Did You Know?

Montgomery County saw a 40 percent increase in drugrelated deaths from 2015-2017

Nowadays it is hard to find anyone who does not know someone affected by the opioid epidemic. Montgomery County has not been spared from what has become a nationwide fight against opioid-based drug addiction.

drug-related injuries from 2002 to 2018. The county made the information public to allow solutions to be implemented and tested in the field as quickly as possible.

Other county efforts include regular public awareness events to educate people about opioids and instruct them on how to use naloxone (a drug overdose reversal drug) — a big part of the county’s response to the problem. Naloxone has also been supplied to emergency medical technicians, law enforcement officers, and has been advocated to public schools and college campuses for trained personnel.

According to county communications director John Corcoran, “In 2017, police alone administered naloxone 367 times, resulting in 97% reversals.” There is also a “drug take-back” initiative to collect unused medications that are vulnerable to abuse, such as oxycodone or hydrocodone, and a “warm hand off program” to smoothly transition overdose survivors from medical care to drug abuse treatment.

But even with all these innovations, Narcotics Anonymous has remained a central part of the response to long-term recovery in the addiction community.

A proposal for a fellowship dedicated to drug addiction was proposed by a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, in 1944. In the following years, drug programs similar to Alcoholics Anonymous began to appear in the United States.

Narcotics Anonymous was founded in 1953 by a man named Jimmy Kinnon, or Jimmy K, as he was known because of the program’s anonymity principle. Today, according to Narcotics Anonymous World Services, over 70,000 meetings are held weekly in 144 countries. Five of these are hosted here in Montgomery County.

According to a study published in BioMed Central in 2019 on Narcotics Anonymous treatment outcomes, “being a member of NA, accepting oneself as an ill person, and receiving support from sympathizers (other treated members of NA) … lead to a change in the individuals attitude and self knowledge.”

While some believe in Narcotics Anonymous’s power to heal, others are skeptical about whether 12Step programs are effective at all. The program does not require members to be affiliated with a specific religion, but does ask that you “surrender yourself to a higher power” (Step Two: ‘We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’), which may not align with the beliefs of all those seeking treatment. These faith-based ideas can view the disease of addiction as a failing of your soul or morality, rather than a disease of the brain.

It’s hard to say how many people Narcotics Anonymous helps, or with what rate of success, because the movement of members in and out of programs and anonymity of participants makes rigorous study difficult. However, personal accounts from those who have participated in the program demonstrate that it can work.

Ben Mosakowski, a former addict who now works in the Philadelphia addiction treatment community, has stated that Narcotics Anonymous was “the only thing that was ever successful [in getting me] to recognize that I had a problem and to identify with others, and really find a template for living.”

*Names of private citizens have been to protect their privacy