The number of people looking to get help with a substance use disorder and starting treatment in drug rehabs in Sacramento and nearby areas has gone up in recent years.
New data has shown that within an eight-year period — from 2000 to 2008 — the number of Sacramento residents who were receiving treatment in local drug rehabs went from 5,708 to 8,756.
In the same period, another change that was observed was that by the first year the vast majority of addiction treatment recipients were women — slightly more than 3,000 women were in treatment for a substance use disorder — but starting in 2002, more men than women were found to be enrolling in the programs offered by drug rehabs in the area.
The most problematic substance
Methamphetamines are one of the most popularly abused illicit substances in the Sacramento. According to the Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services, the effects of methamphetamine abuse have been one the most critical issues in the region.
And a methamphetamine symposium was recently hosted by the county’s Division of Behavioral Health Services, which sought to educate the public on the dangers of the substance and show exactly how the drug has impacted the local community.
During the event, local authorities highlighted that methamphetamine was the drug of choice of almost 40 percent of the people who had been admitted to a Sacramento drug rehab center, received outpatient or residential addiction treatment services from 2016 to 2017.
But Sacramento does not escape the national epidemic and opioid abuse is also a problem in the region.
Heroin has been and continues to be widely abused, but synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have become more prominent in the last few years.
In 2016, there were 1,188,824 opioid prescriptions issued in Sacramento, according to the California Opioid Overdose Surveillance Dashboard.
Launched during the same year, the dashboard is a resource created by the California Department of Public Health as a part of its Prescription Drug Overdose Prevention Initiative in hopes to provide visually-enhanced data about opioid use in specific locations of the state and allow the public to be better informed.
More for addiction
According to reports published this month by the El Dorado County Health and Human Services Agency, health officials have been worried about the number of opioid overdoses in the entire state of California, but Sacramento County has been a specific concern because… (continue reading)
