Education: A Possible Solution

Videographer: Oly Zayac; Interviewers: Jack Pasi, Tyler Patchen, Perry Elyaderani; Editor: Jackie Pascale

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Opioid overdoses resulted in 1,367 deaths in North Carolina during 2015. “It’s not unusual to see people come into the hospital with overdoses,” said on-call ER psychiatrist Dr. John Clapacs.

In the six years that Dr. Clapacs has been at Alamance Regional Medical Center, opioid abuse has been a consistent problem. He said that many of these people got addicted to opioids from a prescription painkiller. Dr. Clapacs said that “nobody sets out wanting to have a substance abuse problem.” Unfortunately, some with chronic pain end up misusing or overusing their narcotic prescriptions. “What may happen is you may go through one prescription and the patient feels they need to have more. It’s often easy to go ahead and give them another prescription at that point.” People usually say that they will be miserable and in pain without the narcotic prescriptions.

Narcotic users oftentimes are not aware of their own addictions. It creeps up on them and is oftentimes seen in how they are not doing things the way they used to. Dr. Clapacs said that interpersonal relationship problems arise and that a disruption to one’s functioning are key indicators of an addiction.

In his experience, doctors want to see the opioid epidemic get better and even disappear. “Nobody want to be contributing to a problem.” Dr. Clapacs believes that educating people about the potential dangers and fatal outcomes of opiate use and giving them resources to track the problem would be beneficial and a potential solution to the ongoing opioid epidemic. He elaborated saying, “we certainly need a lot more substance abuse treatment itself….the need for substance abuse treatment is much greater than the availability of it.”