Through the bars of a Caldwell holding cell, a standout athlete rolled up his sleeves and pointed to the track marks running down both arms. The use of opiate pills following a sports injury had mutated into a heroin addiction, ten bags deep per day. Student Assistance Counselor Anthony Emering, then working at James Caldwell High School, tried to reach him. The next time Mr. Emering saw the 19-year-old, he was dead.
A Nationwide Crisis
Now, 16 years later, the opioid epidemic has finally gained national attention. On Oct. 26, President Trump declared the crisis a “public health emergency,” a label that expands access to telemedicine in rural areas and shifts some federal grants toward combating the crisis.
While opioid abuse is a nationwide affliction, the affluent, predominantly white suburbia of West Essex—and the veil of secrecy and silence that epitomizes the dialogue on drugs here and in places like this across the country—is prime real estate for what is likely the greatest drug outbreak in American history.
“If you call what’s happening nationally an epidemic, I don’t know what you call it in Essex County,” Mr. Emering said.
In 2014, statistics from the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that heroin deaths in New Jersey equated to more than three times the national average of 2.6 deaths per 100,000 citizens. In Essex County, that rate was 8.4 deaths per 100,000 citizens, with the highest concentration of deaths occurring in the suburbs surrounding cities such as Newark and Paterson.
Unlike the previous drug crises of the urban and minority classes, the torrent of opioid addiction has made its way to a new clientele: teenagers with cars, money and a burning desire to escape.
The Epidemic Hits Home
At West Essex, after use of ubiquitous substances such as marijuana and alcohol, opioid drugs such as heroin, morphine and oxycodone rank next in popularity among students who tested positive in district-initiated drug screenings from 2008 to 2014.
Opioids were first detected in student drug tests in 2010, and since then, the deaths of six West Essex alumni have been reported as heroin overdoses.
“That’s what haunts me,” Mr. Emering said. “If you’re leaving with an illness or addiction, the system hasn’t worked.”
West Essex, though not without failures along the way, has emerged from the epidemic minimally scathed considering its dire backdrop. The school’s sending districts are located just 10 miles from leading drug distribution hubs in Essex County, and major highways run directly through both Roseland and Fairfield. The area’s socioeconomic stature means students often have the budgets and independence to support expensive opioid habits.
West Essex’s relative success in containing the spread of the crisis within the district is likely the product of ironclad policy, Mr. Emering said, though he admitted chance could play a role.
“We’ve been lucky, but I like to think you make your own luck,” he said.
Mr. Emering described the school’s approach to dealing with substance abuse as “reasonable, articulate and fact-based.” The school digests data regarding everything from attendance and tardiness to academic performance and visits to the nurse, all with the hopes of pinpointing instances of addiction and intervening early.
The school’s aggressive approach, though often successful, has its critics. Parents and students have argued the school’s drug screening protocols violate everything from Fourth Amendment rights to HIPAA and FERPA regulations, federal laws that set standards for sharing student health information and educational records.
When implicated in substance abuse cases, students frequently take extreme measures to circumvent screenings. The district now employs a number of validity markers in its tests to detect the manipulation of urine samples.
Tracking drug use trends and adjusting screening protocols accordingly, Mr. Emering said, is the best way to ensure West Essex has the resources to shield its students from their state’s silent plague.
Always a Struggle
Pursuing those trends, however, can be complicated. Obstacles in obtaining accurate data and applying that information practically can often be a joint breakdown between numerous parties.
Figures provided to the school by the New Jersey Division of Addiction Services, for example, do not include those who sought treatment privately or out-of-state. The West Essex community’s access to these unmonitored facilities means statistics about use in affluent towns such as those serving the district are frequently underrepresentative.
Those statistical lapses can often impact district policy. In January 2015, Mr. Emering discontinued a chart that he used to track student drug use at West Essex meticulously for upwards of six years. Though he said the chart has “direct implications on guiding the scope and nature of the district’s drug testing protocol,” difficulties in obtaining accurate data from out-of-district schools, as well as hospital locations due to HIPAA regulations, made maintaining the chart increasingly complicated.
Appropriately responding to the crisis in spite of systemic failures is crucial to holding student opioid abuse at bay, Mr. Emering said, as is educating students about the social stigma of addiction.
“This is not a moral weakness that’s proliferating—it’s a brain that’s been hijacked by a chemical,” he said.
Principal Caesar Diliberto echoed that message, noting that the school’s interventions must be backed up by what happens in the classroom.
“We’re an educational institution, so we tend to take an educational approach,” Mr. Diliberto said. “We try to address it through curriculum, we bring speakers in, but we have all sorts of interventions if we actually suspect somebody might be falling into that sort of pattern.”
Mr. Emering, though proud of how West Essex has dealt with the proliferation of opioids, cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis. “It just keeps raging on,” he said. “There’s no glory in what we do here.”
