Town Hall Meeting to Provide Addiction and Opioid Crisis Update

Randy Hunt

State Representative Randy Hunt

SANDWICH – State Representative Randy Hunt is looking to update the community on the state’s addiction and opioid crisis and will host a town hall meeting Tuesday afternoon.

The Sandwich Republican is inviting the public, professionals and substance abuse coalitions to the meeting at Sandwich Town Hall at 3 p.m.

“It is intended for the public but also we are pushing for people who are very close to the issue of addiction, whether they are in social services or any kind of public service, to attend this meeting,” Hunt said. “We’ll have several speakers at the meeting and we will be talking about where we have come over the last few years, particularly, with respect to this heroin epidemic.”

Hunt said recent state legislation passed in March is having some positive short-term effects on the prescribing of opioids but that more needs to be done.

“The notice to our prescribing community about the dangers of prescribing opiate pills when there are alternatives has been noticed,” Hunt said. “There’s been a lot of training amongst prescribers and starting in medical schools and I think that part of our omnibus bill has had an effect already on the number of pills that are being prescribed to patients.”

Hunt believes more needs to be done on the prevention, education and early intervention front.

“Those are things that you do that have a generational effect,” he said. “If we can keep people who are young and who have not become part of the addicted community from taking that step then we’ll make a big step forward to ensuring that the next generation is going to be better off.”

He said people are calling for more treatment beds and medication assisted treatments right now.

“We’ll talk about those ideas and what we can do to bring more resources to the addiction problems that we are seeing,” Hunt said.

By BRIAN MERCHANT, CapeCod.com NewsCenter

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