Expanding local anti-drug initiatives can bring results

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine served up some sage advice to about 1,200 police officers, faith leaders, drug counselors and others earlier this week at his second statewide conference on the ever-intensifying opioid epidemic.

He urged them to strengthen local anti-drug initiatives in every nook and cranny of the state. It is advice that all stakeholders in fighting the heroin and opiate plague in the Mahoning Valley should take to heart.

“The communities that are really making some progress in this area are communities that have come together – it’s really been a spontaneous grass-roots effect – to do things and bring everybody together: the business community, law-enforcement community, educators, service clubs and also the faith-based communities,” DeWine told them.

With no real signs of the deadly opiate scourge subsiding anytime soon, DeWine’s case to those on the front lines of the epidmic is compelling.

New data from the Ohio Department of Health show that one Ohioan now dies every three hours as a result of heroin or opiate abuse. And that rate is likely to accelerate. As the attorney general told the gathering, “I don’t think we’ve bottomed out of this opiate epidemic yet. We’re certainly not out of this, or we’re not even starting to come out of this.”

The reality of that grim assessment is evidenced in the constantly rising toll of fatal drug abuse deaths in the Valley and the state. That toll continues to climb higher in spite of an assortment of new state and federal programs and resources designed to at least crack at the edges of the epidemic.

While those resources are critically needed and while the war on heroin must continue to be waged by all levels of government, the value of a strong, cohesive and active public-private army of local foot soldiers cannot be overstated.

LOCAL COALITIONS IN ACTION

Signs of success from such coalitions already are evident. In Pickaway County, for example, Mollie Hedges leads a consortium of teachers, health care professionals, social workers and law enforcement leaders that collaborates on several valuable initiatives. It has published a pamphlet to help parents deal with drug issues and has reached out to incarcerated addicts before they return to the streets. “We are making progress,” Hedges said.

Similar progress has been achieved elsewhere in the state through such locally-organized campaigns that involve Job and Family Service representatives visiting jails to enroll inmates in anti-drug programs, deputies mentoring addicts, health inspectors delivering fliers to help residents identify signs of addiction, and drop-off programs to dispose of unneeded prescription drugs before they fall into the wrong hands.

Local parent-teacher organizations could take up the gauntlet as well by implementing ideas just released by the Ohio Joint Study Committee on Drug Use Prevention Education. For example, one of them calls for implementing before-school and after-school programs to keep young people occupied at times of the day when they would most likely be prey to illicit drug activity.

The benefits of such locally engineered programs could be bountiful. That’s why leaders in the Mahoning Valley’s efforts to tame the monstrous drug epidemic should accept and act on DeWine’s challenge.