Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 114, No. 159, Ed. 1 Monday, January 8, 2018 Page: 5 of 14
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5A
Denton Record-Chronicle
Monday, January 8, 2018
Families of addicts tout access to Narcan
From Page 1A
“Challengers can
make us stronger.
When you don’t
have an enemy to
focus on ... you tend
to get lax. ”
—John Dillard, Denton County
Republican Party chairman
Democrats
Simply put, death by opioid
overdose — whether prescrip-
tion painkiller or heroin — oc-
curs when the drug depresses
the user’s central nervous sys-
tem, blunting a person’s auto-
matic drive to breathe.
A dose of naloxone — most
practically delivered via a nasal
spray — can stop the elfects for
more than an hour by blocking
the opioid receptors in the brain,
resuscitating the user and pro-
viding the opportunity for any
further emergency treatment
that may be necessary.
Such an opportunity arrived
too late for 21-year-old Chris At-
wood. The Oak Hill, Virginia,
resident, a massage therapist
and animal rescuer who served
as his family’s comedian, inject-
ed himself with heroin in Febru-
ary 2013.
His older sister Ginny At-
wood Lovitt arrived at the home
they shared with their father
and found Chris facedown on
his bed in a pool of vomit. He
wasn’t breathing. Ginny could
only call 911 — and wait.
“I didn’t have naloxone with
me,” she says, adding that she
didn’t know much about it at the
time: None of the six treatment
facilities that her brother had
gone to had mentioned the
medication. “Now that I know
what it’s like to be in a situation
where I needed it and didn’t
have it, I don’t want anyone else
to know what that’s like.”
Stricken by her brother’s
death, Lovitt, 30, quit her job as
a legal assistant and co-founded
the Chris Atwood Foundation,
dedicated to providing recovery
support to people and families
facing addiction.
Overdose reversal
drug easily available
in most states
—
—
“We can’t rest on our laurels,”
said Neal Katz, executive director
of the Collin County Republican
Party. ‘We can’t automatically say
we will get x’ amount of the vote.
We have to work for it.”
Katz welcomes the challeng-
es from Democrats. In Collin
County, Republicans will face
Democratic candidates running
for county judge, three county
commissioner seats, district
clerk, county clerk and all four
justice of the peace precincts.
“What we have to do is be
united,” Katz said. “The office of
JP is just as important as the of-
fice of president.”
Local officeholders in these
counties often are chosen during
Republican primaries in March
because they have no opposition
in the November general elec-
tion. This year is expected to be
different, with Democratic can-
didates up and down the ballot.
This is believed to be the first
time in 24 years that a Democrat
has run for county clerk in Den-
ton County, said Phyllis Wolper,
Denton Coun-
ty Democratic
Party chair-
woman, who’s
also seeing a
record year for
candidates. In
Denton Coun-
ty, Democrats
are running
against Republicans for district
clerk, two county commissioner
seats and all six justice of the
peace precincts.
There’s even a primary con-
test among two candidates seek-
ing the Democratic nomination
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By Alexandra Rockey Flemin
The Washington Post
Beth Schmidt always begins
her opioid-awareness sessions
by introducing her boy. At one
such event, she motions toward
his photos — the solemn base-
ball-team picture, his sweet,
clean-cut middle school por-
trait, the cheek-to-cheek selfie of
mother and son — as she tells a
hushed audience of about a doz-
en how Sean fought and lost his
battle with opioid addiction.
“He actually overdosed right
here in Mount Airy at the Twin
Arch Shopping Center,” she says,
“in a parked car.” It was Decem-
ber 2013, two days after his 23rd
birthday.
His death catapulted
Schmidt, now 50, into a life she
couldn’t have envisioned during
her years as a “baseball mom,
room mother and field-trip
mom” to her three sons. A co-
founder of Maryland Heroin
Awareness Advocates, Schmidt
travels the state advocating for
opioid addiction prevention and
treatment, and explaining how
to use the overdose-reversal
drug naloxone. Too late for her
own son — but not for the loved
ones of others.
“Never in a million years did I
think I’d end up helping people
save their own children from dy-
ing by overdose,” she says. “But
as a grieving mom, I don’t want
anyone else to have to walk in
my shoes.”
The opioid epidemic contin-
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for county judge. Wolper called
that “extremely unusual.”
‘Challengers can
make us stronger’
Just being on the ballot isn’t
enough. It’s been more than a
decade since a Democrat has
held office at the Denton County
level, said John Dillard, the
county’s GOP chairman.
“Challengers can make us
stronger,” he said. “When you
don’t have an enemy to focus on
or a challenger to focus on, you
tend to get lax.”
Republicans often have more
experience in office at the county
level. And the Democrats step-
ping up to run don’t always have
as much name recognition. But
that’s changing.
