(NewsNation) — Baltimore was dubbed the “U.S. overdose capital” in a report by the New York Times, with nearly 6,000 deaths over the last six years. Baltimore Councilman Mark Conway says the city was once a leader in addressing the opioid crisis.
“Back in 2011, 2012, when we saw that folks were having more addiction issues around pills, we were leading the effort to turn those things around. I think even then, we didn’t exactly see the returns we wanted to see,” Conway said on “Morning in America.”
“As we saw folks’ addiction to pills turn into addiction to street drugs and fentanyl, I think it’s had a really, really detrimental effect,” Conway added.
In Baltimore, the rate of death from 2018 to 2022 was nearly double that of any large city and higher than nearly all of Appalachia during the prescription pill crisis, the Midwest during the height of rural meth labs or New York during the crack epidemic.
Conway says though Baltimore has several city programs working to help people struggling with addiction, it hasn’t been enough to address the issue.
“I think we have to think long-term and we need to, you know, maybe be a little bit more creative about what we can do. But this is going to take a lot of resources, when we’ve never dealt with an issue of this magnitude before,” Conway told NewsNation.
When the opioid crisis took hold in Baltimore a decade ago, the city’s initial response was hailed as a national model. The city set ambitious goals, distributed Narcan widely, experimented with ways to steer people into treatment and ramped up campaigns to alert the public.
Since 2020, officials have set fewer and less ambitious goals for their overdose prevention efforts. The task force assembled to manage the crisis once met monthly but convened only twice in 2022 and three times in 2023.
“What you see here though, is a pressure cooker, where the issues of Baltimore are magnified,” Conway said. “We have historically had opioid issues. So you know, we’ll have to look into data, we’ll have to look into processes, we’ll have to look into our agencies to see what more we can do.”
