Chief Rodney Muterspaw
MIDDLETOWN, Ohio -- Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw took to Facebook Wednesday night to strike back at a Yahoo News special report claiming the Butler County city is under siege.
“Everyone I know is on heroin” reads the article’s headline, a claim Muterspaw called negative, brash and misleading.
“If you read the headline, you would think every morning, all of Middletown wakes up, grabs a needle, shoots up, walks outside and falls back asleep in a drug induced coma on the sidewalk,” Muterspaw wrote on the Middletown Division of Police Facebook page. “When the cold hard fact is most of our 48,000 citizens or so, 47,000 of them are not overdosing, not addicts and not involved in the game.”
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The Yahoo article details the journey of several recovering heroin addicts in Middletown who meet at Groups, a treatment center one man credits with saving his life.
Muterspaw argued that every city in Ohio has a heroin problem and that the article does not mention any of Middletown’s success stories — things like new businesses and families moving into town.
“The article is indeed factual in the sense that we do have a heroin problem. We do. It isn’t fake news, but there is so much more to this city than heroin. At what point do we all just give that a rest and move towards the positives?” Muterspaw asked. “Stay strong, Middletown. Ignore the noise.”
Read Muterspaw’s full note below.
For all of WCPO's coverage on the heroin crisis in the Tri-State and resources for addiction recovery, see WCPO.com/heroin.
