CRANBERRY TWP — The opioid epidemic is affecting people in every community in Butler County and attendees of a forum hosted by the county commissioners Thursday night got to see living proof.

The two-hour program held at Grace Community Church was the fifth such forum in recent months to educate the public about the problems the community is facing and what public officials, police and other organizations are doing about it.

Austin Mathews, 21, shared his firsthand experience with addiction.

Mathews is a Cranberry Township resident who graduated from Seneca Valley High School and Thursday said he was one day away from having been drug-free for eight months.

He said he believed he was predisposed to addiction and even showed addictive behavior with toys when he was a child.

“I was just a normal kid in a normal family. Addiction, I guess, ran in both sides of my parents' family tree,” he said.

He said he started drinking and smoking marijuana when he was in ninth grade and was using harder drugs daily by the time he was in 11th grade. He also dealt drugs during and after high school.

He graduated from high school and enrolled at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which he called “the worst four months of my life,” because he was constantly on a variety of drugs while there.

After multiple arrests and four different trips to rehab, he was able to get clean. One of the things that helped him, he said, was removing himself from the people, places and things that he was around when he was using drugs.

For the past five months, he has been telling his story to various groups like he did Thursday, which he said his sponsor encouraged him to do to spread his message and also to help keep him focused on staying off drugs.

“Life does go on and there are chances. I messed up like five times. If your kid doesn't get it the first time, don't give up. There are still chances. Without that tough love, especially from my dad here, I wouldn't be the man who I am today,” he told the crowd.

Samantha Goldberg, a social worker with VA Butler Healthcare's rehabilitation treatment program, shared a personal story about her brother's struggle with drugs. He died of an overdose in 2015.

She said one of the biggest challenges for families is to help and support drug addicts, but not to enable them.

She said that her brother at one point was in recovery at a three-quarter house in Pittsburgh, but was kicked out when he had a relapse and started using drugs again.

Despite wanting to help him, she feared that the familiar sights and smells of her house might trigger him to use again, so she did not let him stay with her that night.

“He called me begging to stay at my house and that was hard, that was really hard. Sometimes the healthiest decisions that we have to make are the hardest and worst,” she said.

Goldberg said she hopes that society can move forward from the stigma around discussing drug addiction.

“When nobody wants to talk about it, nobody is getting support,” she said.

Phil Mathews, Austin's father also shared this sentiment.

“Please don't be ashamed. This is an epidemic” he said. “The more we can talk about this, the more we can help each other.”

Ted Fessides with Cranberry Township EMS said the rescue service has had more than 20 overdose cases each year since 2013 and already has had 16, including one fatality, this year.

He noted there is a trend of having to use more doses of naloxone to revive an overdose patient.

“The drug is getting stronger,” he said.

Sgt. Chuck Mascellino with the Cranberry Township police added that Cranberry has even more overdose patients because some of them drive or get dropped off at UPMC Passavant Hospital's emergency room.

Affluent communities deal with the drug problem too, Mascellino said.

“We have kids that have vehicles and money to spend. That's the truth,” he said.

The biggest property crime in the township is retail theft and about 95 percent of retail theft cases are drug-related, he said.

Dr. Bryan Negroni, medical director of the Ellen O'Brien Gaiser Addiction Center, said that many opioid users start with prescription pills and work their way to heroin as their tolerance increases.

However, since the price of prescription drugs on the streets is increasing, many people are moving to heroin faster and the average age of overdose patients is decreasing, he said.

One problem is that overdose patients are often free to go after being revived with naloxone, instead of getting further treatment, being arrested or being served with a 302 warrant — an involuntary mental health examination.

He said he does believe there is a genetic component that makes some people more likely to become addicted to drugs.

“Everyone that has been there has a chemical change in the brain that makes them at risk of a relapse forever,” he said.