“Just having an R after your
name and saying the word
Trump is not going to be enough
to get you elected,” Wolper said.
Dillard said he sees the real
test in the coming years from
nonpartisan races, like city
councils, school boards and
community college districts,
where Democrats are gaining
experience before seeking high-
er office.
“They’re heading for the low-
er-hanging fruit, and I think
that’s where they’ll be the most
successful if the voters aren’t in-
formed,” Dillard said.
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For most people with health insurance, the purchase of Nar-
can will be covered, according to Thom Duddy of ADAPT Phar-
ma, the maker of the spray.
the Network for Public Health
Law.
ues its deadly march, devastat-
ing families and decimating
communities at an astounding
rate. According to the Maryland
health department, there were
1,029 opioid-related deaths
from January through June
2017, compared with 873 for the
same period in 2016.
Naloxone is increasingly seen
as the first line of defense in an
opioid overdose. When admin-
istered within the first minutes
— even up to an hour or more —
of a potentially deadly overdose,
it can resuscitate a victim before
their fate is sealed.
Naloxone — also known by
its most common brand-name
version, Narcan — was once on-
ly in the purview of first re-
sponders. But enhancements in
law and policy are increasing ac-
cess to the drug, placing it more
easily into the hands of anyone
who wants it in a “remarkably
rapid progression,” according to
Corey Davis, deputy director of
Maryland and Virginia —
like Texas and most other states
— allow pharmacies to dispense
the drug to anyone who asks, no
prescription or training neces-
sary. In those states, walk into a
CVS, Rite Aid or other pharma-
cy, ask and receive.
To addiction-awareness ad-
vocates, such easy access signi-
fies lives reclaimed. It’s “not just
people in active addiction who
should have Narcan,” said Joe
Adams, the medical director of
an opioid-treatment program in
Baltimore. “It’s anybody with
teenagers or young adults in
their household
who’s prescribed or knows
someone who’s taking prescrip-
tion opiates. I’ve heard from
plenty of people who were glad
to have had it because they were
able to save someone’s life. And
I’ve heard from plenty of people
who wish they’d had it.”
"C' /
anybody
Wolper
To Miller, “the portrayal of
the president in the book is so
contrary to reality, to the experi-
ence of those who work with
him.”
includes a number of factual er-
rors and denying that the author
had as much access as he
claimed.
“He said he interviewed me
for three hours in the White
House. It didn’t exist, OK? It’s in
his imagination,” Trump said
Saturday.
Wolff told NBC on Sunday
that “I truly do not want to say
the president is a liar,” but that
he had indeed spoken with
Trump for about three hours
during and since the campaign.
Trump has repeatedly in-
voked Ronald Reagan, tweeting
Sunday that the former presi-
dent “had the same problem and
handled it well. So will I!”
Reagan died in 2004, at age
93, from pneumonia complicat-
ed by the Alzheimer’s disease
that had progressively clouded
his mind. At times when he was
president, Reagan seemed for-
getful and would lose his train of
thought while talking.
Doctors, however, said Alz-
heimer’s was not to blame, not-
ing the disease was diagnosed
years after he left office.
Reagan announced his diag-
nosis in a letter to the American
people in 1994, more than five
years after leaving the White
House.
to put up with a Fake Book, writ-
ten by a totally discredited au-
thor,” he tweeted.
Wolff’s book draws a deroga-
tory portrait of Trump as an un-
disciplined man-child who
didn’t actually want to win the
White House and who spends
his evenings eating cheeseburg-
ers in bed, watching television
and talking on the telephone to
old friends.
The book also quotes Ban-
non and other prominent advis-
ers as questioning the presi-
dent’s competence.
Chatter about Trump’s men-
tal fitness for office has intensi-
fied in recent months on cable
news shows and among Demo-
crats in Congress.
White House spokeswoman
Sarah Huckabee Sanders this
past week called such sugges-
tions “disgraceful and laugh-
able.”
From Page 1A
From Page 1A
Car wash
Trump
it isn’t windy, according to gen-
eral manager Richard Chancel-
lor, so the brushes don’t freeze
when they’re on.
‘We missed probably a
2,000- to 3,000-car week last
week, and now we’re probably
going to have an extra 50 to 60
cars a day” Chancellor said. “It
[closure] can double the busi-
ness that way. The weather helps
us and hurts us at the same time.”
Chancellor said that even
though there can be many clo-
sures, the car-washing business
has held true to him even during
recessions over the 27 years he
has worked at car washes. With
vehicles being people’s second-
biggest investment, they are al-
ways taking care of them, he said.
Surprisingly, the busiest time
for this car wash is the winter
months, when people don’t
want to wash their own cars in
the bone-shaking temperatures.
