Stepping up to our calling

By Chris Villines
AAC Executive Director

We are an amazingly privileged group. The 1,400-plus county and district officials the AAC represents have been given a collective opportunity to help shape our society. We are well respected by our constituents and have been placed on a platform with advantage.

You effectively use this platform to discuss your positions and priorities in local government. One of the barometers by which to gauge our effectiveness is our interaction with the Legislature. We educate our representatives and senators about what we do and why certain laws need or need not be changed. At this, we are skilled and competent. Shared victories at the Capitol are numerous, and we don’t lack war stories about how damaging certain losses would have been. Nor are we at a loss to proclaim many victories in legislation that help us modernize and make more efficient our level of government.

But it is not lost on me that where we have the most potential for impact is in our communities. Many of you live within just a mile or two of your courthouse, but your sphere of influence includes thousands of people across hundreds of miles. This makes me think of comedian Steven Wright, and his comment, “Someone told me half of all car accidents happen within a mile of your house. So I moved.” But, I digress.

Thankfully you are all well planted in your homes and relationships. And as a result of your leadership in your communities, many look to you for guidance, and they value your opinions. When you talk locally about what’s going on in government and society, you have people’s ears. More often than not, though, we tend to shed the limelight that goes along with lofty elected positions because county and district officials are generally a humble sort.

For a moment, though, think about the awesome potential you have to lead people around you. You are skilled at working with the press to communicate changes in your office and their impacts on society. County clerks talk about new voting equipment; justices of the peace talk about unfunded mandates; and sheriffs talk about changes in the criminal law. Each of you has topics that are important to your office, and you find yourself thrust into communicative leadership to educate society.

This issue of County Lines is dedicated to something that one year ago we rarely talked about, much less thought about its impact on county government. But as the opioid epidemic has come to light, it has taught us that this is not only a problem in Arkansas, but it could well be the leading cause of growth in financial cost to counties. It also could be the leading cause of societal decay in a state not used to being at the forefront in the war on drugs.

I remember well Nancy Reagan’s organized attack in the war on drugs in the ‘80s. The phrase, “Just say no!” was everywhere. Public Service Announcements were ubiquitous, and schools ramped up drug abuse prevention to a level never seen before. Drugs in the ‘80s were a dirty, sordid prospect. Images of needles or cocaine were burned into society as a dangerous affront to the utopian America to which we had grown accustomed.

It was the right response at the right time to a crisis our country faced, but in Arkansas there was always something about the reality of inner city drug trafficking and back-alley dealing we couldn’t relate to. Now, however, a very dangerous curve has occurred in drug abuse.

We have gone from black-market drug trade under the cover of night’s darkness to an epidemic unlike any other in which drug companies and distributors have played a role in handing out extremely addictive opioid prescriptions in the trusted vestiges of hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Opioids have always been around, but they historically had been used medically for short periods of time for acute pain relief. In the late ‘90s and moving forward, the drug manufacturers used shaky data and new time-release forms of opioids to launch an explosion in opioid sales under the false premise they would now be safe for chronic pain relief. They argued the addictive qualities would not exist with time-release forms of the medication. Opioid manufacturers and distributors also have intentionally misinformed the medical community and general public in other ways, all designed to increase their bottom line.

This flooded the market with opioid medication without an honest appraisal that the addictive qualities were still there. As a result, we now find many people in Arkansas hooked on an addictive drug that was never marketed honestly. And, most dangerous, is that when this supply cuts off for individual users the best black-market drug available to satisfy the opioid craving is heroin.

Sadly for Arkansas, this epidemic has hit us harder than any other drug epidemic of the past. We rank second — yes, second — only to Alabama in the number of prescriptions for opioids per capita in the country. We have not skirted this problem; we have landed dead center in the middle. For some time now our jails have been full, our county hospitals have been unable to keep up, and our sheriffs’ deputies have been overworked because of this local impact.

Worse yet, many of you know first-hand of someone in your family or someone in your work family who is battling this addiction. The physiological attributes of an opioid addiction are such that some who take opioids don’t become addicted, but others do. There is a cruel randomness about it that means no predictors can help weed out those who should and should not take it.

There are many facts and much information regarding the opioid epidemic, and I encourage you all to take a look at “A Prescription for Action,” a joint National League of Cities and National Association of Counties report. We have linked to this report on the home page of our web site. It is short and easy to read and will give you great insight into the scope of this problem.

On Sunday mornings at church, it’s always good to listen to a sermon. I often find myself conveniently — but wrongly — thinking about all the other people I know with the affliction the pastor is preaching about. That is until he gets to the action points — my action points. Inevitably there are steps I need to take. And some are uncomfortable.

There is one key component of healing our state’s opioid epidemic: communication of the problem. So back to what I first mentioned. You are elected in your counties. You are voices that are listened to. Many in your communities are addicted to opioids and ashamed to talk about it. But if you come forward with the end goal of communicating the problem, you just may give someone somewhere the comfort to share their problem and how it is affecting them or their family. This is step No. 1 in dealing with this epidemic, and as county leaders you are in extremely important positions to raise this topic to the forefront and lead the critically important conversation we must have.

I am reminded of a parable in Luke that every official should heed. In Luke 12:48 it is said, “To whomever much is given, of him will much be required; and to whom much was entrusted, of him more will be asked.”

This problem cuts across all demographics and levels of government and cannot be solved without a response that also cuts across all boundaries. We have begun providing the information necessary for county and district officials to begin this conversation locally. We will continue to provide you tools, so you can lead the conversation. As communications from us roll out, I want to encourage your activism. You have to begin with this process by knowing that just having the discussion is a win — and you are in the perfect positions to start down the road of healing.