MONTICELLO, NY — Dr. Carlos Holden, medical director of emergency medicine at Catskill Regional Medical Center (CRMC) was invited back to the government center on March 5, a year after his previous visit, to discuss the heroin and opioid epidemic in Sullivan County and across the country.

Holden said that there have been some advancements. For instance, the drug Narcan, or Naloxone, which can immediately reverse the adverse impacts of a heroin overdose, is now more available to first responders and is being used to save lives.

Also, the Good Samaritan law was passed, which provides that if someone calls 911 because a friend or acquaintance is suffering from a drug overdose, the caller won’t be prosecuted for low-level drug possession.

But the overall picture is still pretty bleak. Holden distributed information from the Centers for Disease Control, which said that for young people the leading cause of death in this country used to be accidents and injuries; now it’s drug overdoses.

Holden said, “When I started my career we were losing people to car accidents. Now cars are much safer, and unfortunately, drugs are more dangerous.”

The day before the meeting, the fifth annual Nonprofit Leadership Summit was held at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, and the Kingfisher Project, which was created by radio station WJFF, won the $5,000 Innovation Award. The goal of the project is to give a voice to people whose lives have been impacted by the heroin/opioid epidemic, and several people connected with the project were at the meeting at the government center.

Among them was Anne Larsen, a co-founder of WJFF. She said, “Yesterday at the summit, once the presentation was done for the Kingfisher Project, we had lunch. People were streaming toward us to talk to us, to touch us, to say ‘my sister, my brother my uncle.’ It was as if, I don’t know how to explain it... ”

“De-stigmatized,” interjected Legislator Cora Edwards,

“De-stigmatized,” Larson repeated, “I mean we were out there in the open, we were all people together.”

There was general agreement among the experts on hand that doing away with the stigma of addiction was one of the important steps in addressing the epidemic successfully.

Another roadblock to dealing with the problem was delineated by Michelena Mangan, who told the room that her son had been in treatment for three years in Dynamic Youth Community in South Fallsburg. She said that he is now a foreman in a construction project in Brooklyn, but her main point was that one-month treatment for heroin or opioid addiction is not sufficient.

She said she and her husband still go to family meetings, and she said a lot of kids leave the program after eight to 10 months and write letters back saying, “I’ve cleaned up my act.” But she said, “There’s a lot of kids that split within the first two or three months. They’re usually found in the parents’ home dead of an overdose.”

Sullivan County District Attorney Jim Farrell agreed that most insurance companies won’t pay for inpatient treatment for more than 28 days. “It’s sort of like you’ve got to mortgage your entire life to put your kid in long-term treatment,” he said.

Gerard J. Galarneau, CEO of Catskill Regional Medical Center, said that young people were getting mixed messages about drugs. He said, “Can we please stop talking about how wonderful it’s going to be when we legalize marijuana?”

He also added that successfully confronting the problem would take a lot of different people and organizations. He said, “The answer to the problem is in the room, we all have a piece of what can make things better.”