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| Snohomish County (Wikipedia map) |
In 2017 leaders in Stanwood, a town of 7,000 in Snohomish County, declared the opioid epidemic a life-threatening emergency and are mobilizing resources as they would for a landslide or a flu outbreak. "Snohomish County is the first county in the country to treat it this way," Anna Boiko-Weyrauch reports for NPR.
Snohomish County Sheriff Ty Trenary, formerly the police chief of Stanwood, said he once thought heroin was a big city problem, but when he toured the local jail after his election he discovered about half the inmates were detoxing opioid users, Weyrauch reports.
"It took becoming the sheriff to see the impacts inside the jail with heroin abuse, to see the impacts in the community across the entire county for me to realize that we had to change a lot about what we were doing," Trenary told Weyrauch.
The decision to treat the opioid epidemic like a natural disaster was inspired by the government response to a 2014 landslide in nearby Oso that killed 43 people. Shari Ireton, then the director of communications for the sheriff's office, told Weyrauch it was "amazing" to see the coordinated response of people working together across government agencies to respond to the landslide, and thought it would be effective in tackling the opioid epidemic.
"Now, the response to the opioid epidemic is run out of a special emergency operations center, a lot like during the Oso landslide, where representatives from across local government meet every two weeks, including people in charge of everything from firetrucks to the dump. The technical name for this group is the Multi-Agency Coordination group, or MAC group. It comes straight out of FEMA's emergency response playbook," Weyrauch reports. "They talk through PowerPoint slides and rattle off numbers like 7.5 and 6.1, which refer to items on their to-do list. Seven big, overarching goals, which include reducing opioid misuse and reducing damage to the community, are broken down into manageable steps, like distributing needle cleanup kits and a project to train schoolteachers to recognize trauma and addiction."
Ireton, the spokesperson for the MAC group, said the county's approach works because it breaks down the problem into small, concrete steps like making transportation easier for people in drug treatment, or deploying police officers and social workers to help homeless campers access to housing and drug treatment. Though the teams have helped hundreds of people access housing and drug treatment, the opioid epidemic is far from over in Snohomish County, Weyrauch reports.
"Some of these goals are really long term . . . I mean they're going to take years, decades," Ireton told Weyrauch. But "by breaking it down, it's like eating an elephant. You just can eat one piece at a time. Breaking it down into a piece that you can actually digest."
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2qh8dDy Rural Wash. town fights the opioid epidemic by treating it like a natural disaster - Entrepreneur Generations
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