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Addiction treatment center says pandemic made opioid crisis worse

A drug addiction treatment facility in our area responds to the plans laid out earlier this week by Lackawanna County officials to combat the opioid crisis.

SCRANTON, Pa. — It's a crisis that many addiction treatment centers say was largely ignored during the pandemic.

Amy Durham, CEO of Poconos-based Brookdale Premier Addiction Recovery, which has a center in Scranton, says her facility has seen an increase in patients in the last year and a half.

"There's nothing that the disease of addiction loves more than isolation," said Durham.

And drug dealers are capitalizing on it.

Earlier this week, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti and Lackawanna County District Attorney Mark Powell sounded the alarm on what they called a new and disturbing trend in the opioid crisis.

The DA says dealers are putting fentanyl in "virtually everything" now, including marijuana, to make the drugs more potent. 

Durham says that adds up with what she's been seeing among her patients at Brookdale.

"It's frightening because what I have experienced with our patients, in particular, is, when we reveal the contents of their drug screen to them, there are many people that are shocked that they test positive for fentanyl."

That's why Mayor Cognetti is pushing for Scranton to decriminalize fentanyl test strips, which are used to detect fentanyl in unregulated drugs and are currently considered drug paraphernalia under state law. 

"I think it's just lack of education. It's just like Naloxone; there was so much resistance to that for many, many years," said Durham, on why she believes the test strips are illegal now.

The state recently allowed the emergency declaration for the opioid crisis to expire; it was first declared a public health emergency in 2018. 

"Based on the information I've read, they felt like we had made significant progress and that it was not at the top of the list anymore. And I would say there are many families who would beg to differ on that," said Durham.

Governor Wolf says with or without an emergency declaration, fighting the opioid crisis will remain a priority.

Mayor Cognetti says it's still too soon to tell how the expiration of the declaration will impact the city and its funding.

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