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EDITORIAL: Long arc of opioid crisis

The Citizens' Voice - 8/13/2018

Aug. 13--The death toll continues to mount and the ancillary damage from the opioid addiction crisis continues to bore ever deeper into the society.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of mothers giving birth while addicted to opioids rose from 1.5 of every 1,000 births min 1999 to 6.5 of every 1,000 births in 2014.

In Massachusetts, the state Department of Health reported that manual laborers are much more likely than other workers to die from an opioid overdose. It cited construction, fishing, farm labor and lumbering as high-risk occupations for opioid addiction. The authors said workers in those fields often face sporadic employment and do not always have benefits, so they take opioids to manage pain from work-related injuries to keep working.

And Thursday in Wilkes-Barre, Gov. Tom Wolf met with some people who truly have been blind-sided by opioid addiction -- grandparents raising their grandchildren because the kids' parents are addicted to opioids and simply absent, in jail or in treatment.

About 80,000 grandparents in Pennsylvania are raising their grandchildren, though it is not clear exactly how many of those situations are due to opioid addiction.

For grandparents who already have raised one family, the burden is enormous. "I'm 55 years old but I feel 75," Brenda Saba of Wyoming told the governor. "I'm tired."

Custody issues interfere with everything from health care for kids to school enrollment. Children under the care of their grandparents often are eligible for less state assistance than they would receive in foster care.

The House has passed two bills to help grandparents. One would expedite the guardianship process to ensure grandparents' legal authority regarding their grandchildren. Another would create a single website to guide grandparents through legal hurdles to available services.

Due to a late but aggressive response to the crisis, a new state-managed prescription tracking system and physicians' efforts, opioids prescriptions have been on decline, which should result in fewer new addicts. And efforts like a $1 million grant from the state to the Wright Center will make treatment more easily available.

But the grandparents' plight demonstrates the long arc of the crisis. Lawmakers should do all that they can to help grandparents and others affected by a crisis not of their making.

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(c)2018 The Citizens' Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)

Visit The Citizens' Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.) at citizensvoice.com

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