On Wednesday, Gov. Larry Hogan declared a State of Emergency concerning the heroin and opioid crisis in Maryland. Listen as Larry spoke with Lt. Governor Boyd Rutherford about Gov. Hogan’s plan to fight drug overdoses.
Lt. Governor Rutherford addressed why Gov. Hogan is labeling this crisis as a State of Emergency:
O’Connor: Please tell us the details here. What exactly does this mean? I’m a little confused, I thought that a State of Emergency was about a natural disaster or the riots in Baltimore of course that we saw two years ago. How can an addiction problem be a State of Emergency?
Lt. Governor Rutherford: Well our most recent data shows that, and that’s up the first 9 months of the year, just for heroin overdoses alone have reached 900, over 900. So you mention the riots in Baltimore, we declared a State of Emergency in that event, there were no fatalities in that. The floods in Ellicott City that unfortunately two people died, we declared a State of Emergency. So we had 900 through the first 9 months of the year, 918 people died from overdoses on heroin. And 60 percent of that – and what’s really changing this whole dynamic is that 60 percent of those dying from heroin, the fatalities, have fentanyl involved, which is a powerful synthetic which is what Prince died from.
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