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MOORHEAD, Minnesota (Valley News Live) – The drug overdose problem in the Valley continues to grow, and the latest sign to surface in the Fargo Police Crime Report shows a staggering 203% increase in the number of drug overdoses.
We’ve been busy here at Beths Place, said Sequoia Harmon, an addiction counselor.
Since the start of the COVID-19 lockdowns, owner of Beths Place, an addiction treatment center in Moorhead, Cassie Kasowski, has said the number of overdoses they are seeing has increased.
All we teach in the treatment is not to isolate, Kasowski said. Obviously, we have had to isolate ourselves due to the COVID restrictions. Meetings were canceled and many people lost their jobs. So the lack of income has added a lot of extra pressure within the house. We had a lot of people isolating themselves.
Kasowski said the problem with isolation is that whether you’re new to recovery or relapsed, structure is very important. She said COVID and social distancing have taken away much of the structure that addicts need.
However, she said it wasn’t just social distancing that hurt those seeking treatment or recovering.
It’s a combination of politics and COVID, but I also think it’s this new era that we’re seeing, and we’ve seen a trend in this area over the last 3-5 years that is street drugs consisting to add fentanyl, Kasowski said.
She said the biggest increase they’ve seen is in the 18-25 age group.
Kids are experimenting with Percocet, they’re experimenting with Xanax, they’re experimenting with drugs that 9/10 of their parents will have prescriptions for, Kasowski said. If they buy them on the street or at a party and their friend tells them to try this and boost it up a bit, he’s probably going to get caught with an agent and a lot of the agents we see are going to be fentanyl.
Kasowski said more services must be available to provide people with the help they need and to reverse this frightening trend.
It’s an epidemic that I think people have been grappling with for a long time, and unfortunately we can’t get out of it, Kasowski said, we need to put more services in place, make access to care more accessible. , deal with this problem. , helping these children or young adults in difficulty and having them taken care of is the only way for them to recover.
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