In Wilmington, North Carolina, Robert Childs went to Home Depot to get supplies to board up the windows on his home before he fled the city for Atlanta in advance of Hurricane Florence.
“During the storm, everything gets disrupted,” said Childs, a drug policy consultant at the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition. “It’s about getting everyone to preplan as much as possible.”
The path of Hurricane Florence covers a region already beset with opioid addiction. North Carolina, in particular, saw a 22 percent increase in drug overdoses[1] between 2016 and 2017, with an expected death toll of 2,515, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s provisional estimates.
While preparation is crucial for everyone in the path of Hurricane Florence, which is expected to make landfall Friday, people with drug addiction have an additional set of considerations to plan for.
If they’re in treatment, they need to make sure they can get sufficient medication to last them through the storm, or they risk withdrawal and ultimately a potential relapse.
If they’re actively using drugs, extra supplies, like clean needles and the overdose reversal drug naloxone, can prevent overdoses and lower the risk of spreading infectious disease through sharing needles.
Studies done after previous[2]hurricanes[3] have found that people who used drugs shared needles during the storm and that some individuals undergoing addiction treatment relapsed to street drugs. Additionally, shelters in Florida reported drug overdoses during Hurricanes Matthew[4] and Irma[5].
“If you’re in withdrawal, you’re going to make a desperate call,” Childs said. “You may then turn to street drugs or be forced to go through a detox process that you didn’t want.”
As of Thursday, the National Hurricane Center predicted a “life-threatening storm surge[6]” along