New Mexico looks for opioid solutions amid tributes to dead
SANTA FE, N.M. — A Day of the Dead altar with family photos of orphaned children in the arms of the departed stood as silent testimony to New Mexico’s struggle to reduce the toll of opioid addiction, while state lawmakers and health care experts searched Thursday for new tools to combat deaths from the drug crisis gripping the nation.
The unique display at a summit attended by some 300 people in the most Hispanic state comes amid Dia de Los Muertos, a Mexican holiday remembering loved ones who have died.
The number of annual drug overdose deaths in New Mexico has plateaued amid a series of pioneering policies to combat opioid addiction, including becoming the first state to require law enforcement agencies to provide officers with overdose antidote kits.
Other solutions include a prescription monitoring database to prevent dangerous overlapping drug sales; increasingly expanding access to naloxone, a drug that can reverse overdoses; and allowing more medical providers to prescribe the opioid anti-craving drug bupenorphine.