New York Congressman Paul Tonko is highlighting Capital Region addiction support organizations during National Overdose Awareness Week.
Holding a roundtable in Albany Wednesday, the Democrat from the 20th District lamented the more than 100,000 yearly fatal overdoses across the country. He notes there’s a relationship between drug use, incarceration, and overdoses.
“The stats are very clear. There's a 129 times more likelihood that you will die within 15 days of having been released from incarceration from overdose,” Tonko said.
Under previous federal law, healthcare coverage for those on Medicaid, meant for people with low incomes, was terminated if they were incarcerated. Tonko says recently passed legislation changing it to suspension is progress, but still more needs to be done.
Rudy Fernandez is a housing director with Second Chance Opportunities, a support service center in Albany. Fernandez says, as a former heroin user, he knows the situation personally.
“My people have been dying since the beginning of time. This is not new. It's only been ‘new’ – and don’t take this personally- for the past 10, 15, years, since the judges’ daughters started dying,” Fernandez said.
He says, in addition to working for Second Chance, he’s a proud taxpayer, a remark that drew laughs at the roundtable.
“I always like to say that, and people laugh, but the true story is that I have 22 years of incarceration and 30 years under parole supervision, and I didn't pay taxes till I came into the process of recovery,” Fernandez said.
Tonko says society is still coming to the understanding that substance abuse is not a personal failing.
“You treat high blood pressure, you go to work, right? You treat addiction, you go to work. And I think it goes a long way to address stigma, to stamp out stigma. You know, these people I'm working with have the illness of addiction, and they're like I am. They're productive citizens. They come to work every day, and all that so good stuff,” Tonko said.
Stephanie Campbell, the former Executive Director of Friends of Recovery-New York, agrees.
“When we look at other epidemics, we look at COVID, we look at HIV, and when there's a public health approach that pulls in this intersectionality between prevention, treatment and recovery, and we get that message out to the public, then it becomes normalized,” Campbell said.
Campbell says the person she was 45 years ago who lived in bus stations and abandoned buildings wouldn’t believe where she is now.
“Somebody gave me the message of hope, and that's allowed me to have a life beyond anything I thought imaginable. It's allowed me to be a taxpayer as well. It's allowed me to go to college, be the first person my family to go to college and have multiple graduate degrees and raise two children never having seen their mother under the lash of active addiction,” Campbell said.
Morgan Thompson, the director of Friends of Recovery’s Youth Recovery Program, says the normalization of party culture in American society, especially among college students, is a pressing concern.
“You could lose an entire scholarship if you were found to have issues within your own dormitories, and I was a graduate from Saint Rose, and they're now closed, my alma mater, but before starting this position, I found out that they actually carried Narcan on campus,” Thompson said.
Thompson says prevention efforts have focused too much on traditional substances, like tobacco or marijuana.
“Talking about vaping use in young adolescents, right? That is an issue that is very difficult for middle and high schoolers, and for them, the use of tobacco is illegal, and so that is a whole separate conversation that parallels other substance uses for the entire recovery community, but through Instagram, through all these other mechanisms, it's a lot easier for them to access certain things,” Thompson said.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, 12.6 percent, or just under two million high schoolers self-reported currently using any tobacco product, in addition to 7.7 percent of middle schoolers. Among all middle and high schoolers, the same percent reported using e-cigarettes.
Campbell adds a wholesale drug use prevention campaign isn’t the best way to curb use, saying overdoses need to be reduced first. In her opinion, that can be done by providing clean needles and safe injection sites.
“Diabetes, we don't criminalize people who decide to have a jelly doughnut. We give them nutritional support, and we give them information, and we give them medications to support their-we give them insulin. All of these things are part of the package. But we can't say to people that decide that that sugar is not healthy for them, that they can't use sugar,” Campbell said.
International Overdose Awareness Day is Saturday.
