PULASKI, Va. – The Town of Pulaski was one of the hardest hit areas in our region by the opioid epidemic, but now leaders are taking the right steps to get them on the road to recovery.
“We hope to really put our focus in the prevention kind of things but with the understanding that right now, we also have a huge recovery population,” said Katie Thompson, director of the Office of Drug Prevention and Recovery.
Pulaski County has created a drug prevention and recovery office to help people who are still overcoming addiction.
“We have a lot of citizens that need our support both in choosing to move into recovery and getting support through that,” Thompson said.
She said the region was affected heavily by the opioid epidemic, but they have a plan to help.
“Southwest Virginia is one of those that is just still really deep into the effects of that, and I wouldn’t say we are really on the after side quite yet,” said Thompson. “We’ll identify those gaps as part of our work and addressing that may support our partners to fill the gaps, but it might be that we create some independent programming also to fill those gaps.”
County administrator Jonathan Sweet said this has long been a priority.
This is what you would call a responsive-proactive approach where we are responding to an issue or challenge, but we are doing it with a proactive approach of prevention," Sweet said.
One local who grew up in the area, Tommy Edwards, said he has seen the issues and knows the area needs as much help as it can get.
“Addiction in this area is bad,” said Edwards. “It’s offset the lack of opportunity. Working [downtown] at night and during the day, we’ve had to keep an eye on things. You know we had a homeless person staying in one of these apartments”
Thompson said their next steps are to set up a main office in a central part of town to ensure easy access to the community.