May 3, 2016 3 min read

Bipartisanship in Harrisburg is about as rare as a Bigfoot sighting, but Gov. Tom Wolf says he has found common ground with Republican colleagues on at least one issue – recognition that the heroin and opioid epidemic in Pennsylvania is at a crisis point, and the need to alleviate it is urgent.

To that end, Wolf has been hosting a series of roundtable discussions with state and local officials across Pennsylvania to discuss what they are seeing when it comes to the problem, and possible solutions that could be crafted into policy.

The roundtables have happened in Coatesville and Lancaster, and more are planned, though dates and locations are still being determined.

“No one is lecturing anybody,” Wolf explained in a lunchtime phone interview Tuesday. “There seems to be a broad recognition that this is a problem, and there is the political will to do something about it.”

Wolf’s 2016-17 budget proposal puts forward $34 million to treat more than 11,000 new individuals who are grappling with substance-abuse problems. The governor had proposed $5 million more for counties in the 2015-16 budget, which became law in March without his signature, but only $3.5 million ended up in the budget. Wolf is again asking for $5 million in the 2016-17 budget and, according to spokesman Jeffrey Sheridan, “We are confident we can work with both parties (in the Legislature) to provide much-needed funding in the 2016-17 budget to address this crisis.”

In October, Wolf signed an executive order making naloxone, the medicine that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, available over-the-counter at pharmacies across the commonwealth. It has also been made available to all first responders and schools. The Wolf administration has also pushed a drug take-back system that allows people to drop off unwanted prescription drugs in 400 boxes across the state, which the administration says yielded more than 40,000 pounds of prescription drugs last year.

As other public officials in both Pennsylvania and across the country have acknowledged, slapping handcuffs on addicts and incarcerating them has proven to be expensive and, for the most part, fruitless. Wolf said “we need to do a better job of distinguishing between dealers and addicts. We can’t arrest our way to a cure.”

The governor is also an advocate of a “warm handoff policy” where addicts who are treated in emergency rooms for overdoses can be immediately sent to treatment, rather than being told to wait until the next day or turned away because no beds are available. Wolf also hopes to add courses on substance abuse disorders to the required curricula of Pennsylvania medical schools and to establish of a syringe services program that would point addicts toward treatment and reduce the spread of disease.

However, when asked about a controversial plan in Ithaca, N.Y., that would allow heroin addicts to shoot up small amounts of the drug in a medically supervised space, like those that have been established in parts of Europe and Canada, Wolf had some misgivings.

“What I would love to see is people not being addicted to drugs,” he said.