Battling the opioid epidemic
Faith, business leaders come together on communitywide initiative to tackle growing problem that kills tens of thousands of Americans
Central Florida business and faith leaders were recruited Tuesday to become part of a “new front line” in the battle against the deadly opioid epidemic — a scourge that killed over 46,000 Americans in 2017, or one person every 11.4 minutes.
“We cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma told some 350 business and faith leaders who gathered at First Presbyterian Church of Orlando, part a communitywide initiative dubbed Project Opioid.
“In Seminole [last year], if you take every single person who died of a motor vehicle crash or at the hands of a gun, self-inflicted or otherwise, there were more than twice as many that died of opioid-related overdose. Enough is enough,”
Lemma said.
Andrae Bailey, the project’s founder, appealed to the community leaders with a series of personal stories by those who have lost children to opioid overdose, often after years-long attempts at rehab and periodic but short-lived recovery.
“On behalf of all the grieving moms and dads … it’s very hard to survive that,” said Eliza Simmons, whose 27-year-old son, an aeronautical engineering student at the University of Central Florida, died of an opioid overdose in 2016. “But we ask you: Please do something.”
Attendees were offered access to a free online portal — still in development — that will provide detailed information on the best way to address addiction through employee-assistance programs, counseling at houses of worship and referrals to community partners. The session concluded with more than 90 of the leaders undergoing a training session to use naloxone — an opioid-blocking drug that can reverse an overdose within minutes. They were also given two free doses of naloxone to take with them.
“I hope we never have to use it,” said Christopher Caudle, pastor at New Covenant Anglican Church in Winter Springs. “But at least we have the knowledge.”
In the past year, Lemma said, drug dealers have begun mixing fentanyl — a synthetic opioid up to 100 times stronger than morphine — not only with other opioids but also with more “recreational” drugs, such as marijuana and cocaine, with sometimes fatal consequences. Fentanyl, which suppresses breathing, has led to an explosion in the number of Americans dying from opioid overdoses in the past five years.
Though Lemma said he doesn’t yet have the numbers to quantify the problem — because of a lag in determining and reporting the cause of death in all cases — his department was able to reverse 450 opioid overdoses last year by administering naloxone, now routinely carried by law enforcement. For the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, naloxone was administered roughly 2,300 times in the past year.
“Which means, quite literally, that we brought [those] people back to life,” Lemma said.
But naloxone itself was viewed as only a small part of the solution, the speakers said.
“There are people who … show up at an emergency room with an overdose, get stabilized, and then go out and do it again the same night,” said Pat Geraghty, president and CEO of Florida Blue, which has removed the powerful opioid OxyContin from the list of prescriptions it will cover because of the risk for addiction. “We see all around us a health-care system that is focused on sickness, on fixing people after they’re in crisis, [instead of ] focusing on keeping people healthy.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who attended the session alongside his wife, Casey, applauded the work of the initiative.
“What is going on here today we want to see obviously throughout the state,” he said. “It really says a lot about this community.”
Earlier this summer, Casey DeSantis launched a
mental health and substance abuse campaign called “Hope for Healing Florida,” to combine resources from chronically underfunded state agencies with privatesector partners to address the issues, particularly for youth.
In the coming month, Project Opioid plans to work with the business and faith leaders further to form an agenda for the upcoming legislative session.
“The goal today was just to get people involved,” said David Swanson, First Presbyterian’s senior pastor. “And we did that.”
“What is going on here today we want to see obviously throughout the state. It really says a lot about this community.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis