The Temporary Battle Against COVID-19 Taught This N.C. Native Community How to Combat a Longstanding Epidemic

Distributing, promoting and lending continuing support to good ideas for fixing the world’s woes is as critical a task as thinking them up in the first place.

Uganda has the best quality of death among low-income countries, according to the Economic Intelligence Unit. Its success stems in part from the strictly regulated but available supply of morphine, which is distributed by pharmacists in labeled bottles.

In many poor countries, counterfeit medicines are an enormous problem. A quarter-million malaria deaths each year might be prevented if the patients were treated with real drugs instead of fake ones.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdoses are the leading cause of injury-related mortality. Naxolone, a drug used to revive overdose victims, is only available by prescription. However, private organizations have distributed Naxolone kits nationally, showing that the drug can save lives when it is more readily accessible.

In one year, the drug overdoses in Roanoke, VA have taken 12 lives and another 76 have overdosed but survived. The police department developed a new program called the Roanoke Valley Hope Initiative, designed to provide rehabilitation without arrest for those who seek it. The program simulates the successful national effort to help drug abusers instead of incarcerating them.

In 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that gang-related crime had dropped by nearly half since 2008. The transformation of LA holds lessons for decreasing violent crime through community policing, a focus on gangs, and the use of CompStat.

The over-prescription of pain medicine has been a problem in southwest Colorado. Collective efforts of health care providers to standardize opioid prescriptions, clinics to expand recovery programs, and law enforcement to encourage addicts to enter rehab rather than prison, have reduced over-prescriptions of pain medications. However, they also could be unintentionally causing a rise in heroin use.

After going to prison themselves, John Knight of Jackson and Shanduke McPhatter of Brooklyn are living straight and determined to make changes. They work as "violence interrupters" in their neighborhoods, using an approach called "Cure Violence," developed by Dr. Gary Slutkin. They mentor other young, at-risk men and encourage them towards graduating high school, community service, staying away from drugs, and pursuing honest work.

North America is suffering an epidemic of illicit heroin use and fatal overdoses of legal painkillers which fill up courts, jails and hospitals. In Vancouver, Crosstown Clinic is a heroin maintenance clinic that is keeping addicts out of jail and emergency rooms by injecting them the active ingredient in heroin 3 times a day.

Naloxone could be the secret to curing New England's heroin consumption. Trying to expand access to the life-saving overdose antidote is the real obstacle.