The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. While the project will serve the entire community, it is particularly well-suited to support parent-infant relationships impacted by the growing opioid crisis.
Pignatelli was inspired to file the HOPE Act after hearing the story of a young man who overdosed and passed away in the presence of a police officer while waiting for a dose of Narcan to arrive on the scene.
The playwright wrote the play in response to the heroin overdose of his brother, who was a fisherman out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, capital of the 19th century’s booming whaling industry.
“Dopesick” is about a drug that was sold as non-addictive, but is so incredibly addictive it is almost impossible to kick. It kills more Americans than the wars we are fighting.
'Reviving Our Hearts for Justice: An Interfaith Call to Action' seeks to revive people’s spirits for the work of social justice in the Berkshires and beyond.
I was recently invited to be the guest speaker for two journalism classes at Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington. The students, about 35 all together, had prepared questions for me based on their reading the day before of my recent four-part series, "Addiction in the Berkshires: Sara’s story."
"I think a second chance is the greatest gift you can give. I still remember and am forever grateful for the people who gave me a couch to sleep on or a ride or anything when I was on the streets."
I was needing to use constantly. I had just left the clinic, and so now I had even more of a habit because I had the heroin on top of the methadone. I was sick every two hours around the clock.
"When I was younger, I was an A student, in the 98th percentile on all the tests. I did ballet. You wouldn’t have thought I would end up the way I did. All my teachers thought I had a lot of promise and would do well in life."
The CARE Act is the result of extensive work researching evidence-based best practices and collaborating with healthcare researchers and clinicians, hospitals, behavioral health providers, law enforcement officials, patient advocates, and individuals with lived experience to develop policies to address the opioid epidemic.
The Massachusetts Senate has adopted Hinds' amendments to the fiscal year 2019 state budget to continue the efforts of the Berkshire FLYER Working Group to ensure a pilot train service connecting New York City to the Berkshires launches no later than 2020.
The Railroad Street Youth Project’s South Berkshire Community Health Coalition is partnering with the Center for Motivation and Change in New Marlborough on a three-part training for parents who are concerned about their child’s drug and/or alcohol use.
Reps. Richard Neal and Frank Pallone Jr. sent a letter to 14 insurance companies asking for details regarding the challenges plans face and their efforts to address the epidemic.
' ... we cannot wait for studies and commissions to repeat findings of scientific literature that already exist when we could be actively utilizing effective research-based tools to decrease the circulation of prescription opiates in the market and improve the scope of substance abuse treatments in our communities.' --Rep William 'Smitty' Pignatelli, D-Lenox
In his letter Dr. Ernest Drucker writes: "Dramatic evidence of the capabilities of cannabis to reduce overdose deaths due to opioids was published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association."
