One of the true values of the press – opinions originating from the White House aside – is the ability of a reporter to bridge the gap that so often occurs between statistics and stories.
We can rely on figures to grasp the scale of an event or a crisis, but understanding on a real, empathetic level resists numbers and graphs. It comes when reading about or listening to the people directly affected.
Such is the case with Paige Blankenbuehler’s article “When private pain becomes a community problem,” in High Country News, an unvarnished look at the opioid addiction problem in Craig in the northwest corner of our state.
The big figures are all there. How in 1999, some 4,000 people died nationwide from opioid pain relievers, but by 2006, that number had soared to 14,000. How in 2012 alone, physicians in the U.S. “dispensed 259 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, enough to give a bottle of the pills to every adult in the country.” And that for every 100 people in the western states, 71 in Colorado have prescriptions for opioids, while in Arizona, Idaho, Utah and Nevada that figure climbs to 95.
But the heart – or better said, the broken heart – of the story lies with the people of Craig, a community overwhelmed by the scale of an addiction crisis and the speed with which it spread. It then morphed beyond prescription medications – a problem exacerbated by a doctor at a town clinic who is now in prison – to the sale and abuse of heroin and other illicit substances, bringing a sharp rise in crime caused by addicts struggling to finance their habits.
It is almost a reflex action to list the many ways Durango differs from Craig, an isolated community hit hard by the decline of coal in recent years and not blessed with as many scenic and cultural attractions as our unique town.
But we should be wary of taking much comfort in any thoughts that we are immune. In the face of a national opioid problem, that bubble we imagine around us does not exist, except perhaps in our imagination.
