SAFE Glen Cove Coalition Monitoring the Nation's Opioid Crisis

The SAFE Glen Cove Coalition is conducting a opioid prevention awareness campaign entitled "Keeping Glen Cove SAFE" to educate and update the community regarding opioid use and its consequences.

According the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), every day, more than 115 Americans die after overdosing on opioids. The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total "economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.

NIDA maintains that the current crisis is attributed to the behaviors of pharmaceutical companies in the 1990's who reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. This subsequently led to widespread diversion and misuse of these medications before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive. Opioid overdose rates began to increase. In 2015, more than 33,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. That same year, an estimated 2 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 591,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder (not mutually exclusive).

In response to the opioid crisis, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is focusing its efforts on five priority areas: improving access to treatment and recovery services; promoting use of overdose-reversing drugs; strengthening our understanding of the epidemic through better public health surveillance; providing support for cutting-edge research on pain and addiction and advancing better practices for pain management.

The Coalition, composed of twelve sectors of the community which are: youth, youth serving organizations, parents, business community, media, school, law enforcement, faith based organizations, civic and volunteer groups, healthcare professionals, state, county and local governmental agencies and other organizations with expertise in substance abuse will continue to monitor and educate the community about this serious crisis.

For more information about the SAFE Glen Cove Coalition visit SAFE Inc. at: www.safeglencove.org, or follow on: www.facebook.com/safeglencovecoalition