This week, state officials announced the distribution of over 650,000 overdose reversal kits to first responders.
656,568 Narcan nasal spray kits (1,313,136 doses) have been sold statewide during 2017.
Over the past two years, organizations serving high-need communities received 249,024 kits (498,048 doses) of naloxone directly.
“Naloxone is a proven and effective medicine that can save a person who overdoses from an opioid,” Acting Secretary of Health Dr. Debra Bogen stated.
The Shapiro administration reports over 24,000 opioid overdose reversals utilizing state-provided naloxone.
“While naloxone is extremely effective at saving lives, we must continue to focus on a wide range of harm reduction strategies, including helping people get treatment for substance use disorders and associated health challenges,” Bogen added.
Dr. Latika Davis-Jones, interim secretary of the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, said the Shapiro administration wants naloxone available.
Naloxone saves. Davis-Jones stated that opioid overdose reversal drug access and distribution are crucial.
With a copy of the Department of Health’s standing order, Pennsylvania residents can buy or use their insurance to get naloxone at local pharmacies without a prescription.
As usual, this week’s top five stories are below.
Aisha Mobley has parked her van along the Capital Area Greenbelt, a 20-mile loop through Harrisburg and its suburbs that includes woodland regions, urban workplaces, residential neighborhoods, and scenic parks, on a quiet, sunny April day.
Mobley, the community mobilization and outreach coordinator for the Christian Churches United of the Tri-County Area Help Ministry, a Harrisburg-based nonprofit founded in 1978 to serve those facing homelessness, poverty, or incarceration in Dauphin, Cumberland, and Perry Counties, is helping an unhoused person sort through clothes and food in her van.
On Monday, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives votes on bipartisan legislative goals for the first time in nearly two months.
But one long-supported bipartisan initiative could test House Democrats and Senate Republicans’ willingness to break down a partisan wall blocking popular legislation.
The Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill was attacked by a gunman in 2018. The final shootings killed 11 persons, many of them elderly worshippers.
Jury selection for the accused shooter’s trial begins Monday in U.S. District Court here, nearly five years later. The killings have transformed this city, but the laws that may have prevented them have not.
The commonwealth is no closer to legalizing recreational cannabis despite a Democratic majority in the state House and a governor who included it in his budget predictions.
Pennsylvania is one of the few states in the region without weed legalization. New York and New Jersey have mature adult-use recreational markets. Delaware and Maryland recently legalized, licensed, and taxed cannabis sales.
Even though Secaucus, Bloomfield, and Elizabeth are the only legal recreational cannabis shops within 10 miles of Jersey City, searching Google for “dispensary near me” yields dozens of results.
The result is stores with neon cannabis signs in their windows and flashy packaging for edibles that don’t sell legal weed but instead sell delta-8, a psychoactive chemical found in the cannabis plant that doesn’t have the same effects as New Jersey’s delta-9-derived marijuana.
