The Haliburton, Kawartha Lakes, and Northumberland Drug Strategy group held a public meeting in Port Hope to discuss the opioid crisis. Port Hope Police Chief Tim Farquharson and Dr. Natalie Bocking, Chief Medical Officer of the Haliburton Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit, were participants.
The show:
The full interview with bonus material:
The health unit says there were between one and four deaths in May. There were also close to 30 emergency room visits where a drug overdose was suspected. None of this counts for the police and ambulance calls. Those are some of the highest numbers we have seen since a year ago.
As you will hear in this interview, Dane Record, the executive director of the Peterborough AIDs Resource Network, will tell you he is not surprised. He sees it first-hand in his role with the Haliburton, Kawartha Lakes, and Northumberland Drug Strategy.
The group faced a low profile during the pandemic. It did a lot of work from 2016 to 2019 after it received a $285,000 grant to create a strategy to help battle the opioid crisis locally.
A public meeting was held in Port Hope last week. It is the first time in three years. You will want to hear how it went and what was said. And you will be interested in its plans in the future as local activists and leaders work to find solutions to the crisis.
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