Pubdate: Fri, 26 May 2000 Source: Santa Fe New Mexican (NM) Copyright: 2000 The Santa Fe New Mexican Contact: 202 E Marcy, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501 Fax: (505) 986-3040 Feedback: http://www.sfnewmexican.com/letterstoeditor/submitform.las Website: http://www.sfnewmexican.com/ Author: Kristen Davenport RIO ARRIBA REQUESTS STUDY OF DRUG DEATHS ESPANOLA - Rio Arriba County is asking the state and federal governments to find out whether the county's high rate of drug-overdose deaths is due to heroin or whether there is a rampant problem with prescription drugs instead. Some county officials say they suspect heroin is not the main drug culprit despite widespread public perception that heroin is causing most of the drug overdoses. Instead, they say, many of the drug deaths in Rio Arriba are caused by either a combination of drugs or prescription drugs. A recent analysis of numbers from the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator shows that up to 75 percent of the drug deaths in Northern New Mexico could instead be attributed to multiple drug use, including prescription painkillers and muscle relaxants. And Lauren Reichelt, director of Rio Arriba's Health and Human Services, said she hopes law enforcement also will investigate whether local doctors are writing too many prescriptions for drugs such as Valium, morphine or Librium. The County Commission quickly and unanimously approved a resolution Thursday asking that the state Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention perform a "full outbreak investigation" into the drug epidemic - and the commission wants the governments to look at the problem in the context of the county's culture and socioeconomic background. "There's not enough discussion about the kinds of drugs being used," Reichelt told the commission. "People don't just go out and decide to use heroin. We need to be looking at all the drugs." "And we have to begin to place substance abuse in its historical context," she said. New Mexico has the highest drug-overdose death rate in the nation, and Rio Arriba leads the state's counties in drug deaths. And despite dozens of arrests in the past year of alleged drug dealers, the number of drug deaths keeps climbing - from 13 in 1995 to 22 last year in Rio Arriba. Much of the attention on treatment has focused on heroin, Reichelt said, when county officials aren't certain heroin is the main problem. For instance, OMI numbers show that in 1997 and 1998, as much as 75 percent of the drugs that caused a fatal overdose may have been legal - - ranging from alcohol to morphine to methadone, the drug commonly prescribed to wean addicts off heroin. Also, the OMI numbers show that only 11 percent of the deaths were directly attributed to heroin. Instead, 46 percent were attributed to morphine; 21 percent to methadone; 16 percent to heroin, and 3 percent to pharmaceuticals. Many of those autopsies also found multiple drugs in an overdose patient's system. The problem, however, is that a death attributed to morphine or opiates by the coroner could have started out as a heroin overdose because of the way the drug breaks down in the body. "They (morphine deaths) may be heroin, morphine, codeine, Demerol or any other narcotic, legal or illegal," Reichelt said earlier this month. The coroner can't call the drug exactly without physical evidence such as a syringe or pill bottle. "The police used to record pill bottles with the incident reports and name the prescribing doctor," she said. "They stopped doing that, so now we don't know whether these OD deaths are due to heroin or legal, controlled substances." The investigation the Rio Arriba County Commission is requesting from the state Department of Health and the CDC could help answer those questions, county officials said. However, despite the formal request, Reichelt said the resolution passed Thursday has no teeth - the state and CDC have no legal obligation to perform any such study. "But we'll do everything in our power to bring out the resources," Reichelt said. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea