Opioid addiction made worse during pandemic; there is help
Marcia Lee Taylor and Will Castleberry
Cities and states across our country, including here in Fayetteville, are taking necessary precautions, locking down and ordering people to quarantine as COVID-19 numbers rise.
In North Carolina, we have already lost more than 5,600 people to COVID, but there is another crisis taking lives in our community made even worse by the COVID pandemic — addiction.
In just the first half of 2020, there were more than 4,000 emergency room visits across North Carolina related to opioid overdoses. As of Oct. 31, in Cumberland County alone, there have been more than 200 emergency room visits this year resulting from opioid overdoses. These numbers are only expected to rise as people struggling with addiction face challenges of isolation, loss of connection to normalcy, friends and family, and even their livelihoods, leading into the holiday season.