The statistics compiled by the Wheeling Police Department during 2020 are frightening.
- Overdoses: 230
- Median age: 33.
- Overdose deaths: 22.
- Caucasians who overdosed: 86 percent.
- African Americans who overdosed: 14 percent.
- Overdoses – male: 69 percent; female: 31 percent.
- Overdose deaths: Caucasian: 91 percent; African American: 9 percent.
- Median age – overdose deaths: 35.5 years old; 73 percent male, 37 percent female.
And the most likely timeframe during which Wheeling police officers respond to the scene of an overdose is between 5-8 p.m. on any day of any week of the year. That, however, was not true during the first week of 2021, and that is why Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger remains very concerned about what the rest of the new year will bring.
“It was probably the worst seven-day period since I have been the chief,” Schwertfeger said. “We had 21 overdoses in a seven-day period, and that includes three that resulted in deaths. We’ve had a few similar spikes but nothing that was that consistent for seven consecutive days.
“We are still analyzing the statistics from 2020, but we did respond to 230 overdoses last year, and that’s the highest numbers we’ve had in five years,” he reported. “It’s been trending upward every year, and it’s about supply and demand, and there is certainly a demand here in the city of Wheeling.”
Trusting a Drug Dealer?
Drug trafficking takes places everywhere, according to the police chief, and that means deals get done on the streets, in bars and LVL parlors, and near nursing homes and schools and along the riverfront.
Wheeling police have responded to overdoses in grocery store parking lots, restrooms inside taverns and restaurants, and at private residences and playgrounds, too. For the past several years, EMTs with the Wheeling Fire Department have been equipped with Narcan, a medication also known as Naloxone. It is an antagonist to opioids, according to drugabuse.gov, and can rapidly reverse overdoses involving drugs like heroin and Oxycodone.
Schwertfeger, though, has noticed a significant difference with the administration of Narcan over the past six months.
“One big difference we are seeing now is that after the Wheeling Fire Department arrives at the scene of an overdose, it is taking more than one dose of Narcan to revive them,” the chief explained. “In the beginning of this epidemic, it would take one dose, but now it’s two or three, sometimes four.
“That usually means that whatever the person bought has been laced with fentanyl because that makes it much more potent,” he said. “It’s been scary, to say the least, and people need to be very careful because a drug dealer is going to sell you whatever he has, and lot of the drugs appear similar to each other.”
When a rash of overdoses take place in Wheeling and Ohio County, the Ohio County Emergency Management Agency transmits a mass text.
“We had that huge spike during the first week of the year, and I know that our overdose alert system was sending out a lot of texts so that people knew what was going on,” Schwertfeger said. “Anyone who is not registered in that system can get registered online. Now, not all of the overdoses have been caused by opiates because we have a lot of different drugs in this area right now.
“About 85 percent of the overdoses we had here in Wheeling in 2020 were associated with opiates, but others were caused by fentanyl, meth, and cocaine,” he said. “Who knows what people are buying anymore? If you are out there buying illegal drugs, you really don’t know what you are going to get. We had two overdoses that took place in a bar after two people bought what they thought was cocaine, but after they overdosed, we found out that it was fentanyl and not cocaine.”
The War on Drugs
Many who become addicted to opiates were introduced to the drugs following accidents resulting in injury. That is because Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Percocet are painkillers.
Physicians and dentists liberally prescribed the medications because of the presence of morphine in the narcotics, but once a rash of overdoses started taking place in West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky, state and federal lawsuits were filed against manufacturing and distribution companies. In December, even Walmart was sued by the US Department of Justice that alleged the big-box retailer helped fuel the country’s opioid crisis.
The lawsuit states that the “company pressured staff to fill prescriptions as fast as possible,” and the corporation responded that the lawsuits “invent a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors.”
No matter what federal courts decide, Schwertfeger is well aware the damage that has been done and that the drug epidemic is ongoing with no end in sight.
“It is a struggle, but I’m never going to give up, and neither will our officers. We’re going to keep on battling,” Schwertfeger said. “We are developing some new ideas in an effort to deal with what has been going on after I was really optimistic during the first quarter of 2020. The numbers were really low, and I saw that as a very good thing.
“It felt as if we were making some strides because we had started working with Serenity Hills to have an outreach counselor with us every time we had an overdose,” he added. “They were having some success getting people into treatment programs, and we were seeing a decline. But then all hell broke loose with Covid, and the numbers went back up. Covid is one factor, but another could have been that we scaled back traffic stops to limit our exposure to the virus. That’s not the case anymore.”
