Steve Janoski

FRANKLIN LAKES  — Christopher Porrino, the state attorney general, outlined Wednesday night his office’s plan to battle New Jersey’s heroin epidemic by tightening restrictions on prescription painkillers whose legal use so often leads people down the path to illicit addiction.

Porrino, who spoke to a crowd of about 75 in the Ramapo High School auditorium, said his office is not trying to vilify the medical profession. But that profession, he said, was given questionable information about painkillers’ safety, which they chose to believe.

But through new rules, like a state law passed earlier this year that mandated the first painkiller prescription given to a patient can be for no more than a five-day supply, there have been signs of progress. 

“The numbers are still being crunched, but we know that fewer opioid painkillers have been prescribed since we got started,” Porrino said.

It is just one barb of his office’s multi-pronged attack meant to stay the opioid epidemic ravaging New Jersey. The others include prosecuting doctors who freely give prescriptions, joining the multi-state investigation of the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the opioid plague and chasing down traffickers of fentanyl, the intensely powerful opioid whose addition to the heroin supply has led to an untold number of overdoses.  

“It’s very simple math — if there are fewer pills on the street, fewer people are going to get addicted,” Porrino said. “That, with awareness, we believe is the recipe to try and start to prevent people from becoming addicted, before they’re addicted.”

Gurbir S. Grewal, the Bergen County prosecutor, and Patty Trava, the municipal liaison to the borough’s Municipal Alliance, also spoke.

Grewal, who in his tenure has led a number of creative initiatives to combat heroin abuse, again stressed the need for the public to shift its view of addiction and treat it like the disease it is.

“We would never let a stage IV cancer patient just die,” Grewal said. “We would never let somebody who’s battling some other … serious disease just die. We’re trying to change that conversation.”