The New Hampshire Senate unanimously passed three bills on Feb. 4 to address drug problems within the state. The bills allocated $5.5 million to establish drug courts statewide, provide grants for law enforcement and upgrade the state’s prescription drug monitoring program. A legislative task force recommended these changes designed to address the state’s drug crisis.
A portion of the legislation passed aims to further drug education and support community groups.
The bills — Senate Bill 464, Senate Bill 484 and Senate Bill 522 — are currently moving through the House of Representatives.
Drug courts target habitual offenders of drug laws and place the offenders into treatment and recovery programs.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported in 2014 that New Hampshire was ranked second to last among states when it comes to access to substance abuse treatment for addicts.
In Manchester, overdose deaths as a result of heroin or other opiates has increased from 14 in 2013 to 69 last year.
According to the New Hampshire Department of Justice’s Office of the Attorney General, drug deaths have surpassed traffic-related deaths as of 2010 and are still on the rise.
New Hampshire resident Sophie Czerwinski ’19 commented that towns surrounding her area, specifically Laconia, are affected by the heroin epidemic.
“My dad was a doctor in Laconia and frequently dealt with heroin overdoses in the E.R. and he said it was the most common overdose they saw,” Czerwinski said.
New Hampshire’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services confirmed in 2015 the issue when it reported that the life saving anti-overdose drug Naloxone — commonly known as Narcan — has been administered by the county in more than 2,000 incidents.
The actions taken give departments access to Narcan so that they can administer the drug to people experiencing a heroin overdose in the field, Hanover Chief of Police Charlie Dennis said.
The New Hampshire community is trying to educate the public and professionals about addiction, emergency overdose medications and support services, Dennis said.
Dennis also said that the drug epidemic has not hit Hanover to the extent of other towns, cities and counties across the state.
The Hanover Police Department had a total of 38 drug cases in 2015, resulting in 19 arrests. There were also two incidents of heroin overdoses.
Marwan Zelmat ’19 said that he did not think Dartmouth had a heroin problem.
“I keep hearing that it’s a problem throughout the state, but personally speaking, here at Dartmouth, I have never seen or heard of anyone doing heroin,” Zelmat said. “It is rarely brought up unless in the context of, ‘We have a huge rampant problem.’ But, when I hear that, I wonder, ‘What is rampant?’ If I don’t see it at all, is it really that rampant?”
Jeff DeFlavio ’14 founded Recover Together, a company that provides opiate addiction treatment and group therapy, as a medical student at Dartmouth because there were few affordable, effective treatment options for patients in rural areas.
DeFlavio said that since the medical practice opened, the group has grown to seeing over 500 patients per week at locations throughout Maine and New Hampshire, establishing their model in the region.
“We’ve also demonstrated that our innovative model is more effective and cheaper than the existing alternatives,” DeFlavio said.
His project builds supportive communities to combat addiction and is one of the examples of the New Hampshire community’s resilience in the face of the drug epidemic.
Alexa Green is a junior from Boca Raton, FL. She is majoring in English, with minors in Arabic and Public Policy. After joining the newspaper her freshman winter, she served as a beat reporter covering Hanover & the Upper Valley. Following this position, Alexa became the associate managing news editor. Outside of the newsroom, she is a tour guide on campus, works for the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy, and conducts research in the English department. During her off term, Alexa worked for I.B.Tauris, an independent publishing house in London, U.K., editing and publicizing international relations and politics books. She is passionate about the ways in which policy, current events, history and journalism have interconnected roles in defining global issues.
