Addiction Panel: ‘We Can’t Sentence Our Way Out Of This’

The fight against opioids and opioid addiction continued on Saturday morning with an addiction expert panel that included participants such as District Attorney Matt Weintraub, Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, District Judge Frank Peranteau, Bryan Kennedy, the owner and founder of Independence Lodge and other experts.

The panel at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Bristol Township’s Croydon section was solution-focused and moderated by Judge Rea Boylan, who moved the discussion through a number of points brought up by the attendees and discussed at length by panel members.

One of the first and most fully explained plans of action brought up by the panel was the “Push Out the Pusher” campaign, where anyone with information about a drug dealer can call a tip line and anonymously leave a tip to be investigated by county detectives, which just added a dedicated drug investigation team.

“This shows the dealers who are preying on our kids that we are sick and tired of it,” Weintraub said the the attendees.

The conversation moved all over the spectrum of possible things people in communities can do to protect their kids and other residents within local communities. Ideas such as education for parents both young and old, getting trained on the usage of Narcan, petitioning schools to include addiction education in regular curriculum and more came about.

“We can sentence drug dealers and put them away, but we can’t sentence our way out of this,” Boylan said.

Representatives from the Lower Bucks Addiction Task Force, or LBATF, suggested doing things like beginning pen pal relationships with addicts to help people with the disease.

“If everybody does little things, big things will happen,” Andrea Dames of the LBATF said.

“Narcan is like putting a band aid on a bleeding artery, we really need to get out ahead of this,” Fitzpatrick, a former FBI special agent, said after mentioning how important and useful Narcan can be in saving lives.

During the panel, Jim Kowalski, a representative from the Pennsylvania Recovery Organization Achieving Community Together (ProAct,) went through a number of options that family members and parents of addicts have in support. Nearly all addiction services have support services for close family members, Kowalski said.

Real change can only come once members of the community work to create that change, the panel explained. Parents and community members could petition schools to include addiction education in their curriculum and create open dialogues about recovery homes and people in recovery in order to better support those communities.

After the panel concluded, a community outreach event for the homeless community provided lunch, clothes, health screenings and haircuts was held. People in recovery at Kennedy’s Independence Lodge volunteered to prepare and serve the food.

A number of outside organizations, such as Livengrin, Lower Bucks Hospital and more were on site offering information and community outreach for those at the gathering.