Dying by Detox - Heroin-Related Jail Deaths Raise Alarm With Advocates

However, Victoria "Tori" Herr sounded disoriented on a call home three days later.

"I just want something to drink. I want lemonade. They won't give me lemonade," she told her mother, who asked what was wrong. "I don't know, but I'm seeing people die. I'm going to die."

"I said, 'Well, maybe you're going through withdrawal,'" Moyer recalled last week, more than a year after Herr collapsed following days of severe vomiting and diarrhea at the Lebanon County Correctional Facility.

Herr, who had told intake officers she'd been using 10 bags of heroin a day, never regained consciousness and was taken off life support at a hospital five days later.

"This is a woman who died because she was detoxing," said Moyer's lawyer, Jonathan Feinberg, who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Monday in Philadelphia. "Had Tori Herr's withdrawal been treated ... she almost certainly would be alive today."

Her case is one of at least a half-dozen deaths nationwide involving jail heroin withdrawal during the last two years. Advocates fear the number will grow given the nation's heroin crisis. They find the deaths particularly troubling because opioid withdrawal, while miserable, is rarely life-threatening if medication, monitoring and, in severe cases, intravenous fluids are available.

"Obviously, this is an emerging, growing problem and it's hitting communities all over the country. That's exponentially so in jails," said civil rights lawyer Emma Freudenberger, a co-counsel on the lawsuit. She believes that jails have a fundamental duty to care for their inmates, but wonders if some lack concern for people struggling with addiction.

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