New York City will spend $38 million annually to battle the prevalent opioid problem in the state, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“We are focused on the people of New York City but it is impossible to ignore the fact that we now have a national problem on our hands,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “It is an urban problem, it is a rural problem, simultaneously.”
More than 1,000 New Yorkers died last year from an opioid overdose, with almost 90 percent of those overdoses involving heroin or fentanyl. Eighteen percent of overdoses were deemed to be from painkillers.
“We literally have a reality now where more and more people get hooked on heroin because they first they went through the overuse of a legally prescribed drug,” de Blasio said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33,091 Americans died from an opioid overdose in 2015 and death rates from synthetic opioids rose 72.2 percent from 2014 to 2015.
The New York initiative will fund the distribution of 100,000 kits of the drug-overdose-reversal drug naloxone to treatment programs, city shelters and pharmacies, with all 23,000 NYPD patrol officers equipped with the kits.
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