Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Tim Murray called underage prescription drug and alcohol abuse an “epidemic” that youth and officials must collaborate to fix on a grassroots level while holding a series of meetings.
These 50 town hall meetings, he said, will aim to reach out to community members and share stories of substance abuse with the objective of prevention.
About 70 people gathered at the Great Hall in the Massachusetts State House Tuesday afternoon to hear Murray, along with other officials, speak on solutions for youth alcohol and prescription drug abuse.
Murray told the audience the goal of the meetings is to not just hear about statistics on drug and alcohol abuse, although they are powerful, but to see a face and hear a first-account story.
“We want to help those who are battling prescription drug abuse,” he said. “When you hear these young people, they tell you, if it weren’t for these programs, they’d be dead – and that’s chilling to hear from a teenager.”
It is challenging to always reach those who need treatment, he said.
Murray said that in 2010 one in four people using prescription drugs for the first time began to abuse them after prescriptions were no longer in effect. He said 71 percent of these people continued to obtain the drugs from friends and relatives.
The law itself, he said, is not the only way to diminish illegal substance abuse.
“We all need to be doing things – taking actions and teaching others,” he said.
Murray said drug abuse is not solely a court or civil justice problem that requires punishment, but “first and foremost” a public health issue.
Commissioner John Auerbach, of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, told audience members that officials need to work with youth to solve substance abuse on a grassroots level.
“There’s no health issue that’s more serious than dealing with the substance abuse issue,” he said.
He said drugs are so dangerous for young people because the majority of homicides are committed under the influence of an illegal substance.
Overdoses that occur with young adults result from inexpensive substances such as OxyContin and pure forms of heroin, he said. A decade ago, Auerbach said, the cost of heroin was cheaper than a six-pack of beer.
He said this led to an increase in overdoses and was a gateway for abuse of prescription opiates, or painkillers.
Policymakers, he said, did what they could to effect stricter law enforcement upon potential drug abusers, but officials could only do so much.
“A lot of what needed to happen needed to happen in their neighborhoods,” Auerbach said.
This includes writing letters to newspapers, doing more to interrupt illegal purchasing of alcohol by adults for minors and reaching out to pharmacies and clinics about awareness of drug abuse.
He said officials conducted an annual survey on public high school students for more than 10 years. After a decade, illegal drug and alcohol consumption dropped from 75 to 68 percent among young adults.
“That’s encouraging,” he said. “We want to see that actions make a difference.”
Auerbach said he is optimistic that officials and youth will continue to make progress against the war on drugs.
Sen. John Keenan, of Quincy, said before the crowd that town hall meetings in each Bay State community will help highlight the issue of underage drinking even more.
“This is not an inner-city problem anymore,” he said. “It’s on every street of every neighborhood in every community across the Commonwealth and our nation.”
But fighting youth drug and alcohol abuse, Keenan said, does not work “from up here” at the governmental level.
Rep. James O’Day, of West Boylston, said to the audience that the amount of youth attendance at initial community meetings was inspiring.
“I don’t know what I was doing when I was 17,” he said, “but I wasn’t as aware as these young folks at the Worcester town hall meeting.”
He said the youth needs to take control of this issue across the Commonwealth as much as State House officials do.
“Until the number reaches zero with new drug usage or underage alcohol usage,” O’Day said, “we have a lot of work to do.”
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““Until the number reaches zero with new drug usage or underage alcohol usage,” Looks like our tax dollars are going to fantasy land….