Clip of the Week: Opioid Prevention

In June of 1971, the concept of the “war on drugs” began. The campaign was born to tackle the illegal drug trade in the United States by President Richard Nixon. The war on drugs had and still remains a major backlash, for appearing to have targeted strictly people of color. The Nixon administration did not fund the rehabilitation of addicts, but instead incarcerated them.

Nearly 50 years after the war on drugs was declared, the FDA announced that the opioid addiction had become the biggest crisis they wanted to tackle–this came about a year after Obama authorized millions of dollars in funding for opioid research and treatment. With only two years of pushing for treatments and holding companies like Johnson & Johnson responsible for the crisis.

In this episode, Mrs. C. Virginia Fields of NBLCA has a conversation with Terrell Jones, Outreach and Advocacy Program Manager at NYHRE to discuss the opioid crisis and how to combat it.