Sam Quinones – Sarasota Herald Tribune
SARASOTA — In 2019, four years after Manatee County’s 57 recorded fatal drug overdoses placed it at ground zero of the state’s per capita opioid epidemic, Florida launched its Statewide Task Force on Opioid Abuse in an effort to develop a coordinated strategy for education, prevention and treatment to turn the tide.
But one of the nation’s leading experts on America’s addiction to heroin told a well-heeled Ringling College Library Association audience on Monday morning that “there is no solution” unless and until people like them literally get off their couches, get to know their neighbors, and recapture that lost sense of community.
