Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
CLOVIS — The results are in from Curry County's community readiness survey to gauge the area's ability to tackle the problems associated with opioid abuse and underage drinking: The county's Office of Substance Abuse Prevention (OSAP) believes more education and awareness about the issues is needed.
Curry County OSAP Coordinator Shannon Loughery said the survey results indicated to her that more attention needs to be brought to the fact there is an issue with opioid use before focusing on how to actually solve the problem.
"Just judging by the results and the answers that came in, I think we're still at a place in Curry County where we really need to continue to raise the awareness," Loughery said. "This is a problem that some people are aware of but if we can spread this like wildfire and let everyone know that this is a problem, then I think we can move closer to moreso treatment versus the prevention and the awareness."
Several responses indicated residents are aware that opioid problems exist in the county, but the area's elected officials are either unwilling or unable to address it.
"I'm very concerned that people have an idea that we don't have key stakeholders or elected officials that are involved because we do," Loughery said. "That was one thing I really wanted to stress to the community — that we do have a lot of leadership that is vested in this program and vested in what we're working on."
Loughery pointed out the County Commission's vote at its March 6 meeting to explore joining the state's litigation against opioid manufacturers. She said the hope is the county will receive some sort of financial benefit from the lawsuit that could then be put toward prevention strategies.
"Fingers crossed if everything goes accordingly and there is some kind of financial backing that comes back to us, we'd like to put that back into our community with prevention programs," Loughery said.
Now with these survey results in hand, Loughery said OSAP will continue to raise opioid awareness.
"We've ordered a lot of posters and we've been all over the community trying to get businesses and local places to let us put these posters up with resources and information and try to get people to be aware of these problems," Loughery said.
In previous years the county did not exceed more than 15 responses to its community readiness survey so Loughery was pleased 80 people filled out a survey this year.
"From what they told me at the state this is the highest number of responses that any county has ever gotten, so go Curry County; we're very impressed," Loughery said.