Health professionals and business leaders gathered in Hartford Wednesday to discuss the opioid epidemic.
Governor Dannel Malloy made welcoming remarks at the forum hosted by the Hartford Business Journal.
Malloy spoke about how deadly heroin has become over the years, now that it is being mixed with fentanyl.
“Someone is poisoning your poison,” he said. “The reality is if you are using heroin today, you are regularly buying a lottery ticket to be poisoned to death.”
In 2012, 17 of the people who died in Connecticut had fentanyl in their system, according to Malloy. This year fentanyl is projected to be in the systems’ of 644 people who die from overdoses.
The Hartford Business Journal did a month-long series on opioids in the workplace. Greg Bordonaro, the journal’s editor, said he thinks this is an issue employers need to face head-on. After speaking with several employers on the issue, he recommends business have programs and policies in place before they are confronted with an employee that needs help.
“Employers in particular, they have to know how to deal with this issue because it impacts their bottom line, especially if you have employees who are addicted and facing those problems. Sometimes you can’t just fire them. You have to figure out how to deal with them and get them help and recovery,” Bordonaro said.
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One of the forum’s speakers was Matthew Eacott. Eacott grew up in Avon and started experimenting with drugs as a young teenager. He spoke about his struggle with addiction and how it progressed from Vicodin to Percocet to Oxycodone.
“I would accumulate arrests here in Hartford, Boston, I would flunk out of school, I was losing relationships. The drugs were a priority in my life and I was unwilling to do what it took for me to give myself the chance to learn something different, something that could help with my own recovery,” said Eacott.
Eacott said he spent a decade in and out of rehab before he found Aware Recovery Care, a program that he said saved his life. He is now almost six years sober, has advanced to become the Vice President of the company and is sharing his message to give other addicts hope.
“The more I can get out and talk about how addiction has no boundaries, the better,” said Eacott.
Governor Malloy also encouraged doctors to band together and watch out for one another to try and stop the epidemic. He also encouraged people to be mindful that it is easy to become addicted to a prescription if you are taking it longer than three to five days. Another idea he had was for employers to do more.
“Employers have a role to play in having a conversation with their insurance carriers or even in their own reimbursement systems. Long-term prescriptions, anything beyond three to five days for a pain episode is potentially addictive,” Malloy said.
