Although heroin overdoses in Carroll County have declined this year, organizers of Thursday's Drug Summit '99 say the message will be that prevention, enforcement, prosecution and public awareness must continue relentlessly.
The fourth public forum will carry added punch, serving as the public premiere of "Heroin Kills," a 34-minute video written, directed and produced by Residents Attacking Drugs, a Westminster-based grass-roots group of parents and students that took up the anti-drug fight last year after Liam O'Hara, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, died of a heroin overdose.
Drug Summit '99, sponsored by Carroll County and the county's Substance Abuse Prevention Advisory Committee, will feature presentations from David Puetsche of the Maryland Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration and Sgt. Mike College of the Carroll County Drug Task Force, said Olivia Myers, executive director of Junction Inc., a substance-abuse treatment and prevention facility in Westminster.
Puetsche is expected to give an overview of the drug-abuse problem statewide, she said.
College, a parent and county resident, said he will concentrate on how substance abuse affects the family and community. Drug addiction is the root cause of much juvenile and young adult crime, he said.
Some people are in denial and don't want to accept that a shed break-in in their yard or a burglary next door is often linked to drugs, he said.
That drugs are the cause of much crime was driven home two weeks ago by Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug policy director, who noted the strong correlation between drugs and violence after a national youth violence conference in Washington.
According to a National Institute of Justice report in 1997, McCaffrey said, 60 percent of those arrested for serious crimes tested positive for drugs in 20 of 23 cities surveyed.
Overdoses down at hospital
In Carroll County, the number of heroin overdose cases in the emergency room at Carroll County General Hospital has dipped from an average of 13 a month last year to seven a month since February.
Myers noted that the percentage of heroin cases handled by Junction counselors has remained constant at 11 percent of the caseload. The agency has 117 active cases.
The heroin percentage matches that for cocaine but is low in comparison with active marijuana cases, which account for 60 percent of Junction's treatment load, Myers said.
