Drug Use In SC

I looked at the drug abuse statistics for South Carolina for 2017 and 2018, and the stats are very much like you've heard.

Alcohol abuse is down, along with the abuse of general pain reliever and cigarette use.

Pot use is going up. I believe making pot legal for recreational use is a bad idea. Making it legal, will make it more accessible, more will use the drug and get high and do stupid things like get in a car and drive. It is no better than alcohol in that respect. It will be abused at the same rate as alcohol. Both are bad, and we should be pushing to use less, not more alcohol and pot.

Looking at the next graph, data confirms the growing problem in hard drug use beit cocaine, heroin and opioids.

What is quite sad, and I'm hearing this in the schools is babies born with drugs in their system is skyrocketing.

All this data is from the South Carolina Department of Alcohol, Other Drug Abuse Services (DAODAS) and its site JustPlanKillers.com. When it comes to drugs, most of the data comes from hospitals, treatment centers, prisons and Medicaid. There is no general use number I can find for drug use other than national surveys. It is mostly drug treatment or overdose stats from those institutions.

In 2014, 30 died of overdose -- 8th in the state. In 2015, 30 died of overdose -- 10th in the state. In 2016, 31 died of overdose -- 11th in the state. In 2017, 27 died of overdose -- 12th in the state. In 2018, 34 died of overdose or 5th in the state.

In 2018, Pickens County ranked 10th in overdoses. (That is different than someone who died from an overdose, which was the state in the previous paragraph).

What is most worrisome, and may be masking the problem is Pickens is 3rd in the administration of the OD saving drug Naloxone (Narcan), indicating many more in our county could have been facing overdose deaths, but were pulled back from the brink.

There is something called the Serverity Index that weights Narcan administration, opioid-related overdose hospitalization and opioid-related overdose death, and Pickens County ranks 3rd in the state in 2018.

Opportunity is the key there. If a students graduates high school and lands a job here in Pickens; that’s the kind of habit we want them to fall into. Without such job opportunities students could fall into a bad habit, and too many obviously are.

I’m all for building tourism, but that should not be the focus of our economic development. Tourism creates minimum wage jobs. We need gainful employment; jobs generating a living wage and career paths. This is the economic piece of problem/ solution.

We are facing a very broad chanllege here — law enforcement, legal, clinical, social and economic. It requires a coordinated effort across agencies, that frankly I just don’t see right now. It needs to be undertaken, though, because the situation is quietly getting worse.