It feels like there’s a light shining in the darkness. The strain on communities, on first responders, on people who use drugs and their friends and families, on the grassroots harm reduction community, is palpable.Īnd yet, here they are on Christmas Day. What’s happening is unbelievable, unacceptable, beyond the pale - choose a descriptor knowing that no matter what hyperbole you muster, the bodies will keep piling up. A colleague wanted to check those numbers they just seemed high. More: Hope, struggle and harm reduction in 'This is Ohio'Ī month ago, I got an email from an editor concerning a story I’d written.
(Much of the drug supply has been contaminated by the synthetic opioid fentanyl, so some are labeling the overdose crisis a poisoning crisis, as well.) And here in Licking County, at least 37 people overdosed in 2021. Almost 5,200 people have overdosed in our state during the calendar year 2021. An estimated 100,000 people died from drug overdose in the United States from April 2020 to April 2021 - a 28.5 percent increase from the year before. I have no way of verifying this, but her sense of urgency during this crisis - that is verifiable. In about a month and a half, she said, she has reversed more than a dozen overdoses.
She’s been buying it from the pharmacy to hand out in her community and is glad to learn that the Outreach is giving it away. I’m talking with Trish Perry, who runs the Newark Homeless Outreach, when a woman wearing a long, puffy coat and pajama pants asks us where she can get some naloxone. The weather changes by the minute as the wind blows clouds that cover and reveal the sun. For about an hour now, volunteers have distributed food, clothing and harm reduction supplies to dozens of people, including 31 doses of the overdose reversal drug naloxone. It’s Christmas Day at the corner of Buena Vista and East Main streets in Newark, Ohio.