It's perhaps Tennessee's most urgent crisis, people dying from opioid overdoses, more than 1,600 in a recent year. UT Extension and Tennessee 4-H are working to educate people about the dangers of these drugs. Hello, I'm Charles Denny. This is AgCast, brought to you by the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.
Legal or illegal? We've got two legal and one out of them. Come on, take a pick. The game is legal or illegal?
Name a substance and answer the question. Caffeine, that's legal. Methamphetamines, illegal. Alcohol?
Depends on the age of the user. And opioids? Could be both. The game with a serious message was played at a 4-H club meeting at Humboldt's East Elementary, part of Health Rocks, a curriculum focusing on substance abuse.
Leading the exercise, team volunteer C.J. Bryson. So by me teaching them these things, they know, hey, that's something that I learned that's not good for me, I shouldn't do it, and stay far away from that. 4-H agent Caitlin Barker with UT Extension in Gibson County says peer pressure to try drugs is intense.
That's magnified now with so many young people leading their lives online. All this exposure to drugs and alcohol and peer pressure is just at their fingertips 24-7. So I think that's really, you know, social media has definitely had an impact on drug and alcohol abuse with this generation. Which brings us to perhaps the scariest drugs, opioids, and a nationwide epidemic that kills nearly 200 people a day in the U.S.
Part of this 4-H meeting was teaching kids the dangers of opioid addiction. Gary Joyner is also with UT Extension in Gibson County. Right, I think it's a big concern, especially with kids, especially in an area rural like this area in Humboldt. It's an important thing because these kids, their parents may have these in the house and they may think it's candy.
I know a lot of them look like M&M's or different things. So I think it's very important for us to educate them on what it is. In our state, opioids are both an urban and rural problem. In Gibson County and throughout Northwest Tennessee, local law enforcement sees this firsthand.
Sheriff Paul Thomas, a former narcotics officer, talked to the 4-H'ers about how opioids are destroying families and lives. Oxycontin, the morphine, the codeine, that's our biggest problem right now. But every week we get, you know, half a dozen or so that come to my corrective facility that will list their self as an opiate addict. Ashley Garrett knows the heartache and pain of opioid addiction.
I'm having to relearn how to live life and do it as a responsible citizen of the United States and not as a selfish drug user. Ashley is in treatment at the Women of Hope Recovery Center in Meaden near Jackson, a place she credits for saving her life. In her past, she would OD four or five times a year. And I came in because I'd been addicted to heroin for 16 years, started IV heroin at 14 years old, and just lost control of my life.
Had no idea where to turn for help. It does not take long to get addicted to opiates before your body starts withdrawing. And at that point, it's really hard to stop. But Ashley did stop.
Clean almost a year, cautiously measuring time as a recovering addict with each passing day. She's gaining strength emotionally and getting back other parts of her life. That includes money management. Addiction also takes a toll financially.
And we're not unintelligent people because we're addicts. A lot of us are very intelligent, actually. But we like the discipline that it takes to be able to have stable finances. Because we're so used to spending everything that we have all at one time when we get it, we don't know what it's like to save.
So she was able to break that down in practical terms that I could use. She is Amy Eliezer, UT Extension Director for Madison County, who teaches a class for Women of Hope called All Your Money. Being clean and sober from that and not dealing with it anymore, they have a new lease on their finances as well. And so many of them, from just my conversations in general, are really, you know, they're starting over with their finances.
Eliza instructs women on saving, use of credit, and budgeting. Writing a spending plan, looking at financial institutions, how to compare them. Exactly. Any habit that we choose to break, however much it costs, we're going to have more money to spend on necessities, on savings.
UTIA is helping with the opioid crisis also by lending one of its best experts to the state. Dr. Terry Stevens, a pharmacist with UT's College of Veterinary Medicine, was picked to serve on Governor Bill Haslam's Commission on Pain and Opioid Abuse. Stevens fears some opioid addicts may try to get false prescriptions for their pets and then use the drugs themselves or sell them.
One of the things is that they worry about veterinary medicine having problems just like humans. We don't have it yet, but we have the potential in the fact that people can realize, and they are doing it, we just don't know how many. Yeah, a pain med from this veterinarian for their dog, and another, go to another veterinarian, go to another veterinarian. In the human world, we call it physician shopping, we just call it veterinary shopping here.
Stevens, we'd like to see limits on the lengths of prescriptions of pain meds, and believes the committee will make that recommendation. There are no easy answers to America's opioid crisis, but greater awareness is a start. We don't want people to turn to drugs. Many across Tennessee need our support to avoid addiction, and perhaps a tragic end.
Thanks for listening. I'm Charles Denny. For more real-life solutions provided by the UT Institute of Agriculture, go to our website at ag.tennessee.edu.