Hochul must add funds for overdose prevention
In New York City, we lose someone to an accidental overdose death every four hours —and it’s completely preventable.
Report after report has shown that overdose deaths have only continued to rise, not just in the city but across the state. In New York City, we lost more individuals in 2021 to overdoses than in any other year since the city began tracking that data.
Deadly fentanyl is being used to supercharge other alreadydangerous substances, killing both recreational and habitual users here in New York and elsewhere around the country. It was detected in 80 percent of fatalities in 2021. The pandemic set many people back in their sobriety, making the rate of overdoses even higher. These two factors have resulted in losing more people to overdoses than homicide, suicide and car crashes combined.
This is a major crisis and there is a clear solution: significant new funding for treatment providers.
Unfortunately, in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s State of the State address and executive budget, there was no mention of additional resources for the health care professionals overwhelmed with patients at their treatment facilities. Instead, the focus was on arming communities with the tools to stem the tide of fentanyl overdoses, increasing funding for prevention and prosecution. Additional funding for prevention is a welcome investment — tools like Narcan and fentanyl test strips save lives, and there’s so much more we can do with community outreach to make sure people who need those tools have them. But this approach does nothing to ensure that those New Yorkers already in treatment, or desperately in need of treatment, can get the care they need to overcome addiction.
A recent study conducted by
ASAP — New York State Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Providers, representing more than 100 agencies across the state — found that 82 percent of respondents have seen an increase in demand for their services in the past 12 months. And 55 percent of respondents said the demand exceeded the organization’s capacity, with many agencies being severely short-staffed.
Along with increasing capacity and adding staff, we must do more to coordinate access to treatment between our hospital systems, our communitybased treatment providers, our school system and our criminal justice system — no one should be left out of this public health crisis. Eliminating barriers to treatment is crucial to saving lives.
Substance use treatment is by far the most effective approach to prevent the long-term disorders that cause the same people to relapse over and over, sometimes overdosing multiple times in their life. And although preventing overdoses is essential, winning the war against fentanyl and opioids should not be measured only in how many deaths we prevent. It should also be measured in how many lives we make whole.
We hope Hochul dedicates more funding to treatment, harm reduction methods and the workforce necessary to increase access to treatment. We must invest in providers so we can continue to offer the education, prevention and treatment necessary to address this crisis head-on and save lives.