Some New Hampshire residents want better answers from the 2024 candidates on the opioid crisis

ROCHESTER, N.H. — Kristina Amyot’s life has improved dramatically since the last New Hampshire primary, but she isn’t confident that the current candidates will help others achieve the same success.

Amyot, 36, struggled with addiction, primarily to heroin, for more than half her life before joining Hope on Haven Hill, a comprehensive program for pregnant women and mothers that provides residential treatment, transitional housing and a wide range of support services includes. Today she is financially independent with a job, apartment and family she loves.

“I will never experience that again,” she said in an interview last week. “I have self-esteem now.”

New Hampshire, a small state with an outsized role in presidential politics, has heard from candidates taking action on the opioid crisis ahead of several presidential elections. And some of those closest to the problem here say they are dissatisfied with the way Republicans participating in Tuesday’s primaries have focused on border security and law enforcement rather than treatment and recovery.

Amyot isn’t sure whether she will vote in Tuesday’s presidential election, partly because she is skeptical anything will change.

“I feel like it gets talked about every four years, and then it gets lost. We don’t really do much with it, and that’s something that needs to change because this should be one of the top priorities,” she said. “It’s really sad to think that these people don’t care about us.”

Beginning in the late 1990s, with the overprescribing of opioid painkillers, the nation’s drug crisis evolved into heroin and then fentanyl, which in recent years has often been laced into other street drugs, often without the users’ knowledge. More than 80,000 people will die from opioid overdoses in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2015, New Hampshire’s drug overdose death rate was the second highest in the country. And while the state has made progress since then, the numbers have risen again. The final number for 2022 — 486 deaths — was just four short of the all-time record for New Hampshire, a state of about 1.4 million residents.

“In New Hampshire, we’re losing more than one person a day,” said Kerry Norton, co-founder of Hope on Haven Hill in Rochester in 2016. “It’s so easy for everyone to forget that it’s still killing generations of people, and it’s causing continues to cause communities, states, families and friends to lose their loved ones.”

Republicans who will hit the campaign trail in New Hampshire this week have focused on stopping the flow of illegal drugs at the southern U.S. border.

Former President Donald Trump, who once described New Hampshire as a “drug-infested den,” has proposed deploying the military against foreign drug cartels, a position echoed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley . DeSantis has also said drug traffickers should be shot “stone cold to death,” while Haley has suggested halting trade with China “until they stop killing Americans with fentanyl.” China has been accused by many experts of allowing the export of precursor chemicals used to make synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

But that’s only part of the equation, argues Jay Ruais, a Republican who was sworn in this month as mayor of Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city.

“I think we also have to tackle it on the demand side. What do we do about prevention for children in schools? What do we do for those who need more treatment? What do we do for people who are out of treatment? And on the recovery side, housing is also an important part,” Ruais said. “It requires a systemic response where we tackle everything from A to Z.”

During his own campaign, Ruais described how completing a court-ordered rehabilitation program in 2010 after a second DUI arrest deepened his sense of empathy for people struggling with addiction.

“It is a very personal issue for me. That’s why I ran for mayor,” he said. “But I certainly think every candidate who comes to speak in New Hampshire should talk about this issue.”

After two big jumps at the start of the COVD-19 pandemic, drug overdose deaths increased 2% nationwide to nearly 110,000 in 2022. In New Hampshire, overdose deaths dropped significantly before the pandemic and remained stable in 2020, thanks in part to the creation of a hub-and-spoke model called “The Doorway,” in which hospitals partner with local providers to connect patients to services near. home. But the state’s 486 deaths in 2022 marked an 11% increase from the previous year.

Above all, Norton said she wants a president who recognizes that substance use disorders are a disease and will treat the crisis as a public health emergency. Punishment policies don’t help people who end up in the program because of trauma, abuse and lack of connection, she said.

“I’m in no way an expert on how controlling the border will help,” she said. “What I do know is that helping people get affordable health care, affordable housing and basic rights and supports here in New Hampshire will help.”

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who led a bipartisan White House commission on opioid abuse during the Trump administration, reiterated that approach when he unveiled his national drug policy plan in December at the Hope on Haven Hill wellness center, a few weeks before he quit. of the breed.

“We need an approach that remembers and reflects on the basic humanity of each of those 100,000 victims, as well as the treasures that each of them could have brought to this country,” he said.

That message resonated with Amyot, who was in the audience that day and plans to be there when Haley visits the center on Wednesday. Putting a woman in the White House could make a difference, she said.

“The next four years can’t continue the way it has been because it’s going to get so bad,” she said. “It’s so bad right now, and we’re not doing much about it.”