Rossi: Murders part of LI opiate epidemic

Maureen Ledden Rossi is president of Kings Park in the kNOw, a grassroots organization battling the region's opiate and heroin problem.

The opiate-fueled Medford massacre has rocked this close-knit hamlet to its core. Long Islanders mourn with Medford as it buries the four innocent victims of the pharmacy shooting that has forced all of us to take a closer look at our region's opiate problem.

It's an epidemic that has been ravaging hundreds of families in Nassau and Suffolk for years. In the fall of 2009, it also claimed the life of 11-year-old Courtney Sipes, who was run down on Main Street in Smithtown by a young driver high on heroin. And then there are lives like 18-year-old Natalie Ciappa of Massapequa, who died of a heroin overdose in 2008, and the more than 300 Long Islanders who died as a result of opiate overdoses in the last year alone.

We must work harder to eradicate this scourge from Long Island. The opiate plague and Long Island's pernicious youth heroin problem are one in the same: Most new heroin addicts these days began their opiate journey with prescription pills. Long Island's beautiful suburbs, well-performing school districts and high quality of life do not give us immunity from the great societal problem of our day: prescription drug abuse.

What happened in Medford and Smithtown are why every Long Islander needs to care about this epidemic. Opiate addiction changes people; it changes their families and their communities. But there are steps families and communities can take to combat this problem.

Parents must become educated about risk factors and ways to protect their children. And they need to get those prescription drugs out of their medicine cabinets. That means every pharmacy must be equipped to take back unwanted medicines. We also need a real-time prescription drug tracking system for pharmacies, so we can put a stop to doctor shopping.

School districts should offer evidence-based, age-appropriate drug and alcohol prevention programs for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Kids don't just wake up on their 16th birthday and take an oxy or a Vicodin. Generally, before the pills, they start with alcohol. Results from the recently released state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services youth survey indicate that drinking usually starts around age 14 or 15, with liquor kids get in their own homes and the homes of friends. Too often, this kind of drinking is considered harmless by parents -- and then if and when their children progress to other substances, they don't know what to do.

So parents who suspect drug use in their kids must have the tools and the knowledge to take action -- to drug-test their children and seek treatment if necessary.

Police precincts, hospitals and fire departments -- whose personnel are often more able to identify tipoff signs of substance abuse -- must be prepared to hand out a list of treatment options when responding to disturbances or other drug-related situations. Suffolk County's Communities of Solutions -- a coalition of community members and officials fighting addiction -- just created a precinct tear-off with treatment facilities categorized geographically for easy use. Hospitals and doctors should be ready to screen, intervene and refer to treatment, identifying addiction in our emergency rooms and doctors' offices.

Finally, we need laws mandating that managed care companies pay for treatment. Too many Long Island teens and young adults have been denied treatment after overdosing -- only to overdose again later and die. Others, after having been denied treatment, continued to use and went on to commit crimes. Let's hold our public officials accountable. Suffolk will elect a new county executive in the fall; let's find out how candidates Steve Bellone and Angie Carpenter plan to fight this epidemic.

Details are still emerging about the Medford murders and the pair arrested in the crime, and we'll never know to what extent any efforts like these might have helped. But the very fact that 10,000 hydrocodone pills were stolen shows us that we have not yet worked hard enough to fight our opiate crisis on Long Island. Now it's time to mourn -- and then it's time to get to work.