Dec 19, 2018 3 min read

Erie Times

It is not exactly a traditional holiday giveaway. Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration is stepping forward not with turkeys or toys, but with a sobering gift that could prove lifesaving.

From 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday at Blasco Library, 160 E. Front St., and dozens of other sites statewide – including Washington County Assistance Office, 167 N. Main St., Washington – officials will distribute free kits containing the opioid overdose-reversal drug naloxone. Thanks to efforts by Wolf and Health Secretary Rachel Levine, there has long been a standing order allowing anyone to receive the prescription medication at a pharmacy.

Thursday’s giveaway, believed to be one of the largest nationwide, comes free of charge. It is being funded from the $5 million budgeted to supply naloxone to the state’s first responders in 2017-18.

The event is a practical, immediate way to equip anyone to help others. It also serves as a high-profile reminder that this crisis, an ugly, preventable font of grief, dysfunction and crime, persists and requires unflagging, collective effort to defeat it.

Some believe naloxone access enables addiction. It also preserves life and hope for addiction recovery. Naloxone has been used statewide to revive more than 20,000 people since 2014. In Erie County, officials have credited its availability in part to the drop in overdose deaths so far in 2018.

Pennsylvania, where more than 5,400 people died of overdoses in 2017, ranks third in the nation in drug overdose deaths behind West Virginia and Ohio. It is also gaining recognition as a leader in its response to this epidemic, deploying under Wolf’s leadership cross-disciplinary, bipartisan strategies to attack the problem at the root: including harmful opioid prescribing practices and street-level drug trafficking; and by supporting cutting-edge treatment, such as medication-assisted treatment and the warm hand-off programs that aim to connect overdose victims with treatment resources in hospital emergency departments.

Wolf declared the opioid epidemic a statewide disaster in January and created a command center that continues to monitor opioid data, trends and strategies and devise and coordinate targeted responses. The state’s comprehensive approach has been mirrored on a local level.

There is cause for tentative hope. As reporter Madeleine O’Neill has detailed, Erie County’s drug overdose deaths, which reached a record-high 124 in 2017, appear to be on the decline. As of Oct. 25, Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook had tallied 71 overdose deaths, far below the 111 deaths seen at that time last year. Provisional numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that Pennsylvania is on track for a 20 percent decline in overdose deaths in 2018.

The state’s nimble, unflagging and, it seems, effective response deserves credit and also urging, especially since deaths by the synthetic painkiller fentanyl, more potent than heroin, still appear to be on the rise.