Overdose
deaths in the U.S. soared to a record 93,000 last year during theCOVID-19
pandemic, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
News
12’s Doug Geed and his guests Steve Chassman and Linda Ventura spoke
specifically about the pandemic's impact on the opioid epidemic.
Chassman
is the executive director of the Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug
Dependence (LICADD). Ventura founded Thomas’ Hope Foundation, a treatment and
counseling center - after her son died from an overdose.
While
prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, they were
supplanted first by heroin and then by fentanyl, a dangerously powerful opioid,
in recent years. Fentanyl was developed to treat intense pain from ailments
like cancer but has increasingly been sold illicitly and mixed with other
drugs.
As
more people turned to drugs to ease their pain, Ventura says there was less
options available for treatment during the pandemic.
How
did LICADD deal with the pandemic and who is mostly to blame for these problems?
Is the
stigma that comes along with addiction fading?
What
is the main drug that results in the most overdoses and who is most at risk?