Heroin, an Unlikely College Epidemic

        The last place someone would expect to find a heroin overdose would be URI, however there have been three on campus since September 2015, one of which was fatal.

        College campuses are especially susceptible to the heroin epidemic in New England due to the casual use of substances such as opioid pain killers and ecstasy. Pain killers such as OxyContin are expensive, and can be sold for as much as $45 on the street. Heroin, the cheap alternative, can be bought for as little as $4 (when buying in bulk).

        What does ecstasy have to do with opioid painkillers and heroin? When it is purchased, most buyers think they are getting pure MDMA. Often times by the time the ecstasy gets to the average user, it has been cut with methamphetamine and even heroin.

        Rhode Island had 230 fatal heroin overdoses last. Overall monthly drug related overdose deaths are up 65 percent since 2011. One of the reasons for that is because of the introduction of fentanyl to heroin.

        Lieutenant Richard Moniz of the URI police department said, “Fentanyl is an opiate that can be 50 to 100 times stronger than regular heroin and when cut in.” This makes it much more dangerous to use than usual because of the relatively negligent nature of the drug business, resulting in deaths because of the unmentioned potency of fentanyl-cut heroin.

        This powerful synthetic opiate is only the size of a grain of salt, but can kill the unwary user if two or three are added to regular heroin. Because it is cheap and readily available in home labs, more and more users are encountering it in their dope.

        Officer Mike McCabe of the URI police department said that one of the ways a heroin overdose can be reversed is with Narcan. He said, “Narcan is spread out across the state. Locally, we do not carry it and neither do our EMT’s.” Last semester, a student was found in their dorm, overdosed on heroin. The first responders, who were not carrying Narcan, were not able to revive the student.

        With rising opiate usage on campus, it seems that proper drug education and first responder classes will be the only way to help keep heroin overdoses from claiming more student lives.