Millburn, NJ, Nov. 07, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 7, 2022
MILLBURN — The Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day Learning Series will continue this month with a focus on harm reduction and its role in addressing the opioid crisis. The webinar will be presented by the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey (PDFNJ) and the Office of the New Jersey Coordinator for Addiction Responses and Enforcement Strategies (NJ CARES), which is responsible for overseeing addiction-fighting efforts across the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General.
The webinar, “Saving Lives – Harm Reduction and the Opioid Crisis,” will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, November 10. Speakers will include Charla Cousar, program management officer in the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH), Division of HIV, STD, and TB Services; Katherine Kneisel, a health educator from the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Division of Addiction Psychiatry; and Richard Lo Russo Jr., a person in active recovery and a certified peer recovery coach. The webinar will also feature a demonstration on how to use naloxone.
“Harm reduction is an often misunderstood but important aspect of the fight against the opioid epidemic,” PDFNJ Executive Director Angelo Valente said. “This webinar will provide New Jersey residents valuable education on naloxone and other methods of harm reduction.”
This webinar will be the 11th in the 2022 Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day Learning Series. In 2021, PDFNJ and NJ CARES collaborated on 10 webinars as part of the series. The organizations first combined efforts on the series in 2020 as a strategy to provide education on the opioid crisis amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The series is a branch of Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day, which has been held annually in New Jersey on October 6 since 2016. The statewide single-day initiative is organized by PDFNJ and The Community Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Morris, in cooperation with the New Jersey Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Governor’s Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. The goal of the day is to mobilize the prevention and treatment communities, community leaders and concerned citizens to raise awareness of the potential for dependency on prescribed pain medicine, as well as their link to heroin and fentanyl use in the state.
In 2021, more than 3,000 people in New Jersey died from suspected drug overdoses, a vast majority of which involved some form of opioid, including prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
The next webinar, “The Opioid Epidemic: A New Look at the Data,” will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, December 8. To learn more about Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day and to register for this and future webinars, please visit knockoutday.drugfreenj.org.
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Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey: Best known for its statewide substance use prevention advertising campaign, the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey is a private not-for-profit coalition of professionals from the communications, corporate and government communities whose collective mission is to reduce demand for illicit drugs in New Jersey through media communication. To date, more than $200 million in broadcast time and print space has been donated to the Partnership’s New Jersey campaign, making it the largest public service advertising campaign in New Jersey’s history. Since its inception, the Partnership has garnered 217 advertising and public relations awards from national, regional and statewide media organizations.
