‘A lessening of the worsening’

Survey: More in N.Y. touched by opioids as support for help increases

The number of New Yorkers who report being affected by opioid abuse has grown in the last two years, with 59 percent reporting that they or someone they know has abused opioids and 29 percent reporting they know someone who has died of an opioid overdose, a new Siena College Research Institute poll shows.

Those figures are up 5 percentage points each since the poll was first taken in 2018, from 54 percent and 24 percent, respectively. However, a shrinking majority of New Yorkers believe the opioid crisis is getting worse: 65 percent say the problem of opioid abuse has gotten worse over the past two years, down from 83 percent in 2018.

“There’s a sense that it’s still an incredibly serious and demanding problem, but there’s a lessening of the worsening,” said Don Levy, director of the institute. “I don’t like to put those two words together, but that’s the best way to describe it. The degree to which the problem is worsening is slowing.”

A big caveat about the data: Siena surveyed New Yorkers on the opioid epidemic just as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning to impact New York.

More than 1,370 people took the online poll from March 3 to 21. Since then, counties across the state

and Capital Region have reported a significant increase in opioid and drug overdoses — a problem that public health experts believe is linked to the pandemic and the stress, isolation and upheaval it has caused.

Still, the survey reveals the public’s shifting attitudes toward the opioid crisis, their beliefs about who’s to blame and who should be held accountable, and their support for solutions that have been proposed.

It also showed that opioids weren’t the only public health issue on people’s minds prior to the pandemic. Concern about e-cigarette use and vaping rose a whopping 20 percentage points from 2018 to 2020, with 85 percent of New Yorkers now reporting such use as “very or somewhat” serious.

Concern for marijuana use rose from 52 percent to 56 percent. While the latter may reflect increased legalization talk in recent years, both attitude shifts follow last summer’s outbreak of vaping illness, which largely impacted those who had used Thccontaining vapes from the black market and other informal sources.

Doctors have ‘gotten the message’

A majority of New Yorkers say awareness of the opioid crisis has grown and believe institutions are working collaboratively to solve it, the Siena poll found. They say doctors and pharmacies are behaving more responsibly when it comes to filling opioid prescriptions and warning of the risks associated with them.

Nearly seven in 10 New Yorkers said doctors have become more careful in the past two years about prescribing opioids. Of the 29 percent who said they were prescribed opioids in the past two years (this is up from 25 percent in 2018), 76 percent said they feel they were prescribed the right amount compared with 70 percent who said that in 2018. Only 19 percent said they were given too many opioids by a doctor, down from 23 percent.

Additionally, New Yorkers say doctors and pharmacies are talking more about the risks associated with opioids. Of those who were prescribed opioids in the past two years, 64 percent said their doctor talked about risks and 61 percent said their pharmacist talked about risks, up from 51 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

“The data points to doctors having, in effect, gotten the message,” Levy said. “There’s a sense that doctors are not prescribing to the degree that they were, that there’s more of a tendency to prescribe the right amount of pills, and that there’s far more effort being made when they prescribe to say,

‘here are the risks.’ Those are all, I think, real positives.”

More seek treatment, but barriers remain

Survey responses suggest that more people may be pursuing treatment for opioid addiction and that, when they do, they’re finding it easier to access.

Twenty-three percent of respondents said they, a family member or close friend has pursued treatment for opioid addiction in the past two years, up from 18 percent two years earlier.

“The stigma, maybe, is lessening a bit,” Levy said of the increase.

There is also a growing perception that treatment is easier to access: 48 percent of respondents said they believe it is “very” or “somewhat” easy to access treatment in their area, up from 40 percent in 2018.

However, respondents also recognized that barriers to treatment exist: 48 percent of surveytakers said that insurance refusing to cover the cost of adequate treatment is a barrier they have heard of in their area. Other barriers respondents reported hearing of include: treatment programs not working with individuals for a long enough period (42 percent), poor follow-up after a patient completes a treatment program (42 percent), and insufficient space in treatment facilities (31 percent).

Support for once-controversial, evidence-based treatment modalities also appears to be growing: 68 percent of survey-takers said they would support improving access to medications like methadone and buprenorphine, which have been shown to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms. That’s up from 60 percent in 2018. More people also support syringe exchange programs (63 percent, up from 59 percent in 2018).

More striking was the 7-point increase (41 to 48 percent) in people who say they would support funding for supervised injection sites. The sites — which allow people to use illicit drugs under trained, hygienic supervision — have reduced fatal overdoses and infectious disease spread in Canada, Europe and Australia but remain controversial.

A number of them have been proposed in the

U.S., including in New

York City, but have been either outright blocked or stalled from moving forward. Leaders of progressive cities and states, such as New York, have said they support the sites but claim they fear legal retaliation by the Trump administration, which has threatened to shut them down. A judge in Philadelphia last year ruled that the sites, which would operate as pilot programs, do not violate federal drug laws.

According to the Siena poll, support for the proposal in New York comes largely from Democrats, Levy said. The idea remains unpopular among Republicans and Independents, he said.

“New York is always so interesting in terms of, you know, where do the moderates, where do the independents fall on that type of issue, and at present they’re not on board,” he said. “So this is one of those issues where moderates look more like Republicans than they look like Democrats.”

The Siena poll was commissioned by Prescription for Progress

— a Capital Region-based coalition of leaders in health care, business, government, media and law enforcement working to combat the opioid epidemic locally and statewide.