‘One Pill Can Kill: One And Done’

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frizzo@antonmediagroup.com

Putting a face on the opioid crisis, Carole Trottere held up a photo of her son Alex Sutton, who died of a heroin fentanyl poisoning on April 8, 2018. The Suffolk County resident, who spent a career as a public relation professional for various Nassau County politicians, joined Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman at a press conference on March 20 at the Theodore Roosevelt Executive & Legislative Building in Mineola.

The county, as part of its multi-pronged effort to fight the overdose crisis, will place naloxone (Narcan) kits wherever there is a external defibrillator at one of its facilities. Sixty kits were donated by the Long Island Council on Alcoholism & Drug Dependence (LICADD), based in Westbury. Nalaxone counters an opioid-induced coma and is credited with saving many lives as its use has spread from emergency professionals to everyday

Trottere expressed her gratitude for the Narcan kits and stated, “I’m not the only grieving parent here today. I just want to point out, I have many fellow grieving parents. It’s like the club that no one wants to belong to. And I’m one of thousands of parents on Long Island. If you do the math with the stats of how many people have died of fentanyl poisonings, just multiply that by how many parents and other loved ones and families are affected.”

Trottere added, “You have to keep driving home the fact that these children live in a very dangerous world now, unfortunately. And if I had to say something to the young people...[it’s that] death is permanent. And you’re going to leave behind a family that is heartbroken for the rest of their life.”

Blakeman contemplated how the public would react if a commercial plane crashed every day, killing 300 people. That’s the daily toll across this country of overdoses, many caused by the powerful and widely available synthetic opiate fentanyl. The county’s medical examiner, Blakeman related, counted 270 overdose deaths in 2021, 190 of them from fentanyl. He said the figures seemed to be trending lower in 2022, but final stats were not yet available.

“The fentanyl crisis is pervasive in every community, including ours,” Blakeman said. “And what we are trying to do here today is to save lives, especially the lives of our young people, to educate them and

—Submitted by NCCFT to give them tools so that if they are in a situation where they are overdosing, they have the ability or someone else has the ability to rescue them and save their lives.”

Earlier this year, the county made a $2.4 million investment in treatment, education and prevention at its mental health ward at Nassau University Medical Center [NUMC].

“What we find out from a lot of parents that have children who have this kind of substance abuse is that they have some kind of psychological or psychiatric event, and there’s not enough places to treat them for that. So that’s one of the reasons why we put the money [at NUMC],” Blakeman said.

Blakeman noted that the county plans to spend $15 million in each of the next four years, its share of the money from a multi-billion settlement agreed to by opioid manufacturers and distributors.

“We want to make sure that the money gets to organizations that have a track record and that get things done,” said Blakeman, who added he will be guided by a committee of professionals on how to best disburse the funds.

Read a longer story at www.longislandweekly.com.