“A lot of people think we
aren’t busy in the summer, when
people want to wash their own
cars, but who wants to do that
when it is 35 degrees out? So
they leave it to us,” Chancellor
said. We thrive in the winter.
The amount of business after
January is normally double than
a May, June or July day.”
Clean & Green Car Wash off
Teasley Lane was also closed on
New Year’s Day and Tuesday
due to the below-freezing
weather, but has since seen a
boom in business.
“It’s been kind of too full,”
owner Josh Boschee said. We’ve
seen plenty of dirty cars since be-
ing reopened.”
A representative with Den-
ton-based Kelley’s Mobile Wash
said the mobile full-service de-
trash through and through.”
He also criticized Bannon,
who is quoted at length by Wolff,
saying it was “tragic and unfor-
tunate” that Bannon “would
make these grotesque com-
ments so out of touch with reali-
ty and obviously so vindictive.”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo
said Trump was “completely fit”
to lead the country, pausing be-
fore answering because, he said
on Fox News Sunday, it was
such “a ludicrous question.”
“These are from people who
just have not accepted the fact
that President Trump is the
United States president and I’m
sorry for them in that,” said
Pompeo, who gives Trump his
regular intelligence briefings.
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambas-
sador to the United Nations,
said that she is at the White
House once a week, and “no one
questions the stability of the
president.”
“I’m always amazed at the
lengths people will go to, to lie
for money and for power. This is
like taking it to a whole new low,”
she told ABC’s This Week.
Miller’s interview on CNN’s
State of the Union quickly grew
heated, with Miller criticizing
CNN’s coverage and moderator
Jake Tapper pressing Miller to
answer his questions and accus-
ing him of speaking to only one
viewer: Trump.
Tapper abruptly ended the
interview, saying: “I think I’ve
wasted enough of my viewers’
time.”
Soon after, Trump tweeted:
“Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN
just got destroyed in his inter-
view with Stephen Miller of the
Trump Administration. Watch
the hatred and unfairness of this
CNN flunky!”
Trump took to Twitter on
Saturday to defend his fitness for
office, insisting he is “like, really
smart” and, indeed, a “very sta-
ble genius.”
He pressed the case again on
Sunday as he prepared to depart
Camp David for the White
House.
tailing business also has seen an
influx of customers, and re-
mains booked with appoint-
ments for detailing and other
services until next Thursday.
Temperatures this week are
expected to remain above freez-
ing, but Texas weather always
continues to catch people off-
guard.
“If he was unfit, he probably
wouldn’t be sitting there and
wouldn’t have defeated the most
qualified group of candidates
the Republican Party has ever
seen,” she said, calling him “an
incredibly strong and good lead-
fudging the weather, it’s
risky. You don’t really know until
you wake up,” Chancellor said.
‘We try and be our own weath-
erman sometimes.”
“I’ve had to put up with the
Fake News from the first day I
announced that I would be run-
ning for President. Now I have
er.
Trump and some aides have
attacked Wolff’s credibility,
pointing to the fact that the book
From Page 1A
Budget
problem for the first time in two
decades,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-
N.C., a lead GOP immigration
negotiator, told Fox News Chan-
nel on Sunday.
But Sen. Bemie Sanders, I-
Vt., who voted against the tem-
porary spending plan in Decem-
ber, characterized the looming
shutdown as an opportunity for
Democrats ahead of the 2018
midterm elections.
“I believe that if we can in-
crease voter turnout by 5 per-
cent from 2014, Democrats will
regain the House and Senate.
But you cannot do that unless
ordinary people believe you are
fighting for them,” Sanders said
in an interview. “If it’s more tax
breaks for billionaires and huge
increases in military spending,
you have a lot of working people
and young people who will say:
‘It doesn’t make a difference.
Why should I be involved?”’
Republicans control Con-
gress but Democrats hold signif-
icant leverage over spending
talks. In the House, hard-liners
on the right have regularly voted
against recent spending bills, re-
quiring GOP leaders to rely on at
least some Democratic votes to
pass. In the Senate, spending
bills require at least 60 votes to
avoid procedural hurdles, and
Republicans only hold 51 seats.
Sen. Richard Durbin of Illi-
nois, a lead Democratic negotia-
tor on immigration, called
Trump’s detailed request “outra-
geous” and said he would con-
tinue working instead with Re-
publicans “who understand
what is at stake” in hopes of
striking a bipartisan deal.
Progressives such as Rep.
Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y.,
whose Harlem-area district is
home to more than 2,000 con-
stituents protected by the De-
ferred Action for Childhood Ar-
rivals program, known as DA-
CA, said he will continue voting
against GOP spending plans
that don’t include protections.
