I read with interest about the amount of opioid-related dollars coming to Harvard in the paper recently. I, too, was shocked about the amount, based on the number of opioid deaths we have in our community, and as someone who does substance use disorder work for a living, I am saddened to see the unequal distributions.
I work in the city of Worcester where we have over 100 overdose deaths annually, and we can use every dollar we can get. But rather than focus on who gets what, since we have the money we should use it wisely. In my mind, one of the best ways to address opioid overdose deaths is obviously to prevent them in the first place.
We could use our money to do much more education in our schools and in our community. The education needs to be engaging, practical, and get to the heart of the issue. So often we think people who use opioids are different from us and label them drug addicts. Nothing could be further from the truth. I listen to personal stories every day of people who had a house, a nice car, a good family, and then things went south. I’m not going to go so far as to say it could happen to any one of us, but it can happen to a lot of us.
We should educate through real stories, and then address what those stories have in common: mental health issues, chronic pain, family disruption, LGBTQ+ bias, and more. We could share our educational opportunities with surrounding towns in an effort to share money with others. We could use funds to address these causes by putting more money into local mental health services. We could have more Narcan (an opioid reversal agent) distribution in our communities to people who have chronic pain and use opioids at home. We also could just make Narcan more available so that one has it like the knowledge of how to do CPR in case they happen across someone who has had an opioid overdose in or outside our town. We should embrace this opportunity to save lives.
Hugh Silk
Oak Hill Road
