Funds for addiction services seen as key to Georgia’s opioid fight
Published 9:45 am Wednesday, December 14, 2016
- Drugs
ATLANTA — More than a third of the nearly 13,000 children in Georgia’s ballooning foster care system are there because of substance abuse in their homes.
Those children — many from rural Georgia — represent one of the strains created by a growing opioid crisis, which is expected to be a focal point in the upcoming legislative session.
Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, chairwoman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, said the scourge of opioid abuse threatens to reach a level in Georgia comparable to that of some Appalachian states.
“If we don’t get control of it and get those addiction services ramped up, we’re going to be like Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia,” she said.
Unterman said in an interview that she hopes to see funding for addiction services restored in Gov. Nathan Deal’s proposed budget, which will be released early next month.
Money for services such as housing programs for those coming off heroin and other opioids was slashed during the recession. Unterman said the state’s addiction programs now are essentially “nonexistent” because of wait times for people hoping to access them.
The Atlanta-area senator is leading a study committee focused on opioid abuse that has met this fall.
Another committee is analyzing narcotic treatment centers, which have clustered in alarming numbers near states such as Tennessee, which have far stricter regulations.
Both study groups are expected to push forward legislation for the session that begins in January.
Unterman said the bills will likely focus on bulking up the state’s underused prescription drug monitoring program and strengthening regulations for centers that dispense methadone to treat drug addiction.
Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com.