CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The University of Charleston School of Pharmacy and the Kanawha County Health Department hosted a harm reduction workshop Tuesday for those interested in opioid addiction and recovery.
The event had speakers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the county health department, and the Harm Reduction Coalition.
After some opening remarks by Dr. Michelle Easton, the dean of UC’s School of Pharmacy, experts in opiod addiction spoke on topics ranging from how to educate the general public to how to get law enforcement behind the idea of harm reduction.
Daniel Raymond, policy director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, said that there are often many misconceptions about needle exchange programs.
“In all my years of working at needle exchange programs, I have never seen someone come in who hasn’t been using drugs for a considerable amount of time,” he said. “The evidence bares this out, it doesn’t encourage drug use, it encourages people to start taking responsibility for their health and well being.”
Pharmacy interns, local volunteers and doctors were at the workshop to learn how to educate others on their benefit within a community.
Raymond said even though West Virginia has been one of the hardest hit areas when it comes to opioids, there has been progress made nationally that can be learned from.
“There is a lot of good stuff happening across the region,” he said. “A bunch of health departments across the state are starting up new programs and have new ideas on how to integrate recovery services. In North Carolina, they have a lot of great partnerships between harm reduction programs and law enforcement. So as we are seeing more and more of these programs in places similar to West Virginia, there are a lot of oppurtunities for mutual learning.”
Dr. Susan Sherman is a professor at tje Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She spoke alongside Raymond at the workshop, said it wasn’t hard to see the factors that caused West Virginia to fall into the opioid crisis.
“You take jobs out of a community, add the pain and shame associated with that, and then the market is flooded with pills,” Sherman said. “I think those things are kind of connected, but why drug use has taken off is a complicated subject.”
Sherman said opioid pills that have flooded the state are simply a gateway to heavier drugs like heroine and fentanyl.
“You are dependent on a prescription, and then you don’t have that prescription anymore,” Sherman said. “Pills are a lot more expensive than heroine so people switch their habit. It is a huge driving factor in new heroine users.
According to the West Virginia Health Statistics Center, at least 818 people in the state died of drug overdoses in 2016, a 13 percent increase over the 725 who died of overdoses in 2015. Eighty-six percent of those deaths in 2016 involved opioids.