Peter Komendowski, president and exeutive director of the Partnership for a Drug-Free Iowa, speaks at the opioid town hall meeting Tuesday night in Webster City as Becky Koppen with Central Iowa RSVP looks on.

State, local and region experts gathered on June 26 at the Webster City High School Prem Sahai Auditorium to hold a panel addressing the growing opioid epidemic.

The purpose of this panel was to educate the public about the growing opioid epidemic. RSVP, which stands for Retired and Senior Volunteer Program, has created the program SPAN, which stands for Seniors Preventing Addiction to Narcotics. The program was created to help get the word out into the community to prevent the opioid crisis that is steadily growing in America and how badly it is affecting communities. The information presented at the panel will be spread throughout the community by volunteers.

The panel was done in a partnership between RSVP and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Department, Hy-Vee Pharmacy, Van Diest Medical Center, the Hamilton County Public Health Nursing, the Webster City Police Department and the Community and Family Resources Partnership for Drug Free Kids – Iowa.

The keynote speaker of the event, Peter Komendowski, president and executive director of Partnership for a Drug Free Iowa.

Komendowski presented a slideshow with graphs and statistics highlighting the effects of opioids. Of these statistics, it said that 174 people die everyday in America from opioid overdose, attributing to almost 65,000 deaths a year.

“Think about how many widows that leaves, how many children in America that are parentless, how many families, communities, homes and schools that disrupts… that 65,000 grows to a big number,” Komendowski said.

He said an epidemic, like most other epidemics, can start with one person and easily spread to many more throughout the community.

“It’s not something that necessarily has to come from far away,” Komendowski said. “Yes it’s spreading across the country because it’s like anything else, the more people come into contact with each other, the more things move through society just like viral messages on the internet.”

One of the most dangerous aspects of opioids is that they are often prescribed from a doctor, which makes them perceived as not dangerous, when in fact they are.

“Now we realize pain isn’t all that bad,” Dr. Kim Stokes of the Hy-Vee Pharmacy said. Stoakes was one of the panelists for the program.

“So we’ve had to re-train ourselves. We used to be taught that if you have real pain, if you take an opioid, you won’t be addicted. That’s B.S. We know that know. But that’s how physicians were trained. We are learning, along with the public, how to manage that,” she said.

Komendowski said the best prevention is education about the effects of opioids and not engaging in HRBs, which are high risk behaviors. High risk behaviors include experimenting with other dangerous substances such as alcohol or marijuana because these are almost always used before opioids.

Other prevention is spending more time with family Komendowski said. Parents and caregivers are spending less time with their kids now which allows them to be more influenced by other things rather than their parents and caregivers.