SUNBURY — The opioid epidemic hit The Valley hard in 2017 and dominated the headlines. State Representative Fred Keller (R-85th, Kreamer) was on WKOK’s “On The Mark” and he said understanding the disease is the first step in battling this scourge, “When somebody has a problem with addiction, it’s often looked at as a character flaw, and it’s not a character flaw, it’s a disease. I think we need to not be judgmental, but we need to say ‘this is a real issue that’s facing our neighbors, our friends, our communities.'”
Rep. Keller said they have not ignored this issue in Harrisburg in 2017, “We did a lot of things in Harrisburg to help manage a pharmacy where the prescriptions are monitored so somebody can’t go and do drug shopping and go from one doctor to another, because again, when you have that disease, you’re going to try and fill that need.”
Rep. Keller also highlighted the bolstering of the task force statewide and arming the first responders with Naloxone as efforts to combat the opioid epidemic in the state. Keller says that Harrisburg will continue to work on this epidemic, but it can’t come all from them, “We can’t fix it all from Harrisburg, and I think that’s a very important thing to note. We also need to have our community. We need a state government encourage our community to work on some of these things locally, and to give them the resources to do it.” You can hear all of his remarks in the On The Mark archives at www.WKOK.com.
