Drug overdose prevention and grants: St. Lawrence County on the lookout for new funding

CANTON, New York (WWNY) – It’ll be the final year St. Lawrence County gets a certain grant it uses to help prevent drug overdoses.

“The number of overdoses has risen in the past few years significantly.” That’s what Sheena Smith of St. Lawrence Community Services says when talking about the use of opioids and fentanyl-laced drugs in St. Lawrence County.

In the past four years, the county and its community services department have received and relied upon grants to try to prevent overdoses, including a recent $72,000 grant from the federal government.

“It allows us to do work within the community to reduce the effects of overdosing. So it’s a focus on harm reduction, Narcan training and education,” said Jolene Munger, St. Lawrence County Public Health director.

From January through the end of July, there have been 60 suspected overdoses in the county – 33 of them stopped with Narcan, a treatment used on overdose victims. Three of those suspected overdoses were fatal.

Community Services recently opened an addiction center in the county’s human services building where addicts can get prescribed drugs to help prevent another overdose.

Smith says this program is funded with the grant money that is given to Public Health, and officials are disappointed that this will be the final year for this funding.

“We watch for grants and as they come around we keep in mind that this funding is going to end. So we need to find grant funding to apply for in the future to continue it. We have found it to be valuable to the community and we’ve seen a number of reversals, therefore, we feel that it is important to us,” said Smith.

The grant itself will be used to continue education on preventing overdoses as well as providing harm-reduction kits to those who currently use addictive substances.

Copyright 2022 WWNY. All rights reserved.

Next Post

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.