Heroin is hurting the community declared Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth.
It’s “so incredibly bad,” Beth told hundreds of local law enforcement officers, elected officials, community activists and clinicians gathered at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside Wednesday.
They took part in “Opioids: Killing More Than Pain,” a one-day conference on the crisis.
“We have to do something. We really have to do something,” Beth said.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse found the U.S. had 404,000 heroin users in 2002, a number that spiked 135 percent to 948,000 in 2016. Fatal heroin overdoses jumped from 2,089 in 2002 to 13,219 in 2016, an increase of 533 percent.
