Ocean City Today
PAGE 16
AUGUST 12, 2016
State data shows 180 percent spike in ODs County raising awareness with campaign to combat uptick in opioid, heroin use
By Josh Davis Associate Editor (Aug. 12, 2016) More than 7 percent of 12th graders in Worcester County have used heroin at least once, according to a recent Maryland Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Opioid and especially heroin abuse appears to be on the rise locally, as evidenced by the most recent data from the Maryland Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. According to a quarterly report on overdose deaths released in June, heroin-related deaths in the state have increased more than 180 percent during the last decade. In 2007, 77 deaths were attributed
to heroin use between January and March. Last year, that number was 190. This year, for the first time, more than 200 people have died in the state during the first three months of the year because of heroin use. To combat that growing trend, the Worcester County Drug and Alcohol Council, a program of the county health department, formed an Opioid Awareness Task Force along with a campaign launched last year, dubbed “Decisions Matter.” “Last year when the governor set up his opioid task force to address the opioid addiction epidemic, all the county health departments got to work with their own local communities to develop their own awareness campaigns around that issue,” Worcester County Health Department Prevention Director Kat Gunby said.
Those campaigns, she said, focused on treating addiction and preventing overdoses. Locally, the task force included workers at the health department, along with State’s Attorney Beau Oglesby and members of the Drug and Alcohol Council. “The Decisions Matter campaign is an awareness campaign about the importance of making wise decisions in order to prevent opioid misuse and abuse, and taking actions such as securing your medications [like] prescription painkillers so that unintended people don’t get access to them and start using them or abusing them, and to create and awareness that misuse can lead to addiction to opioids.” A year into the campaign, Gunby said organizers are hoping to “breath some new life” into the prevention movement by starting another pro-
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