The number of opioid overdose deaths in New Jersey is on the decline, reversing a decade long trend of an increase but experts say there’s a long way to go in battling the crisis and there are things that could derail the progress.
Data shows New Jersey recorded 2,816 overdose deaths in 2023. That’s about an 11 percent decline from the prior year, with reduction reaching all ethnic and racial groups. Prior to that, deaths had been on the rise for 10 years in the Garden State. The downward trend continued into 2024.
Steven Cystal is the Board of Governors Professor of Health Services Research at Rutgers University and is an expert on the matter.
“New Jersey finally started to really move on harm reduction. Harm reduction means getting Narcan into the hands of people. It means safer injection sites. It means a lot of education to reach out to people and encourage them into treatment programs. New Jersey has really done an excellent job in the last couple years in expanding that program which took a long time to take off. So we have a lot more Narcan out there.”
Another reason for the decline is an increase in access to treatment through Medicaid.
“Since the pandemic, we have had the ability to access treatment through telehealth by Medicaid. That’s very important and we are gradually giving a path to more people.”
However, he says major federal legislation passed this past summer will knock a lot of people off Medicaid who have been receiving drug abuse treatments and that will hurt the opioid battle. New Jersey’s ability to fund the state share of Medicaid is also being reduced.
“About half of all people with opioid use disorder in expansion states like New Jersey are on Medicaid and Medicaid is their critical lifeline to treatment and protecting them from overdose.”
New Jersey is getting money from a massive federal opioid settlement involving manufactures, distributors and marketers for their role in alleging creating and fueling the opioid epidemic. The state is getting at least one billion dollars over 18 years. The money started going to the state and local government agencies in 2022 for programs aimed at treatment, prevention, and other strategies to combat the opioid epidemic.
Morgan Thompson is the CEO of Prevention Links, which primarily serves Union, Hudson and Middlesex counties, focusing on addiction prevention, long term recovery support services and operates a recovery high school. Prevention Links has received about two million dollars of opioid settlement funds. Thompson says it’s made a huge difference.
“We were able to increase our operating hours from about 25 hours a week to operating full time six days a week, having far more staff than we had previously, offering far more programing that we have had previously so it really has been a transformational investment.”
Thompson is also involved with opioid settlement funding and advocacy on the state level. She says great investments have been made in harm reduction expansion and recovery supports housing with the settlement money. However,
“I would like to see more upstream intervention. A big part of our work is around preventing opioid and other substance use disorders. We operate a recovery high school. To date there has been little to no funding for youth oriented services through the state’s portion of the opioid settlement, just one or two programs, but I think we need to do more for young people with those dollars.”
Ken Musgrove is the Director of Recovery Support for Community in Crisis for Prevention and Recovery in Sommerset County. The non profit helps people in their recovery journey, Narcan training and peer support.
He says they have launched a few county wide initiatives with their settlement money.
“It allows us to go out and do what we call pure recovery popups. We are able to fill the gaps between our physical location so we go out to those towns that have had high fatal overdoses and low recovery capital and bring services directly to the community.”
Despite the settlement money first being distributed a few years ago, Musgrove says a lot of it is not being spent yet.
“Somerset County was very quick to get funds out into the community which is a little bit of a challenge for the rest of the state that many communities are sitting on opioid settlement funds and not necessarily using them to their full capacity.”
His educated guess as to why.
“Part of it is they are not sure how to use the funding. It shouldn’t be supplanting previous programming.”
Musgrove says while there has been significant progress on reducing the number of opioid overdose fatalities, the battle continues.
“As we focus on one substance, there’s other substances coming into the communities that we will need to react to and we’ll need to have funding around it and we need to be able to be prepared to address the next substance that comes into the community. This funding is critical that we are able to innovative and responsive to challenges that come along.”
NOTE: This feature is part of WBGO's "Voices of Wellness" series made possible in part by a grant from the Horizon Foundation for New Jersey