll is even worse, he said — the equivalent of 87 fully loaded 747s crashing every year.
If that many people died in airplane crashes, he said, people would be “banging on their legislative representatives’ doors” trying to get legislation for airlines — but no one is as concerned when the problem is doctor-prescribed pain medication and the addiction to narcotics that follows.
Heroin was big in the 1980s and ’90s, he explained, and then it died out for a few years. But then something happened.
“Doctors decided that prescription pain pills were the greatest thing in the world,” he said.
It starts with a person who gets an injury or who legitimately has some kind of pain, he said. The person goes to the doctor, who prescribes pain pills. Often, that leads the patient to narcotics addiction, which can result in them buying heroin off the street.
Exchange Club member and Chancery Court Judge Jim Davidson sees a lot of the same problem in custody cases and divorces, he said during the question-and-answer session at the end of Woodruff’s talk. In the last three to five years, he’s seen a significant uptick in chancery court cases involving allegations of narcotics and other drugs.
“The father, the non-custodial parent, will sue the mother for custody, or grandparents are seeking custody because the children are virtually abandoned, deserted because the parents have a drug addiction,” he told The Dispatch after the meeting.
And because many of these addictions begin with prescription medication, it touches all socio-economic classes, he added.
Woodruff, himself, spoke to how easy it is to become addicted to pain pills. After having his ankle replaced a few years ago, he needed prescription pain pills after the surgery.
“I have an addictive personality. So I can tell you, after about two weeks, I couldn’t sleep without it,” he said. “I had to throw that stuff out. I just had to suffer through it for a couple of days. Not with the pain — I was done with the pain — but I needed the pills for a little while.”
The answer, Woodruff told Exchange Club members, is legislation regulating prescription pain pills. After all, he said, regulation was the answer to the decrease in homemade methamphetamines in recent years.
Woodruff sat on a governor’s task force dedicated to finding ways to cut down on meth labs in the state a few years ago. The task force helped make pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient in homemade meth, illegal to buy in the state without a prescription. Narcotics agents went from having to clean up hundreds of active meth labs every year to only seeing one last year.
“There’s going to have to be some legislation,” he said in regard to curtailing the opioid epidemic.
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