SC House speaker: Panel must offer hope to those affected by opioid abuse

House Speaker Jay Lucas charged a legislative panel studying the growing epidemic of opioid abuse with returning “hope to those who need it in this state.”

During the inaugural meeting of the House Opioid Abuse Prevention Study Committee, Lucas, R-Darlington, addressed the panel, telling legislators is their “job to figure out how to best protect South Carolinians from this disease.”

“One of our jobs as legislators is to help people,” Lucas said. “We cannot sit back and watch this growing epidemic take more lives and destroy more families in South Carolina.”

More than a dozen House members were appointed to the House panel by Lucas. It’s chairman – Rep. Eric Bedingfield, R-Greenville – has a personal connection to the opioid epidemic. His 26-year-old son, Joshua, died in 2016, when he relapsed and overdosed on a variant of fentanyl, a synthetically produced opioid that is about 50 times stronger than heroin.

It remains unknown how many South Carolinians died in 2016 from opioid-related abuse, because those numbers are not available yet. But 2015 numbers showed 69 more people died – totaling 573 – than in 2014, according to numbers by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Several speakers addressed the panel on Tuesday with information, including Sara Goldsby, the acting director of the S.C. Department of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services, who said three out of four people who used heroin had misused prescription opioids first. She also presented legislators with a map that showed how the Upstate and the coast surrounding Horry County have been most impacted by opioid abuse.

“This is not an issue that any one of us can address alone,” Goldsby said. “There’s a lot of work to do.”

Two of the speakers on Tuesday hailed from Horry County, which for years has been at the center of the state’s growing heroin use. In December, Myrtle Beach Police responded to nine overdoses in one week alone, according to local reports.

Yet, it was “not hard to predict” the arrival of the opioid epidemic, said Bill Knowles, narcotics commander for the coastal 15th Judicial Circuit Drug Enforcement Unit. Knowles also worked as a regional agent for the State Law Enforcement Division for 27 years.

He echoed Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson in saying that the state cannot arrest its way out of the epidemic. Knowles said prescription drugs were more often than not found when serving search warrants as far back as 2005.

An average of about three people suffered from an overdose in Horry County in 2016, he said. That same year, first responders administered 958 doses of Naloxone, a drug used to reverse the effects of an overdose that is also known by its brand name, Narcan. Shelly Kelly, the director of health regulation at DHEC, also told the panel there was a 39 percent increase in use of of Naloxone statewide from 2015 to 2016.

Knowles lamented after the hearing not having enough time to share with legislators how the current heroin-opioid epidemic differs from the crack epidemic of the 1980s, when the pervasive attitude toward the issue was higher sentencing penalties for users.

In the 80s, the crack epidemic primarily focused on a social class of Americans; the poor, the indigent and the under educated,” Knowles said. “Heroin is the exact opposite. It’s diverse. It affects every social class of our citizens. I’ve never seen anything like it in my 38-year career.”

As of late 2016, heroin arrests were set to outpace arrests for cocaine and crack in Richland County.

Bedingfield said that despite law enforcement’s prediction of the epidemic, it “snuck up on a lot of people.”

“It snuck up on me and my family,” Bedingfield said. “My son had been taking pills and doing things for years before I ever recognized that there was a problem.”

He added that in hindsight, the signs that his son was suffering from addiction were there. Bedingfield said he just didn’t see them.

“Maybe I wasn’t aware enough or I wasn’t paying attention enough, but to be honest I didn’t know what to look for,” Bedingfield said. “My goal is to share that message to make sure that other people see and recognize the signs.”

This story was originally published May 9, 2017 at 11:16 AM with the headline "SC House speaker: Panel must offer hope to those affected by opioid abuse."