They were chemists and truck drivers, landscapers and car salesmen, homemakers and hydrologists. They plowed snow for the Agency of Transportation and brewed coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.
They died in motel rooms in Brattleboro, woods in South Burlington, a sister’s basement in Barre, a campground in Duxbury and a mobile home three blocks from a Rutland hospital. They were young mothers and retired Vietnam veterans.
Some had lost contact with their families and were dead for days before someone discovered them. Others had kissed their wives goodbye or bid their parents goodnight just hours earlier.
Their common fate: All were Vermonters who died of opiate overdoses in 2016.
It’s been three years since former governor Peter Shumlin devoted his entire State of the State address to Vermont’s “full-blown heroin crisis,” focusing attention and resources on a public health problem that has since exploded nationwide. In Vermont, the Department of Health reorganized and expanded drug-addiction treatment programs. Law enforcement officials unveiled new strategies and declared that addiction should be treated as a health problem, not a crime.
Despite those efforts, the “crisis” is claiming the lives of more and more Vermonters.
In anticipation of the health department’s annual tally, Seven Days obtained and reviewed last year’s drug-related death certificates. The records revealed that 100 Vermonters died from fatal opiate overdoses in 2016.
Although she wouldn’t corroborate that number, Vermont Department of Health Deputy Commissioner Barbara Cimaglio didn’t dispute it, either. The department, which uses complex criteria for labeling a death an opiate overdose, is expected to release its official count for 2016 in the coming weeks.
Cimaglio said: “From what we do have, it doesn’t look like it’s gotten better, and it’s not going to be lower than 2015,” when 75 Vermonters fatally overdosed on heroin and prescription opiates. “We’re still in the throes of a serious problem. The supply is there, and it’s cheap.”
No report — official or independent — can reflect the number of overdose deaths that would have occurred last year, if not for efforts to increase the statewide availability of Narcan, a life-saving drug that reverses opiate overdoses. Addicts get free Narcan at most treatment centers and tend to keep it around in case the need arises — a friend or family member can easily administer the nasal spray. Most police agencies, ambulance crews and pharmacies now carry it, too.
The health department distributed more than 4,000 doses of Narcan in the first six months of 2016, according to its most recent available data, and the drug was used to attempt to reverse 241 documented overdoses. By contrast, Narcan was used only 122 times in all of 2014.
“The fact that fatalities are still up, even with a universally available antidote, is troubling,” Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said. “It shows that the grip of opioids is relentless. People struggle with this addiction knowing it has killed their friends and that it could kill them.”
As use of the powerful “antidote” spread, though, so too did an even stronger poison: The opioid fentanyl, which is used as an anesthetic in routine surgical procedures such as colonoscopies, can be 100 times more powerful than heroin. In 2016, it claimed a record number of lives in Vermont, according to death certificates. The drug, which is also now manufactured illicitly, was cited in 47 Vermont death certificates from 2016 — up from 29 in 2015.
Many other drugs, from Demerol and Dilaudid to Percocet and Vicodin, show up as a “cause of death” or “contributing condition.”
To better understand the Vermonters who died by overdose, Seven Days attempted to reach out to the families of each and every victim. Some could not be located or did not respond to requests for comment. Others declined to speak because the stigma of a drug-related death compelled them to conceal — even from friends and neighbors — how their family member died.
“That would be devastating,” one mother said of going public. “We’ve already lost enough.”
But many people did agree to talk, hoping that it would shed light on the problem. A number spoke in unwavering voices, bravely answering questions they had clearly pondered long and hard. A few broke down sobbing and asked apologetically for a break. One or two talked for more than an hour and then called back again and again.
Their stories illustrate the diversity of Vermont’s opiate victims: blue collar and professional class, rural and urban, old and young. Roughly 30 percent were women.
And yet common themes emerged.
Addiction often starts with a prescription to ease the pain of injuries or medical procedures. Eric LaPierre, a 38-year-old Milton carpenter, hurt himself playing hockey as a teenager and quickly became hooked on prescription painkillers, touching off a lifelong struggle with addiction. He overdosed on fentanyl in October, just a few months after he married his longtime girlfriend. They were planning to build a house together.
“I honestly thought that wasn’t going to happen to him,” his wife, Shannon LaPierre, said. “I knew it was a battle, but he worked every day to stay good. He wanted more out of life than that.”
A startling number of opiate victims died just after they had gotten clean — and when their families had reason to believe that the worst was over.
Jared Lee Jackson, 36, had moved back to Vermont from Florida, where he fell in with the wrong crowd and developed a drug habit. His father, Joel, said his son was excited about moving in with a health-nut friend in Waterbury, and perhaps launching his own business. “Things were really looking up: It looked like he was turning the corner; we were all proud of his efforts,” said Joel Jackson. “He seemed fairly put together. He was making good plans.”
The night he died was supposed to be one of celebration; he and his sister were hosting old friends for dinner. As she was preparing the food, he overdosed on a mix of fentanyl and methadone.
Experts in the field have long been aware of this cruel irony: Addicts may be most susceptible to an overdose just after they have gotten clean. In recovery, the body’s tolerance for opiates drops, according to Cimaglio. Starting up again with a formerly acceptable dosage can prove fatal.
Cimaglio said the Department of Health has started a public education effort to warn addicts and their families of the risk. They’re distributing literature at treatment, rehab and needle-exchange centers and encouraging health professionals to find a way to bring it up with patients.
