Gabriel grew up in a nice home. But his father, a single parent, was a heroin addict, and Gabriel got into a lot of trouble. A curious kid, he would wander into strangers’ houses on the Westside. By age 13, he was shooting up. Today, the 48-year-old, who has been clean since last December, has a plaque on his wall of the 40 or so people he knows who died from an overdose.
That painful reality has gotten worse in recent years in Santa Barbara County. In 2015, the number of drug- and alcohol-related deaths reached 75 — including 24 suicides — a 21 percent increase from 2014. This year, Santa Barbara is on track to match 2015’s figures, with 29 confirmed overdose deaths through June, plus a handful of cases still pending coroner’s reports.
Fueled by the mass marketing of OxyContin beginning in 1995, the U.S. has become obsessed with the idea of pain and a pain-free existence, said John Doyel, the county’s alcohol and drug expert. For decades, doctors were undertreating pain, but in the past 15 or so years, the pendulum has swung the other way, and opioids started to be overprescribed. That trend, coupled with the rising prices of these pills and the availability of cheap heroin out of Mexico, created the country’s heroin epidemic.