Drug & Housing Update

When I ran for county council in 2016 (the Pickens seat), I spoke to many people and gained insight into the challenges and problems faced in our county. Two surprised me, because they weren’t much talked about at the time, and I then wrote about both then in this newspaper — the rising housing shortage and the troubling drug problem.

The housing shortage in the Pickens area has arrived. Due to rising regulation and costs to build roads, curb, gutter and stormwater systems (and a few other reasons), the supply of new housing has not kept pace with rising demand. As a result, the average price of a home in Pickens (29671 zip code) has risen from $114,600 to $150,500 in less than four years. That’s an average increase of about 8.5% a year. When wages are rising only 3% a year, even a 4^th grader can do that math and see how housing is becoming unaffordable for even the middle class in Pickens County.

Data on drug mis-use and abuse is a bit harder to come by. For instance, if Mr. Jones has a knee operation and is given a prescription, his legal use is recorded when the prescription is dispensed. If Mr. Jones only takes half the pills, puts them in his medicine cabinet, and months later his wife twists her ankle badly, and takes the rest, that mis-use is not reported. Worse yet, if his daughter gets her hands on the pain pills, starts to take them, develops a habit then buys heroin the street, that abuse is not reported either. If she ends up in prison, in a treatment center, or overdoses and is hospitalized, then it shows up and is reported.

Severe abuse is reported, but not functional-abuse and mis-use in most cases. As a result I think the drug mis-use and abuse problem is understated and the problem is likely worse than the data indicates.

The South Carolina Department of Alcohol, Other Drug Abuse Services and its website JustPlanKillers.com has drug abuse data reported from hospitals, EMS reports, treatment centers, and prisons.

Statewide the number of reported overdoses seems to have leveled off at about 44,000 a year (left chart top line). This data includes overdoses from a variety of drugs including opioids, fentanyl, cocaine and heroin. In 2018, the number of overdose deaths in the state was 1,103, continuing to rise about 10% a year.

Naloxone (Narcan), the antidote used to bring overdose victims back from the brink, has proven to be a life saver. However, it masks the severity of opioid drug abuse when one examines the overdose deaths by county. Pickens County ranks near the top of the state — 3^rd -- in the administration rate of Narcan.

To take this into account there is something called the Serverity Index that weighs Narcan administration, plus overdose hospitalizations and overdose deaths, and Pickens County ranks 3rd in the state in 2018.

While opioids are getting most of the attention nationwide because of their high overdose death rate, local experts told me methamphetamine remains the leading drug problem in our county, followed by opioids, alcohol and then marijuana. Reading the minutes of the June 17, 2019 county council meeting, Pickens ranks 4th in the state for amphetamine abuse (which is methamphetamine, and other amphetamines.

Everyone has their view on the causes of the problem and solution. Personally, I think economic opportunity or the lack of it is key. If a kid graduates high school and lands a job here in Pickens, that’s the kind of habit we want him to fall into. Without such job opportunities he could fall into a bad habit, and too many of our young adults evidently 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 challenge here – law enforcement, legal, in our schools, clinical, social and economic. It requires a coordinated and bold effort across our city and county councils, school board and the state delegation.