Coalition for a Brighter Greene to hold another town hall on heroin
WAYNESBURG – Hundreds are expected to pack Greene County Courthouse Thursday night for a town hall meeting that’s been a year in the making.
Coalition for a Brighter Greene, which formed at a town hall meeting last October, will hold another town hall this week to discuss collaboration and treatment efforts in dealing with the heroin and opioid epidemic.
Jonathan Johnson, treasurer for the coalition, is a clinical social worker with a private practice in Greene County. He said the town hall, which is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, will focus on things the coalition will work on over the next year to continue moving Greene County toward becoming a drug-free community.
“What I hear a lot of is the hopelessness and despair that sets in when addiction becomes so prevalent in the community,” he said. “If we come together, we can affect real change, and it starts with hope.”
Johnson said over the past year, the coalition has been focusing on drug awareness and prevention efforts. It organized an awareness march down Route 21 near Waynesburg in May and a countywide showing of “Appalachian Dawn,” a movie about a Kentucky town that struggled with drugs, and it implemented a new anti-drug curriculum for each of the five school districts in the county.
This year, he said the focus of the group will be community partnerships with law enforcement, health care organizations and treatment providers.
“The question is how do we provide evidence-based approaches when it comes to re-entry into society?” he said. “How do we give people opportunities to be successful and how do we give people treatment instead of just putting them in jail?”
He said the coalition is trying to figure out where the gaps in treatment are for residents fighting addiction and “what practical treatment options can we bring to the community.”
Christine Gardner, court assistant for community prevention and education, said the coalition will work to establish a Greene County substance abuse help line for people to call when they are looking for recovery options or recovery support. She said the line would be staffed with trained volunteers from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Another step the group wants to take is developing “Greene Zones,” or neighborhood crime watch groups, which will be made up of community volunteers who will help stem crime in Nemacolin, Crucible, Rices Landing, Bobtown, Clarksville and the West Greene grange area, Gardner said.
She also said the coalition is trying to organize neonatal training because “we’ve had an increase in babies being born addicted to opiates.”
Officials expect the town hall to be well-attended since it was standing room only at the first meeting held a year ago.
“That was a mark in time when we as a community said, ‘We’re going to come together,'” Johnson said. “The coalition has taken that and run with it.”
With all it accomplished in a year, Gardner said it’s too early to tell if the coalition’s efforts have made a direct impact on the number of overdoses or heroin users in the county.
According to a Drug Enforcement Administration report released in July, Greene County’s fatal drug overdoses skyrocketed last year, putting the county at number five in the state per population size. In 2015, the county had 14 drug overdose deaths, jumping from nine in 2014.
“We won’t know if we’ve had a big impact until the numbers come out early next year,” she said. “But we’ve had a tremendous response to the awareness efforts. We hope that the message this year is that people do recover.”