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Professionals on the front lines of the national opioid epidemic met Friday at Hager Hall in Hagerstown to discuss tactics that are being used to prevent drug addicts from dying.
The attendees included health officials, police officers and Hagerstown City Councilwoman Emily Keller, who said before the event began that the problem isn’t getting any better.
Keller said 21 drug-related deaths and 138 overdoses have been reported in Washington County since Jan. 1.
“It’s a pretty scary statistic,” she said.
To help combat the problem, Keller said she recently teamed with Washington County Sheriff Douglas Mullendore and Victoria Sterling of the Washington County Heath Department to create Washington Goes Purple.
The initiative is modeled after a similar effort in Talbot County, Md., that was designed to teach children and their parents about the dangers of prescription opioids, which can lead to heroin use.
“We talk about alcohol and cigarettes — but not prescription pills,” Keller said. “Just because a doctor prescribes them doesn’t mean they’re safe.”
Keller said the organizers of Washington Goes Purple hope to visit local schools and start educating children by September. They also want to hold town halls to speak with parents about the issue.
She said the dates will be released when the group’s website and Facebook page go live.
Andrew Bell, syringe services program coordinator for the Maryland Department of Health, said during Friday’s presentation that the opioid crisis has been in a state of emergency for the past 13 months.
“It’s largely by the indicators getting worse,” he said.
Bell gave several examples of how the government is trying to make things safer for addicts by using a method called “harm reduction.”
He said the term was coined in the 1980s in Europe by people who wanted to create safe ways for addicts to use, including a needle distribution program that offered sterile syringes to combat the spread of HIV and hepatitis.
He said the program has been a success, despite pushback from critics who said it would promote drug use.
“Thirty years of evidence and research has demonstrated” that’s not true, he said.
Ronnie Varnell, a former special agent in-charge of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Diversion and Environmental Crimes Unit, said he was against the needle exchange program when he was a young police officer several decades ago.
“I was a typical law enforcement officer,” he said. “All you had to do was point me in a direction ... Our focus had always been enforcement.”
But as he got older, Varnell said he realized some of the approaches law enforcement commonly used didn’t solve the addiction problem.
He said North Carolina was able to reduce drug overdoses by passing a Good Samaritan Law, which gave people immunity from criminal prosecution if they called 911 to report an overdose.
Varnell said another successful idea involved equipping first responders with naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose.
“If it were up to me, we’d have free naloxone sitting in buckets on the street corners,” Varnell said.
Washington County Health Department officials said they would like to make the summit an annual event.
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