O'Malley discusses ways to fight opiate crisis. [View all]

Last edited Sun Dec 27, 2015, 04:44 PM - Edit history (1)

Candidate calls for 'continuum of care'

'O’Malley discussed what he would do as president to help states address the opiate abuse epidemic. He has put forth a plan for combating opiate addiction he says would cut by 25 percent the number of U.S. overdose deaths within five years.

“A first step would be to stop the overprescribing of these very potent pain medications,” he said, adding, “the FDA made a big mistake in greenlighting the prescribing of these very addictive medications.”

O’Malley said he would push for a federal investment of $12 billion to help states provide the “continuum of care” that many are lacking to keep people on a safe path after detox or hospitalization and prevent relapses. He also would create a national strategy on fentanyl – the synthetic opioid much more powerful than heroin and has claimed more lives than heroin this year – within 100 days of taking office, he said.

Pointing to his record as mayor in Baltimore, where he expanded drug treatment availability by 20 percent, O’Malley said, “I promised not only to improve policing, but to improve treatment and I’ll be damned some of these government programs don’t actually work … We saved a lot of lives.”

“We struggled a lot, frankly,” he added. “We switched our goal to reducing overdose deaths.”

O’Malley said the most important indicator of whether a person is at risk for overdosing is if they have presented themselves at an emergency room with a “near-miss” once. That point, O’Malley said, is where intervention needs to happen.

The federal government will need to help states build a continuum of care to provide addicts with a safe place for a short-term detox, and readily available 28-day residential programs, he said. He stressed the importance of recovery communities, like one recently proposed for downtown Portsmouth, and said he realizes the difficulties such centers can face with neighboring residents and zoning regulations.

“What works best is to get them paired up with a church or someone respected in the community … You have to pair those with your nonprofits that are there with representatives in the community so neighbors know who they can go to when there are problems,” he said.'>>>

http://www.seacoastonline.com/article/20151227/NEWS/151229428

Look for part two of this interview focusing on foreign policy in Tuesday’s Exeter News-Letter, the Portsmouth Herald and on Seacoastonline.com.