Although the stunning increases in heroin-related deaths in Palm Beach County bore all the hallmarks of a public health emergency, community response remained muted. Much like AIDS in the 1980s, deaths were shrouded in secrecy and stigma.
Until The Post began its investigation, the dead were not even being counted: There was no local list of those who had died from heroin, illicit morphine and fentanyl – the trio of drugs at the heart of the heroin epidemic. The faces of the dead were almost never shown; their names never mentioned. It was an invisible epidemic. As long as the dead remained hidden from public view, reporters and editors concluded, the health emergency would not be aggressively addressed.
Further, traveling to small towns in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia hard-hit by heroin, Post reporters discovered other, smaller, poorer communities taking steps to curb heroin deaths that Palm Beach County was not even considering. And no lawmaker or state agency had shown interest in calculating the epidemic’s hard-dollar cost.
On Nov. 20, The Post gave over its front page to a single image: the photographs of 216 teenagers, men and women who had died of a heroin-related overdose in Palm Beach County in 2015. Online, The Post republished their photographs and wrote their 216 individual stories. In print, a 12-page special section explained why so many were dying, explored the science behind the disease of addiction and documented the government inaction that enabled the epidemic to continue unabated. On Dec. 18, The Post published an analysis of 58 million Florida hospital records, the first and only statewide hard-dollar cost of Florida’s heroin epidemic: $1.1 billion in heroin-related hospital charges in just nine months, more than $4 million a day.
The story poked holes in the widespread belief among state lawmakers that overdoses were a South Florida problem, or a problem confined to large urban hospitals. And The Post found that taxpayer-funded insurers, including the state’s perennially cash-strapped Medicaid program, were being billed hundreds of millions of dollars.