Alarming Overdose Numbers Prompt ‘Spike Alert’ for Oneida County

Seven heroin or cocaine overdoses in the past three days are prompting officials in downtown New York to issue a “surge alert.”

The Oneida County Sheriff’s Office says an increase in heroin and opioid overdoses required the public health alert.

In addition to overdoses, the Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program (ODMAP) also showed “a trend in intentional and unintentional overdoses involving youth 18 years or younger that included vaping marijuana / THC and ingesting prescription pills over the counter. free”.

According to the Oneida County Overdose Response Team, there have been nine overdoses of minors since Wednesday, December 1, 2021. In contrast, in all of 2020 there were ten overdoses of minors. Of the December overdoses, three were intentional and six unintentional. The total number of overdoses by minors in 2021 was 25. Statistics for 2021 show an increase of 150% compared to 2020.

In a written statement, the Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente He said, “The US Surgeon General recently issued a public health advisory on the unprecedented impacts of the pandemic on youth mental health, and our overdose surveillance data reflects that impact on our community.”

Many of the unintentional overdoses were the result of vaping. In addition to the dangers caused by the potential combustibility of vaporizers, health risks appear to be increasing, in part because e-cigarettes, originally intended for smokers to help them quit, are now the vehicle by which many young people are interested in smoking. In a 2019 interview now frequently quoted by Tony Dokoupil on “CBS This Morning,” Kevin Burns, then CEO of popular e-cigarette maker Juul, said: “As the parent of a 16 and 19 year old, I do not want my children to use the product. It is not intended for them. They are not smokers or ex-smokers trying to use the product. We don’t want them to ever use the product. And I feel empathy for them, for what they are going through, dealing with their children who are trying to go through any kind of difficulty, especially an addiction to a product that contains nicotine.“

According to the Truth Initiative, a non-profit group whose mission is to inspire “lives free of smoking, vaping and nicotine,” the use of e-cigarettes by “young people has exploded in recent years and remains at epidemic levels: approximately one in five high school students used e-cigarettes in 2020, many of whom were nonsmokers in the first place. “

The uptrend in December is worrisome because the numbers had started to decline. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse Illicit drug use fell overall from 2020 to 2021.

As part of the Oneida County alert, Dr. Avinash Kambhampati, MVHS Faxton St. Luke’s deputy chief medical officer, said vaporizers, including those with THC, “… often contain unknown psychoactive substances and we see in The Emergency Department of wildly unpredictable and dangerous immediate clinical presentations. This is in addition to significant long-term adverse health effects. “

That was evidenced by a recent incident at Oneida Herkimer Madison BOCES recently, where a vaping incident sent three students to the hospital after four had smoked with the same vaporizer.