CLEVELAND — The opioid crisis is a nationwide crisis that continues to impact communities across the country. Here in Ohio there has been a big effort to address the issue and find a solution. In Lorain County, a Quick Response Team (QRT) is on the ground and has helped overdose survivors with treatment and recovery.
A big part of Ashley Diederick’s recovery from addiction is the smile of her 2-year-old daughter.
“I had my daughter, and that’s when I went to recovery court and decided to change my life around,” she said.
Diederick has been sober for two and a half years and has recovered from an addiction to opioids. Her addiction started when she was only 12-years-old.
“When I was 12, my growth plate slipped out of place. I had a surgery to correct it. The surgery did not go well,” she said.
After multiple surgeries, by the time she was 15, she was on high doses of oxytocin and Percocet. Things got worse when the prescriptions abruptly came to an end.
“I withdrew and so I went to the streets, which eventually led to me going to heroin and other things, and unfortunately for me I was out in the streets for quite some time for 10 years,” she said.
Diederick said the hardest part was when she lost her son during pregnancy because of her addiction. She decided to turn her life around and getting the help she needs to avoid the same thing happening to her daughter.
Now Diederick has been is a peer recovery specialist with the quick response team in Lorain County. It’s a team made of up of overdose survivors, clinicians, and peer mentors that go right to the front doorsteps of survivors within 72 hours of their overdose, making sure they have the resources they need to begin detox and recovery.
“My biggest goal is to reach as many people as we can, let them know that they’re not alone and that we have these resources that can be life changing for them if they just give it an opportunity,” she said.
The involvement of the Lorain Police Department has been pivotal. Sergeant Andrew Greszler oversees the QRT team and even goes with Diederick to visit overdose survivors.
“Through my earlier years here especially I can’t tell you the number of times through the opioid epidemic that I’ve heard people later say hey, I want to get help, I need treatment, but I’ve called places 6 months, 12 months long, and obviously we know through experience and statistics that doesn’t work,” he said.
Numbers in Lorain County are so high that the police department was the first in the state to carry Narcan in 2013, saving over 350 lives while using it.
“Most officers here, I’m going to say all officers here have responded to an overdose, most of them have been to a fatal overdose and they’ve had to deal with that and see that and try to help the families from that, and I think after you’ve been to those you want to do everything you can to not have that happen again,” he said.
The Lorain County corners report shows 461 overdose cases in 2023, with a 117 of them being fatal. That’s why Diederick said her work at the lets get real recovery building in Lorain is meant to save lives.
“You can just go in and say I need help and we do that for you, and then transport you there, and say you do a 30-day treatment and want to go to sober living after, as long as you complete your 30 day treatment we will then come back, pick you back up and then transport you to sober living,” she said.