Brought to you by: theadvocate.com
Task force working to solve Louisiana's opioid crisis In 2009, Cayce Badeaux McDaniel had just nished college at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and was living what people would consider a normal life. ings were going ne. It all changed when she broke her neck in a car wreck — an injury that would send her into a spiral of addiction to painkillers. "Before I even knew it, I was buying it o the street. I was using benzos, and then I used alcohol – basically anything that would make me feel di erent than I did," McDaniel said.
For the next ve years it was a cycle of drugs, car accidents, arrests.
She describes the time as: "Pain and sorrow and disappointment after disappointment of my family and of everybody around me who truly loved me."
"We've got so many people dying because of drug use," said Dr. Rochelle Head-Dunham, executive and medical director of the Metropolitan Human Services District. "It is absolutely an epidemic." A new task force, formally called the Commission on Preventing Opioid Abuse, is working to come up with a set of recommendations for short-term and long-term e orts that can be made to address prescription opioid and
Today, she's in recovery and serves as an addiction counselor herself.
But McDaniel's addiction story is a familiar one in Louisiana, a state that has been hit particularly hard by a national opioid crisis that health leaders say is largely driven by the abuse of prescription painkillers. Louisiana has the seventh-highest opioid pain reliever-prescribing rate in the country, and the drug overdose rate outpaces the national average.
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