Ohio Ice!

Lots of ice in the state of Ohio. Meth is making a huge comeback.

The Great American Comeback, folks.

Donald J. Trump will likely win Ohio despite the population of the state is declining. The Republican governor Mike DeWine and statehouse Republicans control the government. They will retain power in 2020 and gain the opportunity to redraw congressional districts in 2022. The state is slated to lose at least one congressional district. The state is older, white, and economically depressed.

The only city in the state to see growth is Columbus, Ohio.

The population of Columbus at present time is nearly 989,000 people. The city has 1 million residents. Because of Ohio State University, state government and the healthcare industry has boast the city's population. The retaining of Major League Soccer's Columbus Crew and city's innovation to growing within it's borders has turned the city around.

Columbus is bigger than San Francisco, Indianapolis, Fort Worth and Jacksonville.

Yet, the rest of this state is suffering badly. Dayton, Akron, Youngstown, Canton, Toledo and Cleveland have seen massive decline in their populations.

The communities have suffered with blight, graffiti, boarded up homes, business leaving, food deserts and lackluster services like hospitals and schools.

Now the suburbs and rural communities outside of the major centers are facing turmoil.

Cities like Marietta, Stuebenville, Athens, Logan, Marysville, Lima, Upper Sandusky, Warren, Springfield, Greenville, Delphos and Cambridge have stories to tell. The smaller communities have dealt with opioids and now methamphetamine.

The deadly drug is back.

Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky experienced a jump in the meth addiction.

State officials have been tracking the increase of meth across Ohio and according to the letter sent to legislators there were hundreds of overdose deaths involving meth.

The ice is back on the streets and it's worst than expected. Ohio became the number one state for opioid addiction. Dayton, Ohio was ranked the third community in the United States with a rise in heroin addiction.

Even though law enforcement has seen a decrease in opioid addiction due to treatments like Narcan and naloxone, folks are still finding opioids as an escape from the "hard knock life."

Lots of white people are becoming addicted to opioids. When Black and Brown people were addicted to drugs, law enforcement have locked up them up. When white people are addicted to drugs, they get help and reality television treatment.

Having a gram of heroin would get a Black man locked up for up to 10 years.

The drug cartels are intensifying their distribution of the meth.

The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky/Eastern Indiana area has reported that meth is big in their area.

The Queen City is the second Ohio city that's growing with population. At present time, Cincinnati has 301,000 residents. The community has experienced a rise in meth.

Meth is a cheaper high and those moving past fentanyl are looking for the easiest way to get high without having their hearts stop.

The rise in meth tested at law enforcement crime laboratories across Ohio and Kentucky is staggering.

Just one example: The 23 drug task forces (including Northern Kentucky's) that are funded through the Ohio High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area agency saw a 1,600% jump in meth seized from 2015 to 2019 (and the 2019 numbers are incomplete).

A woman addicted to drugs changes over time.

But as shocking as that number is, some addiction experts say that we are missing the point behind the new meth wave.

The point: Addiction. The United States has an addiction crisis.

"We just simply move like a herd of locusts from one drug to another," said Dr. Mina "Mike" Kalfas, a certified addiction expert in Northern Kentucky. "Meth is the replacement for the crack of old. We go from opioid (pain pills) to opioid (heroin) to opioid (fentanyl) to stimulant (meth)."

"We try to get them off of the drug they're on," Kalfas said. "What we need to do is, treat the addiction. They're using (a) drug as a coping mechanism."

Addiction, which has been with us forever, is what needs to be fixed. With evidence-based treatment. The American Society of Addiction Medicine is still clamoring for more doctors to learn about such treatment and to attend to the problem as a disease.

Historically, the medical system largely ignored addiction, allowing the criminal justice system and treatment programs outside of the health care system to deal with it, said Lindsey Vuolo, director of Health Law and Policy and public affairs for the science-based nonprofit Center on Addiction in New York City.

The grudging change started with the opioid epidemic. As overdose death tolls soared, the mantra became: Treat addiction. Save lives. Keep people safe if they use drugs. Carry the opioid-overdose antidote naloxone. Provide more needle exchanges to prevent the spread of diseases such as hepatitis and HIV. Continue treatment for this chronic disease.

Those who ignore the advice put us at our own peril, experts say.

"If we don't start to effectively and efficiently address addiction like the public health issue that it is, we will continue to see drug epidemic after drug epidemic," said Courtney Hunter, director of advocacy at the Center on Addiction.

So why meth? Why now?

For starters, those who are addicted to opiates are hearing others talk about a new high, cheap and easy to get, and safer than fentanyl.

They are people with addiction, after all, and most people who suffer from addiction will reach for drugs other than the one they primarily use.

Meth is an alternative. But it's sneaky.

