County News

Taking on substance abuse

County legislator, NCPD help raise awareness

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Nassau County Legislator Laura Curran (D-Baldwin) hosted a Substance Abuse Education Awareness Community Seminar at the Merrick Library on July 28. Curran, who had hosted two previous seminars with NCPD Community Affairs detective Pamela Stark in Rockville Centre and Oceanside, partnered with the Nassau County Police Department and the Rockville Centre Coalition for Youth, and reached out to local communities, including Baldwin, to share information on opioid abuse and the heroin epidemic.

“One of the fronts in the war against addiction is awareness,” Curran said at the beginning of the session. “Law enforcement can do a lot, but I think people can do a lot to raise the awareness.”

Stark, who has worked in Community Affairs since 2009, said that opioids are substances commonly used to relieve pain and come in many different forms, including heroin, hydrocodone (Vicodin), oxycodone (OxyContin), oxymorphone (Opana) and hydromorphone (Dilaudid). Most of them can be found in people’s medicine cabinets.

According to Stark, the repercussions of abusing these drugs can go beyond physical and mental problems. There are also financial implications, as addicts have been known to spend thousands of dollars a month just to feed their addiction. Stark urged her audience to share this information with family and friends.

“You need to know how to strengthen yourself and talk to your children, how to talk to your family members and, number one, you have to talk to your seniors,” she said.

The increase in prescription drug use over the past few decades, Stark said, has contributed to the upswing in addiction to opioids. She pointed to societal changes in treating pain or injuries as a direct correlation to the epidemic.

“Back then, you didn’t always constantly run to get medicated,” she said. “It wasn’t in our thought process. Now it has become a way of life for us to constantly go to the doctor.” She went on to say that the increased dependency on opioids began when pharmaceutical companies told doctors that the drugs were non-habit-forming and non-addictive.

Stark also said that the heroin epidemic extends to states like Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and that on Long Island, treatment is readily available.

“We have great resources in Nassau County,” she said. “You can call Jim Dolan, who’s in the Department of Mental Health, and there’s so many avenues and so many different people in our county.”

At a number of forums in Nassau County, Stark has discussed the dangers of taking opioids and how they can lead to lifelong addictions. She has spoken not only at meetings of community groups and task forces, but at schools, fire departments and houses of worship.

Merrick resident Lisa Mineo said she never realized how extensively the NCPD works with local communities on drug awareness through seminars. “I think there’s a lot more educational information in the community than I thought, which is interesting, because I’m a marriage and family therapist,” Mineo said. “I work for the Family & Children’s Association, and I didn’t know there were so many resources. I didn’t know about all these presentations that were happening, so that was surprising.”

Mineo said she hoped there would be a larger turnout in the future for seminars like this.

Curran and Stark both said they believe the fight against substance abuse in Nassau County starts with the residents of each community, and that now that they have more information about the epidemic, now is the time to put that knowledge to good use.