Middlesex DA looking to consolidate opioid efforts
Ryan: Hodgepodge of responses confusing
A research project in Middlesex County will add up the costs of opioid abuse and examine how institutions from elementary schools to police departments and county morgues can better address the crisis.
Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan said her office is working with the American Institutes for Research to study the opioid crisis and plan ways to streamline how public and private groups respond.
Ryan said the reaction to the opioid crisis has become a hodgepodge of disconnected efforts using different clinical terminology — a confusing muddle of wellintentioned prevention and treatment programs that is too complicated for addicts.
“Addiction is a disease of disorganization,” Ryan said, explaining how addicts’ focus on their next hit crowds out their family, job and other priorities.
“To take a person in that state of disorganization and to expect they are going to be able to navigate a variety of systems … when those systems aren’t connecting or talking to each other or even speaking the same language, is to set a task that even many people who are here today — who may have the benefits of education, maybe have the benefits of sobriety, who may have the benefits of English as their first language — would find impossible,” Ryan said.
The study is being funded in part by a $25,000 state grant Ryan said was secured by state Sen. Jamie Eldridge.
Jennifer Loeffler-Cobia of the American Institutes for Research said the opioid response needs to be informed by local data that can help “health, justice and social service systems to work on an integrated approach.”
Gov. Charlie Baker this week introduced a second major opioid bill to address the scourge that killed more than 2,000 people last year — with 12 percent of those deaths in Middlesex County.
Ryan said through all the research and data on opioid addiction the people in her office haven’t forgotten its human toll.
“We have never lost sight of the fact that every one of those numbers, every dot on a map, every mark on a graph is somebody’s son or daughter,” Ryan said, “and increasingly for us somebody’s mom or dad.”