Kalfas calls the current meth problem a new tentacle of the opioid epidemic, noting that most patients he's seeing who switch from heroin to meth don't give up opioids for long.

"They perceive (meth) as different, sometimes even lesser somehow, which is how they underestimate it. But when their batteries are dry, they need to 'come down,' what will they turn to? The opiate-addicted turns to opiates."

Brittany Christian, 32, of Walnut Hills, who's in recovery, said she learned about meth while she was in treatment for heroin addiction in Louisville.

Hamilton, Ohio is a city that is located 20 miles from Cincinnati. It's a hub of meth and opioids.

"Everybody had done it and I hadn't done it, and I really wanted to try it," she said. "I did not want to go through the heroin withdrawal again."

Six months after she left that rehab, in May 2017, she decided to find meth.

"It's just as easy as getting cigarettes at the gas station," Christian said.

For Detzel, the woman who fell into obsessive floor-scrubbing, drugs were a way to cope with living, she says. Now 35 and in recovery for a year, Detzel was 13 when she was led into a sex-for-drugs trafficking situation orchestrated by someone close to her family.

She did drugs, she said, because it seemed normal.

"I never knew the proper way, you know, to get help," she said. “All I knew was to use because that's what I'd seen ... at a young age."

She was vulnerable to anything that took her away from her real life.

"I just wanted to try anything. Anything that I thought would take me to another level."

And by the time she was 30, meth was simply there for her to try, she said. "Somebody was selling it."

But Detzel rallied. She was able to maintain sobriety after her stint in the nursing home. She had been prescribed Suboxone for her opioid addiction and had to steer clear of drug use for six months before she could have heart surgery. She learned coping mechanisms, learned she'd been trafficked through no fault of her own and turned to God for help. She celebrated one year in recovery in January.

No such help with meth...

Both Detzel and Christian had been introduced to medical help for their initial addictions. There is no medication-assisted treatment available for meth addiction, as there is for opioid addiction.

The best treatment right now for meth addiction is psycho-social therapy, addiction experts say. The method can include talk therapy, learning about the illness and a rehabilitation regimen that helps people develop social and emotional skills they can employ to live a healthy life. Some sufferers are prescribed anti-anxiety or sleep-help drugs or other medications while they detox from meth.

Like with other addictions, "You have to look at the underlying issues and really make a treatment plan that's individualized for the person," said Kat Engel, vice president of nursing services for the Center of Addiction Treatment in the West End. "Are they self-medicating?"

As is usual with treatment, not enough are getting it. Meth-related deaths are rising. The latest figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that, from 2012 to 2018, the rate of drug overdose deaths involving methamphetamine and other “psychostimulants with abuse potential” was up almost fivefold.

Christian, who has been in recovery for a year-and-a-half, said that, "absolutely," treating drug use has to include treating the individual's trauma.

"What's causing someone to use? What issues are they going through? You know, I think a lot of it is underneath that needs to be brought up."

In her case, it was sexual abuse she'd endured as a child.

The faces of meth.

With meth, she was paralyzed, hyper-focused on a single task. Sometimes, she felt empty. She scratched and picked sores onto her body and face. Once, she piloted her car to a hospital, expecting to be locked in a psych ward. But she was discharged.

For her, the confines and rules of the Center for Addiction Treatment saved her, she said. She found sobriety by following the rules, then looking into her own traumatic past.

"If they told me I could not have a pair of leggings, oh well, I can't have a pair of leggings. If they told me to go to group therapy three times a day, I did that. My counselor, when she told me to journal, I journaled."

Both she and Detzel believe their continued success has at least something to do with their work.

Christian is an admissions specialist for the Center for Addiction Treatment. She loves her job, saying, "Somebody did it for me."

Detzel works at the YWCA downtown in Cincinnati helping domestic violence and rape victims as well as people with developmental disabilities who struggle with addiction. She’s been in recovery for just more than a year.

The lessons they learned about their own addictions and how to treat them are holding. But they see the avalanche of meth on the streets now. They know the attraction among opioid users to this drug is real.

In Hamilton County, Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco, the county coroner, said the crime lab's meth caseload leaped from a little more than 600 in 2016 to 3,600-plus cases in 2019 – "a sixfold increase."

In Kentucky, the amount of meth seized and tested at the Kentucky State Police Crime Laboratories rose by 77% in just two years, from 2016 to 2018.

The outcomes of all this meth is yet to be seen.

Dr. Adam Bisaga, an addiction research scientist who is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, has this prediction for those who use such stimulants along with opioids:

"The mixed stimulant-opioid addiction is a different one," Bisaga said. "We do not have a strategy to treat it, and many programs will be taken by surprise."

"The number of overdoses and adverse medical outcomes in people using both will increase, and this will be a fourth wave of the opioid epidemic."