The Ohio Mayor's Alliance — a bipartisan coalition of 25 mayors from the state's largest municipalities — on Monday sent a letter to Republican Gov. John Kasich, urging him to take additional steps to fight the state's opioid epidemic, according to cleveland.com.
While the mayors commend the governor for his previous efforts to address the crisis in the letter, they describe the current situation as a "mass causality event" and call for further actions from the state executive branch to curb Ohio's rising rates of opioid-related deaths.
In the letter, the coalition describes a framework of actions the governor could take to bolster the statewide response to the crisis. The actions include creating a mechanism to allow cross-county resource sharing amid shortages of materials like clean needles and the opioid-overdose antidote naloxone; assessing Medicaid policies related to detox and treatment of drug overdose; and activating the state's emergency operations center to improve data collection and information sharing through different levels of government. The emergency operations center was activated in 2009 during the H1N1 influenza outbreak.
"We are losing an average of 11 Ohioans a day to the opioid epidemic," wrote the mayors, according to cleveland.com. "Last year, the overdose death rate increased from the previous year by 36 percent, and all signs suggest that 2017 could be even worse. We are witnessing an unfolding catastrophe, unparalleled in our state's recent history, and more needs to be done by all of us to confront this deadly epidemic."
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