Ernie Salomon

Someone you know is addicted to opioids!

Some frightening facts about drug addiction:

• Drug addiction is up about 20 percent this year alone.

• Drug addiction overdose is killing one person every 15 minutes in this country.

• Medicaid patients are prescribed pain killers at about twice the rate of non-Medicaid patients and are three to six times more at risk for addiction.

• Not only the young are addicted. One in three people 65 or older on Medicare Part D received opioid prescriptions in 2016.

The opioid drug epidemic now raging in the U.S.A. is a killer and is here in Santa Barbara County. About one in 133 residents in our county is addicted to drugs!

In the U.S., 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016. This is more than 12 times greater than the 5,000 who died from drug overdose just 30 years ago during the height of the crack epidemic.

Help for drug addiction is available to all who need it in Santa Barbara County. Down the page at the “Prescribe Safe Initiative — Santa Barbara County” website, information on those to consult for addiction recovery, at Cottage Hospital and elsewhere, provides help to people who want to stop their addiction.

My TV Santa Barbara show, Ernie Salomon-Live!, presented a full hour on the Opioid Drug Epidemic with an emergency-room doctor and substance abuse specialist, which you can view here. It’s available on DVD to organizations at no charge.

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