Ewert said he talked with a school psychologist, who said every Monday during the school year students show up needing treatment with heroin withdrawal.

“There is no way to arrest our way out of this problem,” he said, adding it will take all resources to combat the problem.

Ann Bates agreed. She works as a prevention specialist for Pepin County.

“Often times drugs will cycle around. They leave us and then come back,” Bates said.

There’s a reason for that. “(The drug users) haven’t seen repercussions with the use of that drug. So they don’t have that experience of what dependency to that drug looks like,” she said.

Plus, she said people don’t understand how quickly they become addicted to drugs such as heroin and methamphetamines.

Bates said when abusing prescription drugs stops working for addicts, they shift to heroin. But there’s a problem with that.

“You never know strength purity. There is no way of judging that,” she said.

There are other areas of concern.