Nation in pain: Why isn’t government doing something?

Former BJ reporter Ted Gup, writer in residence at Durham University in Britain, writes a powerful article about his son’s heroin death.

Ted Gup

4,000 died from drug overdoses in Ohio last year, equal to 60% of the total killed in Afghanistan and Iraq for the entire length of those wars.

Half a million have died in America since 2000, which is more than the number of Americans killed in World War II.

But the one that hit Ted the hardest is the death of his 21-year-old son, David.

Yet President Trump proposed a 95% slash in the budget of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

So, Ted asks, why isn’t Trump, the Senate and the House whipping into action, as their offices did after 9/11, when 100 Americans a day a dying from drug overdoses?

To read Ted’s compelling article, click on https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-lost-my-son-to-heroin-how-many-more-will-we-lose-before-trump-cares/2017/06/23/c181247e-5211-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.2bc80b61ed40

Since 2009, Ted has chaired the Emerson College (Boston) journalism department. He also taught at Case Western Reserve University, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

He and wife Peggy live in Boston and Bucksport, Maine. Their other child is Matthew.

Drug-overdosed bodies pile up in Ohio

Dayton, like Akron and most of the country, has a serious problem with drug overdoses.

Already this year the Montgomery County coroner in Dayton has handled 2,000 overdose autopsies. That’s more than in all of 2016.

12 of 13 bodies the coroner had Monday were overdoses.

Akron had 236 heroin overdoses in 3 weeks last July.

Stark County’s coroner had to get a cold storage vehicle to handle the overflow of drug overdose deaths.  So did Ashtabula and Cuyahoga counties.

Last year a record 3,050 Ohioans died from drug overdoses, most from heroin or pain-killers.

In 2015 the worst drug overdose death totals were in West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Ohio and Rhode Island, in that order.