Over the holiday recess, he said
DACA “was the issue I heard
about the most when I’m walk-
ing in my district.”
“Every time it’s delayed, the
movement just gets stronger, the
outcry gets louder,” he added.
Progressive groups are plan-
ning to apply fresh pressure on
Democrats who voted to tempo-
rarily extend government fund-
ing in December without ad-
dressing DACA — a mix of mod-
erates facing re-election this
year in states Trump won in
2016 and others from states with
sizable populations of federal
government workers.
‘We are laser-focused on Jan.
As the fulcrum of the immi-
19 as a do-or-die moment,” said
Greisa Martinez, advocacy di-
rector for United We Dream, an
immigrant advocacy group or-
ganizing protests on Capitol Hill
against Republicans and Demo-
crats who have voted for previ-
ous GOP spending bills.
Although the situation facing
dreamers is “a crisis that was
created by Donald Trump,” Mar-
tinez said Democrats “are not
without power,” especially now
that Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala.,
has joined the caucus. “They
have a closer margin now, and
we expect them to meet their
public and private commitment
to us that they’ll use every lever-
age they have.”
Indivisible, the progressive
grass-roots network of citizen
groups, said it will focus its ef-
forts on six Democratic senators
from left-leaning states: Gary
Peters and Debbie Stabenow of
Michigan, Martin Heinrich and
Tom Udall of New Mexico and
Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of
Virginia. Kaine, Stabenow and
Udall face re-election this year.
“Democrats have done a poor
job of playing hardball,” said An-
gel Padilla, the group’s policy di-
rector. “They said for three
months they would use their le-
verage in December to get this
done, and that didn’t happen. In
order to have leverage, the other
side has to believe you’ll use that
leverage, and I don’t think that
[Republicans] think that
[Democrats] will use that lever-
tee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-
Va., is expected to unveil a bill as
soon as this week that would ad-
dress DACA in exchange for a
raft of conservative priorities on
immigration.
Goodlatte’s plan would grant
legal status to DACA recipients,
provide funding for a border
wall, end a visa lottery program
criticized by Trump, take action
against “sanctuary cities” that do
not cooperate with federal im-
migration enforcement and roll
back rules allowing legal immi-
grants to sponsor the entry of
certain family members. But
House Republican leaders do
not think the bill will be able to
gamer enough support to pass
by the deadline.
A spokeswoman for Goo-
dlatte declined to comment.
Bipartisan immigration talks
in the House have produced lit-
tle visible progress. A bipartisan
group of moderates, the Prob-
lem Solvers Caucus, created an
immigration task force that
formed the outlines of a deal,
said Rep. Mike Coffman, R-
Colo., one of the participants,
but the larger caucus wouldn’t
sign on.
“We’re not there right now,
and we’re going to start working
on it again when we come back,”
Coffman said.
gration talks has shifted deci-
sively toward the Senate, law-
makers on the hard right are
pressuring House Speaker Paul
Ryan, R-Wis., to be more asser-
tive. They are wary that House
members will get “jammed”
with a Senate bill that they will
have no choice but to pass main-
ly with Democratic votes.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-
N.C., chairman of the House
Freedom Caucus, said it was es-
sential that House Republicans
pass a stand-alone immigration
bill that promotes conservative
priorities in line with Trump’s
agenda.
age.
Spokesmen for the senators
said the lawmakers support
dreamers but had various rea-
sons for backing the last spend-
ing bill.
Udall said a government
shutdown “would be a disaster
for New Mexico” and the
45,000 residents who work for
the federal agencies and re-
search labs in his state.
A spokeswoman for Kaine,
whose state is home to hundreds
of thousands of federal employ-
ees, said he will keep pushing for
a solution for dreamers and
“he’ll evaluate a deal once he’s
seen it.”
Despite Trump’s renewed
calls for a border wall, Republi-
cans remain frayed over how to
move forward. Some moderates
are willing to either pass a bill
giving dreamers a path to citi-
zenship or craft a deal with
Democrats that would include
some border security measures.
But the bulk of the conservative
rank-and-file want more in ex-
change for accepting an immi-
gration policy that much of the
Republican base opposes.
“If the only thing you do is
wait for something the Senate
can pass, then what we might as
well do is have the House recess
for the next nine months,” he
said. Allowing Democrats to dic-
tate immigration policy at a time
of Republican control of Con-
gress and the White House is
“distasteful and certainly not in
keeping with what we promised
the American people.”
Amid a slate of partisan and
bipartisan proposals, another
conservative immigration plan
may emerge in the coming days.
According to a lawmaker and a
GOP aide familiar with the
plans, House Judiciary Commit-
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 114, No. 159, Ed. 1 Monday, January 8, 2018, newspaper, January 8, 2018; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1138328/m1/5/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .