A state official who works day to day on Indiana’s response to the drug epidemic paid Jackson County a visit last week.

Douglas Huntsinger, executive director for drug prevention, treatment and enforcement for the state, was at the Jackson County Learning Center in Seymour on May 11 to participate in a substance use workshop that was attended by local law enforcement, health care providers and city officials.

He said the primary focus of the workshop was to learn about what efforts communities across Indiana are doing for recovery and what steps they can take in the future to address those with substance use disorder.

Huntsinger oversees Gov. Eric Holcomb’s Next Level Recovery initiative, which he said is the governor’s branded effort surrounding the state’s response to the drug epidemic.

One focus of Next Level Recovery is harm reduction and distributing the overdose reversal drug naloxone.

Since May 2020, Huntsinger said the state has given out 128,000 doses of naloxone.

Some of the ways the state has been able to distribute naloxone has been by putting vending machines in jails that are in high-trafficked areas and hard acrylic NaloxBoxes that hold 30 doses and can be installed on the side of a building.

Two NaloxBoxes have been installed in Jackson County: Anchor House Family Assistance Center and Pantry in Seymour and Freetown Community Center in Freetown.

“If someone isn’t ready to go to treatment, the only thing we can do is hopefully keep people alive so we can get them into treatment,” Huntsinger said.

Another effort by the state to address the drug epidemic has been working with the Indiana Department of Health to expand residential treatment beds.

Huntsinger said residential treatment beds have increased in Indiana by 273% since 2017.

In 2018, the state approved an amendment to a Medicaid waiver (Section 1115) that pays for substance use disorder treatment.

Huntsinger said this has been a “game changer,” and more than 300,000 Hoosiers with Medicaid have taken advantage of that coverage.

Jackson County and Seymour are both opted into the state’s lawsuit against Johnson and Johnson, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson and are expected to get payouts from the $507 million settlement.

Huntsinger said Seymour will receive $114,000 from the settlement, and Jackson County will be getting $10,000.

Settlement money was allocated to municipalities across Indiana based on an intensity metric that calculated how many overdoses, overdose deaths and morphine milligram equivalents happened in one area, Huntsinger said.

Fentanyl has been a major contributor to overdose deaths in recent years. Because only a small amount of fentanyl is needed to be lethal, Huntsinger said it gets laced into other drugs and is easier to traffic across the country’s southern border.

Over the span of a year last November, there were approximately 106,000 overdose deaths in the United States.

Huntsinger said 2,700 of those deaths were in Indiana, and fentanyl accounts for 85% of Indiana’s overdose deaths.

“I personally think this is the most dangerous time to use illicit substances in the country,” he said.