Heroin does discriminate

While Bill Hardy walked to a gas station on Kenmore Boulevard with his children one day a few months ago, his son spotted a discarded object.

It was a hypodermic needle, the kind used to inject heroin into the bloodstream.

“Dad, what’s that?” his son asked.

Hardy, a recovering drug addict with two years of sobriety, said he never saw such a thing growing up in Kenmore.

Back then, he recalled, he’d go out to ride bikes with other kids at night. That’s unheard of now, he said.

While almost every community across the country is struggling with an epidemic of drug addiction — ushering in the mantra “heroin doesn’t discriminate” — none are more affected than places like Kenmore.

That’s because heroin and other drugs do discriminate.

Poor most at risk

A Beacon Journal analysis of local and federal data found drugs had a markedly stronger hold on poor communities in Summit County than their richer counterparts last year. Residents of communities with household incomes below the county average made up 70 percent of the county’s 2,423 overdoses reported in 2016.

Kenmore residents ranked second-highest for drug overdose rates. Only downtown Akron had a higher rate, but it’s an outlier because of its small population.

Kenmore ranked among the lowest in the county for median household incomes and graduation rates from high school and college. It also ranked among the highest poverty rates.

According to the Beacon Journal’s analysis, people living in Kenmore were 11 times more likely to overdose on drugs than people living in more affluent communities such as Hudson and Boston Heights.

Hudson and Boston Heights ranked among the lowest overdose rates in the county. The communities also boasted the highest median household incomes and graduation rates, as well as one of the lowest poverty rates in the county.

Similar trends appeared across the board. Other factors, like a community’s racial makeup and median age, were not strongly connected to overdose rates.

To reach its findings, the Beacon Journal analyzed data from the county’s public health department and the U.S. Census Bureau.

The county’s data tracked ZIP codes where overdose victims lived, not where they overdosed. The data, which included fatal and nonfatal overdoses, was limited to patients who were treated last year in hospital emergency rooms. Overdose victims were not included in the data if they never made it to an ER or if they left before they could be logged in a hospital’s system.

The census also used ZIP codes and included data from 2015, the most recent year available.

Funeral after funeral

For Hardy, the reality of Kenmore’s struggle with drugs is all too real. He’s had 35 friends die of overdoses in five years.

“It’s like going to funerals is a full-time job,” he said.

Hardy, who said he used to deal drugs while in the throes of his own addiction, explained that drugs are a way of life in poorer neighborhoods. Rich communities have drug addicts too, but it’s not like Kenmore. Drug users can rattle off half a dozen parking lots to score heroin in the neighborhood, and people come from nearby communities to make purchases, he said.

The neighboring cities of Barberton and Norton also are among the hardest hit.

Barberton and Norton combined logged the most overdoses — 290 — of any community in the county. The pair shared a ZIP code, so it wasn’t possible to separate them in the data obtained by the Beacon Journal. The rate of overdose in the two combined populations was the fifth-highest, falling just below Lane-Wooster and East Akron.

Like neighboring Kenmore, Barberton and Norton had below-average household incomes and graduation rates, as well as above-average poverty rates.

Nationwide trends

Experts say the Beacon Journal’s analysis is in line with national studies.

Kent State University professor Cynthia Osborn has worked in the field of addiction and mental health counseling for decades. She said there’s a strong link between addiction rates and poverty.

“Poverty could be a perfect storm of developing a substance abuse disorder,” she said.

Addiction isn’t the only disease that affects the poor disproportionately. Depression, asthma, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart attacks are more common among the poor, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. Most prominent was the disparity for depression: Those living in poverty were twice as likely to have depression.

Osborn said these trends can be explained because wealthy people are more likely to have strong support systems and access to effective education and high-paying jobs. Impoverished people are faced with more “risk factors,” including increased exposure to crime, lower access to effective education, inadequate housing and fewer role models.

The wealthy, as a result, are less likely to engage in risky behaviors — like drug abuse — than the poor. The same can be said of behaviors like poor eating habits, which might explain the other diseases that hinder the poor more than the rich.

Long-term struggles

At the same time, Osborn said there are long-term socioeconomic factors at play.

Addiction and mental health risks are said to run in families.

If that’s the case, Osborn said, a family member generations back might have lost a job or a house due to addiction or mental health. The family might have moved to a poorer neighborhood as a result, and their children went on to face the challenges associated with living in a poor neighborhood.

“That might put poorer people at a higher risk because their families have been placed there as a result of mental health,” Osborn said. “So the cycle continues to today, when a person might not be able to escape it.”

Breaking the cycle

James Cain, another addict in long-term recovery, grew up in Barberton but now lives in Doylestown.

Like Hardy, Cain said drugs are more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods because selling them is a means to getting by.

“You’re finding it in these places because selling it is their only means to survive,” he said. “It’s a vicious cycle, and until you break the cycle, nothing will change.”

He stressed that drugs aren’t limited to poor neighborhoods, though. He recalled buying drugs from someone living in a $150,000 home while he was still an active user.

Getting to work

After beating their own addictions, Hardy and Cain joined their peers to fight back against the epidemic.

Hardy joined a local grass-roots advocacy group, Akron Say No to Dope. The group opened a thrift shop in Kenmore in January to offer a place to raise money to help recovering addicts reset their lives.

New Beginnings thrift shop stands at Kenmore Boulevard and 13th Street, in the heart of the neighborhood.

Cain joined the Warriors Project, a Canton-based organization dedicated to getting help for addicts and their families.

The two groups are partner organizations. Joining together is the way local advocacy groups make the biggest difference, said Tugg Massa, a recovered addict who founded Akron Say No to Dope.

“We’re making more of a difference than the government ever will,” Massa said. “Grass-roots organizations are filling the gaps.”

Massa, like Cain, said it’s important for those seeking recovery to have hope that they can overcome circumstance.

“People can change their lives,” he said. “It’s just about how much you want it.”