You can see Snohomish County Executive’s complete interview with Northwest Newsradio’s Ryan Harris in the video below:
A dramatic increase in drug overdose deaths, especially those involving fentanyl, has the leader of one of Washington’s largest counties ordering a big response.
With about one person a day dying from overdoses and a doubling of the number of opioid overdose deaths in the past 5 years, Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers has ordered his Department of Emergency Management to coordinate agencies across the county to deal with the crisis. Somers is essentially reviving the county-wide response we saw with COVID.
Drug addiction and overdose deaths are a problem Somers tells Northwest Newsradio are only getting worse. “These drugs are flooding, they’re cheap, they’re small, they’re readily available, and they’re just affecting many, many people’s lives,” Somers says, “More people are homeless now than before, and it’s just compounding the problem.”
For Somers, it’s personal because his is one of the lives affected. His brother, Alan Paulsen, was just 58 when he died in March of a fentanyl overdose. Somers says Paulsen had been clean for 10 years after struggling with drugs for most of his adult life, an addiction he says started as a coping mechanism for a childhood trauma. He says he was unaware his brother had taken a step backward, acknowledging that is part of the scourge of addiction, but urging all of us to destigmatize addiction as one step toward helping the people who need help. Somers says that help will attack the root of the problem, but he says our attack must include more treatment centers, so he hopes next time there’s a plan for one in your neighborhood, people won’t be so quick to push back against it because, he says, they have to go somewhere.
Somers’ plan includes a proposal now before the County Council to spend the first $1.4 million the county gets from the opioid lawsuit settlement on things like drug education, more of the opioid-overdose reversal drug, Narcan, which has already saved lives, and even a mobile treatment unit to help people in crisis, similar to Seattle’s Health One units. That settlement money is supposed to come in annual payments for at least the next decade or so, with $12 million guaranteed and more that might come.
