Progress in opioid ODs reversed
As jobs vanish and isolation grows, addicts leave recovery path
When Jamal Pongracz left jail in February, his sister Tiffany couldn’t help but think it would be different this time.
He got a job at a junkyard and was spending time with his family. But then the coronavirus pandemic hit and he broke his leg at work, she said. After that, things fell back into a familiar pattern: He started going out, overdosed and eventually was admitted to an inpatient treatment center in Allentown, she said.
“I was worried that he’s back at it. He’s not working. He can’t get a job because everything is shut down,” she said.
And on July 12, Jamal Pongracz overdosed while in treatment at Keenan House and died.
Drug overdose deaths have been rising in the Lehigh Valley since the coronavirus pandemic began, a devastating turn of events for a region that was seeing some improvement in the drug epidemic.
“The pandemic set us back years,” said Donna Jacobsen, a Lehigh Valley advocate for people in recovery.
In the first seven months of the year, there already were 72 drug-related deaths in Lehigh County and another 22 presumed to be drug-related. Last year, there were 82 drug-related deaths in that time period.
In Northampton County, there were 34 drug-related deaths in the first five months of 2020, compared to 28 last year. Progress has been hard won. From the late 1990s until around 2018, overdose deaths in Pennsylvania steadily rose to the point where most people knew someone who had died from addiction.
In response, parents shared painful stories about sons and daughters found dead after injecting heroin, often laced with fentanyl, to inspire others to seek help without shame. Politicians and patients sued pain pill makers and distributors for not warning people about the dangers of opioids. Health officials established more treatment programs. And the state removed barriers to a medication that reverse overdoses.
Those efforts seemed to finally pay off in 2018, the first year the state saw a decrease in overdose deaths.
Then, the pandemic forced businesses to close and people to quarantine. Jobs disappeared. Routines were disrupted. And people in recovery were suddenly cut off from their support groups, family and friends.
In July, a recovery counselor was so alarmed to learn of back-to-back deaths at Lehigh Valley rehabilitation facilities that she alerted the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.
The state agency said it has received complaints and conducted inspections for both Keenan House and Lehigh County Center for Recovery but has not posted the results of the inspection yet. The agency also would not share the complaints.
John Dillensnyder, executive director for Treatment Trends Inc., which runs the Keenan House, declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.
The Morning Call’s calls to the Lehigh County Center for Recovery were not returned.