Are we trying to close the barn door after the horse has bolted?

Liverpool Police Officer Jerry Unger thinks so. Heroin abuse, he said, has hit the village with a vengeance.

Within a 40-day period late last year, Unger responded to three serious drug overdoses here involving the opioid known on the street as H, smack, the boy and, of course, horse.

“Heroin addiction happens to all kinds of people,” Unger observed. “It doesn’t know race. It doesn’t know age. It doesn’t know class or culture.”

For decades, most of us have thought of heroin as a city problem, relegated to criminal types who steal to support their habit. Not anymore.

On Jan. 6, Unger participated in a forum at Liverpool Public Library hosted by the Onondaga County District Attorney’s Advisory Council. The topic was “Within our community, heroin an epidemic: What every parent needs to know.”

Joyce Abold, the council’s vice president for educational projects, said the current heroin problem “is a scourge that affects people in every type lifestyle.” She advised parents whose teenagers are addicted to contact the OnCare office at Onondaga County’s Children and Family Service, at 463-1100. 

But Unger’s recent experiences with overdose cases involved adults exclusively. “Two were professional people and one was a stay-at-home mom,” he recalled. While circumstances differed, each case resulted from the ingestion of high-potency heroin.

Driving while ODing

The first case occurred Nov. 11, when a female passenger called 911 to report that her boyfriend, who was driving his Land Rover north through the village, was unresponsive but flooring the gas pedal. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she told the dispatcher.

Unger and LPD Sgt. Mike Manns caught up with the car after she’d thrown it into park and it stopped in the middle of the road outside Liverpool Fire Department Station One.

“At this point I didn’t know what was going on,” Unger said, “but I leaned in and turned off the ignition, then gave him what we call a sternum rub [a technique designed to assess the consciousness level of a person not responding to normal interaction]. I noticed he had a death grip on the steering wheel, his pupils were like pinholes and he was sweating profusely.”

Unger, who was trained in Advance Roadside Impairment Detection, knew those symptoms pointed to narcotics.

Within five minutes, Rural Metro ambulance arrived and EMTs administered Narcan, a drug which effectively counters the effects of opiate overdoses. The man finally started responding and admitted that he’d taken heroin in a restaurant restroom unbeknownst to his girlfriend. Later, at the hospital he needed even more Narcan because he’d taken so much heroin,” Unger said.

Mothers on drugs

Things didn’t turn out so well on Dec. 15, when Unger answered a call regarding an unconscious person possible DOA at a village residence. A 50-year-old woman was found dead in her bathroom. Unger’s investigation turned up nine full packets and one open packet of a white powdery substance which proved to be a mix of heroin and cocaine, commonly called a speedball.  “She had snorted one-half of that $20 packet. Now her two daughters have no mother. It’s unfathomable to me how people can put their addiction before their children,” said Unger, who is a father himself.

About a week before Christmas, the 911 dispatch center sent the officer to a residence on Aspen Street where a 30-year-old woman was reported unconscious and unresponsive. “I found her on the floor, with her eyes closed and her lips blue,” the policeman said. “Her muscles were flaccid, which is a sign of an opioid overdose, and she was only breathing once every eight seconds.

Because of a heavy snowstorm that day, the Nova ambulance was delayed, so Unger pulled a small nasal atomizer of Narcan to try to thwart the overdose. “In his haste, he broke off the atomizer and had to literally pour the medicine into her nostrils. It worked.

“In two or three minutes, she snapped out of it,” Unger said. “I later found a needle mark on her arm and she admitted that she was a former user, who had decided to try it again after a two-year layoff.”  She was also a mother of two kids and a former school teacher.

One of the Nova EMTs told the woman, “This officer saved your life.”

Unger told her that she owed him a Christmas card. The holiday came and went, and the officer has yet to receive that holiday greeting.

Meanwhile, no matter how hard we try to close the door, the horse remains on the loose.

Readers can contact the columnist at [email protected].