Cook wants House leaders to address opioid crisis in Mon Valley
One of the first issues to be tackled once state Rep.-elect Bud Cook, R-Coal Center, is sworn in will be the opioid crisis.
“There have been approximately four deaths in the last two weeks in the 49th District,” Cook said as he reflected on a problem to be illustrated early in his term with a House Majority Policy Committee hearing in the mid-Mon Valley.
Cook said he wants that hearing in the first few weeks after his Jan. 3 inauguration.
“These are not junkies, these are people who are someone’s son, someone’s daughter, someone’s grandson, someone’s granddaughter,” Cook said Friday. The time and place for the hearing are still being determined.
Cook wants testimony from Washington County District Attorney Gene Vittone, as well as law enforcement, medical professionals, treatment centers, employers, educators, advocates and private citizens.
“Gene has responded and we’re in this together,” Cook said. “We have not had the opportunity to sit down yet but we have arranged a meeting.”
The opioid crisis is an issue Cook and his supporters pressed in the recent campaign that resulted in a Nov. 8 victory over Democrat Alan Benyak.
“Are we willing to continue to watch the many heroin and opioid overdoses taking our children and loved ones while officials struggle to come up with effective answers?” West Pike Run Township Supervisor Laura Hough asked in a letter to the editor of the Herald-Standard published last month.
Cook said he heard about the issue often while visiting more than 20,000 homes in the district straddling Fayette and Washington county shores of the Monongahela River.
“When you talk to a grandfather raising his six-year-old daughter because his 21-year-old daughter overdosed on heroin and died, you don’t forget that conversation,” Cook said.
The representative-elect said “in approximately every fifth house” there was someone who knew a family member, a co-worker or some other close acquaintance who was dealing with drug problems.
“I want to talk to the chiefs of police in the 49th District,” Cook said. “The police chief (Brian Tempest) in Monongahela I understand is doing an excellent job.”
He stressed the need for “a business approach to the problem, not a political one,” Saying, “I didn’t run as a politician, I ran as a business person. It was always our number one problem that we needed to address.”
Cook said he aims to implement solutions that prevent addiction, improve substance abuse treatment, increase drug monitoring programs, expand available resources to our emergency responders, strengthen families and save lives.
“There have to be preventive measures,” Cook said. “What steps are being taken educationally with our children, how does recreation play into that? Kids who are in school who are involved in extracurricular activities are less likely to go down that path.”
Cook said on his campaign website that he has a plan to tackle the drug crisis by strengthening prevention as well as law enforcement efforts, providing resources to first responders including training in the use of naxolone or Narcan to treat opioid overdoses, improving substance abuse treatment and working to provide “more jobs and opportunities” that “will lead to hope and promise and a less reliance on drugs to make individuals feel good.”