The use of heroin and other drugs is on the rise across northern Michigan, but the effects are being felt particularly in the small, tight knit communities of Benzie County.
Toxicology reports are not back for the two latest victims. But if their deaths are confirmed overdoses the count will rise to six deaths in two years. And some in the community are looking for anything they can do to ward off the next.
Drugs Testing Kits At The Funeral Home
It’s not just the police who have noted a rise in heroin and other drug-related deaths in Benzie County.
“You’re taking care of a lot your friend’s kids now,” says Funeral Director Gaylord Jowett. Some of those funerals have taken place at the Jowett Family Funeral Home in Benzonia.
What Jowett has seen in last few years has bothered him enough to do this: Parents can now come privately to one of his funeral homes, anytime, day or night, and pick up a free drug test kit. No questions asked.
“That’s sort of your outreach, your anger,” says Jowett. “After a while it becomes challenging watching these families hurt. And it’s time to do something.”
‘The Kid Next Door’
As that small-town funeral director, Jowett often knows the families he serves. Good families, he says. Good kids. Good parents. If he used to believe drug overdoes only really affected troubled families, with deep problems he doesn’t believe it today.
Neither does Deputy Kyle Rosa, who patrols the roads for the Benzie County Sheriff’s Department. Rosa says drugs have always been a problem in Benzie but now some teens and young adults are experimenting not just with marijuana and alcohol. They’re pushing the bounds with highly addictive heroin or meth.
“Someone asks you, ‘Well what does a drug user or someone like that look like?’ Today you just don’t know,” says Rosa. “It’s the kid next door. It’s the athlete. It’s the seemingly good student.
“It’s the father and the mother that are in good standing in the community. You know, it can be anybody.”
Overdose victims are not always young people but Rosa used to be a school liaison officer. He says in half of the recent cases he’s known the victim as they rose through the ranks at school. Sometimes he hasn’t seen it coming.
To his boss, Sherriff Ted Schendel, these are not the wrong-doers.
“The bad guys, to me, are the pushers of the product that might not even be using it but that want the almighty dollar,” says Schendel. “And I look at the people that are actually using it as the victims.
“So if there’s anything that we can do to help save a life, or help a victim, then that’s what we want to do.”
Schendel’s deputies are among just a few officers in the nation now carrying a drug called naloxone. It’s often called by the brand name Narcan. It acts as a temporary overdose antidote for heroin and other opiate drugs. Time is of the essence, so it has to be administered fast.
Training For Addicts
It was Keri Schneider who convinced Schendel to sit through hours of Narcan training and to equip his deputies with the drug. Then she put together a free training where addicts themselves could come and be prescribed the drug, to have on hand for an emergency.
“I got to see the cops train,” she says. “And (naloxone) is not hard at all to use. So I figured if we could get it in the hands of addicts, or people that have a loved one who is an addict, it might help save lives too.
“You know, put it in their hands, saving each other’s lives .”
Last May at a graveside service, Schneider remembers a line of 70 or 80 cars.
“My brother Justin Smith overdosed on heroin four days after his 23th birthday, on May 15th.”
Schneider describes him as a guy who loved his family and especially his nieces. He was well liked. Drugs really didn’t change him, she says. But they cut his life short.
“It’s all I’m aiming for, is to save other families the grief that we went through,” she says. “It’s not anything that any mother, or anyone should go through, you know? It’s sad.”