A Good Start to the New Year

Happy New Year! The Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey is pleased to start off 2018 with some good news about the impact of prevention.

A recent study conducted by PDFNJ revealed that a media campaign on the opioid epidemic helped motivate New Jersey residents to step up their efforts to prevent opioid abuse in their homes and community.

Adults in a mid-sized New Jersey community who recalled receiving the prevention messages reported taking an average of at least two preventative measures to combat opioid abuse, while those who had not received the information averaged one preventative action.

Preventive actions assessed in the study included seeking more information on opioids, locking medicine cabinets and disposing of unused medications in different ways. The number of adults who talked to a child about the risks of opioids increased by nearly 15 points, from 26.6 percent before receiving campaign information to 41.2 percent after the campaign.

These results provide another example of the power of prevention campaigns to educate and motivate people to protect themselves and their families from opioid addiction. Awareness is vitally important to stemming the opioid epidemic, and media campaigns will continue to play a key role in educating people around the state and country.

Much more work needs to be done to fight the opioid crisis, but this is an important sign that prevention efforts work and will be a big part of the solution to the epidemic as we begin 2018.

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