The opiate epidemic is no longer a secret. Every family member contacted for this story was well aware of the nationwide rash of opiate-related deaths. They know that their personal loss is part of a much bigger problem. A few relatives, determined to overcome the stigma, have used obituaries to reveal how their loved ones struggled with addiction.
They also offered a range of possible solutions: Hire more cops. Open more treatment beds. Pass tougher laws for drug dealers. Give addicts a safe, legal place to inject.
But more often than not, their recommendations seemed half-hearted, as if they were restating something they had heard on the news. Most of them were too deep in their own grief, trying to make sense of what happened, to debate policy. They just want the problem to stop.
“It seems kind of weird for an adult woman to confess this, but I’m astonished at the permanency of death,” said Island Pond resident Susan Vera, who lost her 29-year-old son Adam to a fentanyl overdose. “I don’t have the answers. I have a loss that will never be regained. As a society, I don’t know what we are waiting for. Have we not lost enough people — male, female, young, old, everywhere in between? How many more do we have to lose?”
We asked family members of the overdose victims to share their last memories of their loved ones.
How We Reported This Story
Investigating the breadth of the opiate abuse problem in Vermont, Seven Days filed a public records request with the Vermont Department of Health for death certificates for every fatal drug overdose in 2016. We quickly realized that pinpointing opiate overdoses is not as simple as we had assumed. Our findings may not match the Department of Health’s own forthcoming annual opiate overdose tally.
Why? Many people are killed not by one drug, but by a mixture of multiple drugs. Alcohol is sometimes a factor. Some overdose victims have underlying health problems, such as heart disease, that contribute to their deaths.
For these reasons, the health department has complex criteria for declaring a death an “opiate overdose” and conducts investigations of every fatality.
Even the term “opiate” is more complicated than you might think: The health department supplied a list of 56 prescription medications that double as oft-abused opiates. Most of them we’d never heard of.
For this story, Seven Days included people whose death certificates reported that opiates were a cause or contributing factor in their death. Like the health department, we excluded drug-related suicides. Last year, there were six.
Related Stories
Hooked: How So Many Vermonters Got Addicted to Opioids
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2017.
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In December, of 2016, I lost a beautiful and talented cousin to heroin. She was a singer, an EMT and a mother to a beautiful little girl. She had such promise, but heroin took its grip. After many stints at various rehabs, a long stay Albany Med (an abscess from shooting up that almost left her paralyzed), 2 overdoses in which she was revived from, losing custody of her daughter and having her house nearly burned down by other addicts; she lost her battle. Its an epidemic and it touches so many lives that from the outside seem so put together. Thank you so much for this article and showing the faces of those who have passed; it adds such a raw emotion as to how awful and painful this all is… it has to stop.
We’ve lost too many. When I was in school they told us don’t do drugs, but didn’t show us why not. The book I’ve published, Moral Dissipation, puts readers in the shoes of an addict in hopes that readers will not make the same choices the main character made…establishing an emotional connection and showing rather than telling can make a difference.
Moral Dissipation is for sale on Amazon, Nook, Kindle and in Barnes & Noble on Shelburne Road and Phoenix Books downtown. https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Dissipation-S…
It would seem that one way to help prevent this continued tragedy would be for the pharmaceutical industry to stop manufacturing addictive substances in the first place.
blame it on everyone else because people have no control over their own actions..Victim Vermont…..they should change the state name to that.
Doctors must recognize the danger of addiction when they prescribe pain medication . I’m sure it’s not easy to refuse to write a script for pain relief but it might be harder to face the deaths you have inadvertently caused .
Yes Mr Garza people must ultimately be responsible for their own actions . Does this mean we should ignore this very real opiate crisis with a ” tough luck druggie ” attitude ? What about their friends , family , and kids .I suppose you don’t care so what about the actual cost to society in dollars wasted .
So brave is this article. In 2015, I lost two of my sons, Dennis and Sean Thibault, to an addiction that we were not even aware of. They were highly successful men in their 30’s that were “functioning addicts”. Only in the wake of their death’s have I become educated about this epidemic. I was ignorant, plain and simple. I plead with anyone reading this article, and the posters of all of the comments therein: Please, talk to your middle school and high school children about what they see and hear in school. Talk to your neighbors about what may be going on next door. Enlist the help of the law and the medical profession. Consult with your employers about an EAP, which is a an anonymous service for counseling through many employers. I will grieve forever without Dennis and Sean and I can only do what I am only now capable of…….try to help someone save a life. There is no immunity to this scourge. Thank you to Mark for his article. My heart and thoughts go out to all of you that contributed to this story. I truly know how hard that was. Penny Thibault
Jesse was amazing Yetthey asked a woman who didn’t know her son and caused him the most pain. She only callswhen she wants something he would say. He was so much more than she knew and I watched him hurt from the things she said. He always said she was the most selfish person he new. And struggled with this. He had gotten clean and yet a few weeks before he passed he was hurt again and my love wasn’t enough to keep him from it. I am the one who knew him better than anyone yet was pushed aside and wiped away. But those who knew Jesse well know the truth about his childhood and adulthood. It’s hurtful when people can’t see how amazing their child is yet are two faced and amazing actors to strangers. But guilt can destry you if he were alive today he would still say she only calls when she wants something I’ll call her back sometime or tell her I’m not here. I wish I could of mended that. He was amazing and this addiction does not solely define him.
Wow. Its always unfortunate when someone dies but drug addiction is a choice. Its sad that now because of opiate addiction treating drugs like suboxen are sonwidely used now is to generate a profit from addicts for the already bloated big pharma.