Arlington County Government, VA Human Services (DHS), 21 May 2018

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From YouTube: Scope of Problem: Arlington County Town Hall Meeting on Substance Abuse

Description

The entire program can be seen at https://youtu.be/5YWNPVA2vzk

Arlington County’s second Town Hall on substance use was held on Wednesday, May 2, 2018 at Kenmore Middle School, Arlington. The panel discussion was moderated by Kimberly Suiters, local investigative reporter for WJLA ABC7, and included officials from Arlington County Public Schools, Arlington County Law Enforcement, and Arlington County Human Services.

The event focused on:

* Recognizing the signs of substance abuse
* What Arlington County is doing to address substance use throughout the community
* Where and how to get help for someone with a substance use issue

For more information, please contact Suzanne Somerville at 703-228-7340 or visit https://health.arlingtonva.us/opioid-awareness/.

This event was sponsored by the Arlington Addiction Recovery Initiative (AARI).

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We want you to know, and maybe you already know, that drug use has no color, no income level, no age. No, look. We want to help remove the stigma that people with drug dependence are the others that they would not be anyone that you would be in contact with. They are people, we know they're people, we admire they're people, we love they're people, we care about oftentimes. If we could, let them see their own potential, we could help them.

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Drug abuse. Drug use affects everyone, and we want to stop adding photos like these.

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These are all people who have died. These are all children who have died from drug overdose in 2013 drug overdose took over as the leading cause of unnatural death in Virginia. No more was it gun related incidents. No more was it automobile accidents, it was drug use and we're talking about prescription drug use as well as heroin and illegal drug use. The opioids opioids have been the driving force behind the large increases in fatal overdoses since 2013.

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If you picked up this pamphlet as you walked in opioid treatment in Arlington rows, 245 percent between 2015 and 2017 doing this to ourselves, and we need to find a solution and we're going to find a solution ourselves in 2015 statewide, the number of illicit opioid deaths surpassed, prescription, opioid deaths and the trend has continued into 2017 and 2018.