THE BOSTON Health Department and community activists should be commended for their successful efforts in reducing fatal opiate overdoses with the use of the drug Narcan (“Progress seen in fight on heroin,’’ Metro, Aug. 31). But readers should not get the impression, simply from reading the headline on the story, that progress is necessarily being made in fighting opiate abuse in Massachusetts.
The opiate epidemic rages on. We should be alarmed that the problem is now so severe that the public health focus has shifted from drug prevention to death prevention. According to the Department of Health, opiate abuse-related hospital visits increased more than 14 percent from 2008 to 2009, to a staggering 35,900 visits.
