INDIANA OPIOID CRISIS TRENDS: LIES TO COVER FAILURE OF TREATMENTS FUELING A WORSENING EPIDEMIC 

In Indiana as consistently elsewhere data affirm the longstanding obvious meaning of recent drops in opioid overdose deaths – desperate intensive Narcan campaigns are harm reduction, reducing deaths due to expert treatment failure

by Clark Miller

Published  January 16, 2025

In Indiana as elsewhere the numbers tell the story, and don’t lie, nor do the front line healthcare, community, and support workers who are witnessing first-hand the intensively expanding distribution, training, effective use, and outcomes of campaigns to make naloxone, the agent for reversal of potentially lethal opioid overdose, more accessible in communities.

Over recent years, as in other states and locales, Narcan campaigns have been dramatically successful – millions of units distributed to communities, where they are needed, a strategy that more than accounts for the reported decreases in opioid overdose deaths. 

That those magnitudes of year-to-year increases in naloxone reversals of otherwise fatal opioid overdoses literally leave no reduced deaths to account for by other means hasn’t stopped Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb from attributing the reduced deaths to investments in treatments for which there is no evidence of benefit, including residential substance use treatment and use of the state’s Medicaid waiver to fund more methadone and buprenorphine (Suboxone) treatment, this recent study of  17 states demonstrating lack of benefit and instead harm caused by Medicaid expansion for substitute opioid treatment. 

Holcomb listed several ongoing state efforts to combat fatal overdoses: extending the state’s Medicaid demonstration waiver to expand coverage for a full range of substance use disorder treatments for enrollees and the Family and Social Services Administration’s reported 385% expansion of residential treatment beds, for a total of 2,900 statewide, since 2017. ..

“From the outset of his administration, Gov. Holcomb has emphasized the need for an all-hands-on-deck approach to combat the drug epidemic,” said Douglas Huntsinger, the state’s executive director for drug prevention, treatment and enforcement. “These numbers are a testament to the collaborative efforts of countless stakeholders who have contributed to Indiana’s comprehensive treatment and recovery infrastructure.”

So there you have it. The governor and his mouthpiece, like members of the expert class they are fused with in groupthink mindmeld, may not be remotely capable of forming a cogent thought about problem compulsive substance use or its treatment (a fundamental requirement for maintaining their status and positions), but they are naturally adept at uttering the mindless pieces of acceptable, meaningless script e.g., “an all-hands-on-deck approach” and engaging in equally soothing AI-speak.  

But reality is not that easy to disappear. The dramatic surges in yearly opioid deaths prevented by use of targeted, distributed Narcan in communities are neither treatment nor recovery, are outside of “Indiana’s comprehensive treatment and recovery infrastructure”.

The desperate naloxone campaigns with consistent results in states and locales nationwide are emergency programs of harm reduction, necessary precisely due to the lethal failure of the factors the governor attributed benefit to.  That’s all covered in multiple recent posts here and here.  

A different news account is more grounded in the evidence and in reality. 

INDIANAPOLIS — For Justin Phillips, the millionth dose of Naloxone distributed in Indiana by the organization she founded (Overdose Lifeline) is an achievement borne out of personal tragedy.

”I did lose my child to an opioid overdose…I knew I needed to try to help save others,” Phillips said.

In addition to working with hundreds of families across Indiana who share the same experience, Phillips works to ensure the state puts federal opioid settlement dollars to the best possible use.

”We are all really proud of the public partnership we have with Overdose Lifeline and the State of Indiana,” Phillips said. ”I think Indiana is a leader in a lot of things related to opioid overdose reduction.”

Those efforts paid off, providing targeted, community based Narcan in quantities that account – many times over – for the recorded decrease in opioid overdose deaths. 

Indiana has distributed more than 1 million doses of naloxone since partnering with Overdose Lifeline in 2020. …

Phillips said Overdose Lifeline works with a network of 200 distributors to connect people with the “life-saving” drug. …

Douglas Huntsinger, the executive director for the Office of Drug Prevention, Treatment and Enforcement, said Indiana invested $1 million in 2020 to provide the 25,000 doses of naloxone to anyone who needed it.

“To put that in perspective, we’re now distributing an estimated 24,000 doses every month,” Huntsinger said.

More detailed discussions of how the evidence establishes that widespread Narcan campaigns account for recent declines in opioid overdose deaths, not treatments that are fueling high-risk opioid use and overdoses, in states and locales with outcomes like Indiana’s are found in recent posts including for – 

Boston

Connecticut

Vermont

West Virginia

Minnesota

Michigan

Chicago – upcoming post

Nevada – upcoming post

Tennessee – upcoming post

San Francisco – upcoming post

North Carolina

Philadelphia

Kentucky

Utah

Massachusetts

Florida

New York,

and Maryland 

Additional evidence based analyses of recent major study outcomes establishing the same effects are here and here and here

The evidence is clear, consistent, and accumulating: emergency naloxone campaigns desperately required to moderate opioid overdose deaths due to persistently increasing high-risk opioid use are a measure of a worsening epidemic and of failure of expert gold standard treatments. 

Why A Critical Discourse?

Because an uncontrolled epidemic of desperate and deadly use of pain-numbing opioid drugs is just the most visible of America’s lethal crises of drug misuse, suicide, depression, of obesity and sickness, of social illness. Because the matrix of health experts and institutions constructed and identified by mass media as trusted authorities – publicly funded and entrusted to protect public health – instead collude to fabricate false assurances like those that created an opioid crisis, while promising medical cures that never come and can never come, while epidemics worsen. Because the “journalists” responsible for protecting public well-being have failed to fight for truth, traded that duty away for their careers, their abdication and cowardice rewarded daily in corporate news offices, attempts to expose that failure and their fabrications punished.

Open, critical examination, exposure, and deconstruction of their lethal matrix of fabrications is a matter of survival, is cure for mass illness and crisis, demands of us a critical discourse.

Crisis is a necessary condition for a questioning of doxa, but is not in itself a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse.

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