PR&LA Summer 2018

4  • PENNSYLVANIA RESTAURANT & LODGING matters • Summer 2018 INDUSTRY OUTLOOK IN THE MID-90S, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about heroin. While serving as Mayor, the city of Plano, Texas became one of several affluent U.S. cities where a new, highly refined form of heroin was distributed by South American drug cartels. This heroin was “marketed” as Chiva, and was so pure that it did not require injection, but instead could be snorted or ingested, which dramatically increased its potential customer base. I learned firsthand that you cannot understand the pain that this terrible drug brings until you sit with the parents of a child taken by it. Before we stopped the tragedy that had beset our city, we lost 18 young people. We considered this a devastating epidemic and treated it as such. Looking at where we are today in Pennsylvania and across the nation, the situation we faced in Plano is minuscule by comparison. Today we face a heroin and opioid crisis beyond belief. And so, PRLA dedicates this edition of Restaurant & Lodging Matters to a frank discussion of where we are and what our industry can do about it. We lump heroin and opioids into the same category. Unlike what we faced 20 years ago in Plano, today prescription opioids have become the gateway to heroin. According to Heroin: Combatting this Growing Epidemic in Pennsylvania Report compiled in 2014 by The Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative agency of the Pennsylvania Legislative Assembly, the rise in heroin and opioid abuse in Pennsylvania has no geographic boundaries, and crosses all socioeconomic groups, all ages and all races. In 2011, the National Institutes on Drug Abuse (NIDA) estimated that 4.2 million Americans age 12 or older had used heroin at least once in their lives. In addition, recent reports note that approximately 80 percent of people who abused heroin reported abusing prescription opioids before starting to abuse heroin. Further, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vital Signs report confirmed that health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers in 2012, enough for every adult in the United States to have a bottle of prescription painkillers. The study went on to say that heroin, an illegal and highly addictive drug processed from morphine, a natural occurring substance extracted from the seed pod of certain varieties of poppy plants and opioid abuse is widespread across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania affecting one out of every four families in the state. At the time of the study it was reported that over the past 5 years, heroin and opioid abuse has claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 Pennsylvanians, according to data from the Pennsylvania Coroners Association. Overdose deaths have increased by an astounding 470 percent, rising from 2.7 to 15.4 per thousand over the last two decades, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Health. John Longstreet We Can Make a Difference Dramatic Action is Required to Stem the Tide of the Growing Drug Crisis “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vital Signs report confirmed that health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers in 2012, enough for every adult in the United States to have a bottle of prescription painkillers.” continues on page 8 ➔