Addiction crisis — hard work ahead

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Any illusions we may have harbored regarding our insulation from the nation’s addiction crisis have been easily dispelled in recent weeks and months. We are losing our friends and neighbors, and waiting for the tide to turn, hoping to dodge a bullet, is a prescription for accelerating despair.

The opioid addiction tragedy, which has too often seemed private, remote, and too complex to easily take on, while still all those things, seems to have crossed a threshold of public awareness on Martha’s Vineyard, as well as elsewhere in Massachusetts and nationally. It’s begun getting the open, organized community attention needed if we’re to accelerate pathways to effective intervention. Two recent forums and subsequent follow-up meetings have attracted several hundred Islanders.

Staff from Martha’s Vineyard Community Services have helped facilitate the logistics of these meetings, and provided important ongoing information — but impressively, the folks turning out are making a personal commitment to participating. We’ll do best if we own the problems, design and track solutions at the individual level, and rely on organizations and government to do the necessary work based on their competencies. The Norfolk County S.A.F.E model seems promising and instructive as a point of departure.

The stakes in this battle are way too high, the resources required way too diverse, and the individual interests of public and private Island organizations too restrictive and competitive for us to outsource addressing the addiction crisis. What’s needed is the focus, intensity, and grassroots leadership concerned community members can bring, supported by a variety of private service agencies, state and federal programs, and local philanthropy, to get us out in front of this addiction nightmare.