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Opioid abuse continues to plague the Copper Country and the judge in Houghton County’s 97th District Court has seen enough.
Judge Mark Wisti sees many of the drug cases first hand from his bench and the effect prescription drug abuse has on people’s lives.
“It’s devastating,” Wisti said. “It’s a very powerful drug. It destroys their lives, they lose their jobs, they don’t work, they lose their relationships—it just devastates them. But ultimately, they die. We had 52,000 deaths in the year 2015, which is the last year that the CDC keeps these statistics. 33,000 of those were opioid deaths.”
Wisti says there has also been an increase in heroin use in the area…accounting for 5 percent of drug overdose deaths in 2010 and now up to 25 percent nationwide.
“According to the Society of American Addiction Medicine,” said Wisti, “roughly 80 percent of the heroin users start on prescription drugs, and now that it is becoming somewhat harder to get the prescription drugs, they’re going over to heroin. 94 percent of the people in treatment for heroin addiction said they started on the prescriptions and their main reason for going over to the heroin was it was easier to get and cheaper.”
Wisti doesn’t believe incarceration is an effective way to get people off the drugs.
He supports alternative means such as the treatment court, which is already having some success.
The Michigan legislature is looking at ways to control the availability of prescription drugs and to focus on treating the addiction rather than criminalizing it.
