RIO ARRIBA REQUESTS STUDY OF DRUG DEATHS

ESPANOLA - Rio Arriba County is asking the state and federal
governments to find out whether the county's high rate of
drug-overdose deaths is due to heroin or whether there is a rampant
problem with prescription drugs instead.

Some county officials say they suspect heroin is not the main drug
culprit despite widespread public perception that heroin is causing
most of the drug overdoses. Instead, they say, many of the drug deaths
in Rio Arriba are caused by either a combination of drugs or
prescription drugs.

A recent analysis of numbers from the New Mexico Office of the Medical
Investigator shows that up to 75 percent of the drug deaths in
Northern New Mexico could instead be attributed to multiple drug use,
including prescription painkillers and muscle relaxants.

And Lauren Reichelt, director of Rio Arriba's Health and Human
Services, said she hopes law enforcement also will investigate whether
local doctors are writing too many prescriptions for drugs such as
Valium, morphine or Librium.

The County Commission quickly and unanimously approved a resolution
Thursday asking that the state Department of Health and the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention perform a "full outbreak
investigation" into the drug epidemic - and the commission wants the
governments to look at the problem in the context of the county's
culture and socioeconomic background.

"There's not enough discussion about the kinds of drugs being used,"
Reichelt told the commission. "People don't just go out and decide to
use heroin. We need to be looking at all the drugs."

"And we have to begin to place substance abuse in its historical
context," she said.

New Mexico has the highest drug-overdose death rate in the nation, and
Rio Arriba leads the state's counties in drug deaths. And despite
dozens of arrests in the past year of alleged drug dealers, the number
of drug deaths keeps climbing - from 13 in 1995 to 22 last year in Rio
Arriba.

Much of the attention on treatment has focused on heroin, Reichelt
said, when county officials aren't certain heroin is the main problem.

For instance, OMI numbers show that in 1997 and 1998, as much as 75
percent of the drugs that caused a fatal overdose may have been legal
- - ranging from alcohol to morphine to methadone, the drug commonly
prescribed to wean addicts off heroin.

Also, the OMI numbers show that only 11 percent of the deaths were
directly attributed to heroin.

Instead, 46 percent were attributed to morphine; 21 percent to
methadone; 16 percent to heroin, and 3 percent to pharmaceuticals.

Many of those autopsies also found multiple drugs in an overdose
patient's system.

The problem, however, is that a death attributed to morphine or
opiates by the coroner could have started out as a heroin overdose
because of the way the drug breaks down in the body.

"They (morphine deaths) may be heroin, morphine, codeine, Demerol or
any other narcotic, legal or illegal," Reichelt said earlier this
month. The coroner can't call the drug exactly without physical
evidence such as a syringe or pill bottle.

"The police used to record pill bottles with the incident reports and
name the prescribing doctor," she said. "They stopped doing that, so
now we don't know whether these OD deaths are due to heroin or legal,
controlled substances."

The investigation the Rio Arriba County Commission is requesting from
the state Department of Health and the CDC could help answer those
questions, county officials said.

However, despite the formal request, Reichelt said the resolution
passed Thursday has no teeth - the state and CDC have no legal
obligation to perform any such study.

"But we'll do everything in our power to bring out the resources,"
Reichelt said.