Mayor Kelly Yaede announced a new strategy to combat heroin by bringing together local agencies to coalesce around the problem.
HAMILTON -- Mayor Kelly Yaede announced a new strategy to combat heroin Wednesday by bringing together local agencies to coalesce around the ongoing problem.
Yaede, flanked by police, school and other officials, said the plans come after months of conversations on how to battle the heroin epidemic going forward.
"And we realized not one person can do this alone," Yaede said.
Yaede's plan calls for working with the Overdose Prevention Agency Corporation (OPAC) and the township's health division to offer training on how to use the heroin antidote Naloxone - also known as Narcan - community wide.
Hamilton resident Paul Ressler, whose son died of a drug overdose, and who started the nonprofit OPAC in 2014, was on hand for the announcement.
The mayor's plan calls for training the township's health division's nurses, school officials, township directors, including the mayor herself, in using the antidote. Yaede said she has already completed the training.
Also part of the strategy is partnering with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Hamilton, who will offer patients taken to the hospital following a Naloxone treatment with "save" counseling.
In the schools, officials will supplement ongoing prevention efforts, the mayor said.
"We still cannot change someone from making a choice," Yaede said, "But we can give them all the tools needed for making that decision."
Acting Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri, who worked on the plan to equip county police departments with Narcan in late 2014, said since the program was started, officers have deployed Narcan 111 times and have saved 97 people - which Onofri termed as "reversals."
The acting prosecutor said one of the vexing issues in the heroin opioid battle is that New Jersey's heroin supply has a purity rate of 62 percent - among the highest in the nation - and a "deck," or small bag, of heroin can be as cheap as $2 on the streets.
Vinnie Capodanno, a former township councilman who is on the board at City of Angels, a nonprofit drug counseling agency in the township, also attended the event.
But he was not invited, nor was anyone from City of Angels, he said. The agency is run by former councilman Kevin Meara, who also founded the agency, in 2009, after his son died of an overdose.
And that is a misstep, Capodanno said.
"It's nice to see that the mayor is getting serious about heroin, but there's more to it than the mayor said today," Capodanno said afterwards.
"We have a lot more knowledge and we've been doing this for a long time. We can really help her out," he said. "But I give her credit for the event."
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