Blyth Barnow News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Licking County readers share their views on a multitude of topics.

A Room of One's Own livestream, editors discussing "Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis" and "The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health," on Crowdcast.

Ohioans without opioid addiction treatment near home are less likely to maintain their sobriety, and Ohio State University researchers found these provider "deserts" throughout Franklin County. An area is considered a desert if the distance from a person's home to a provider is a mile or more away, a two-minute drive by car or more than 30 minutes away on public transportation, according to a study published Wednesday in the medical journal PLOS ONE. Research has shown the likelihood of someone staying in treatment drops by up to 50% when a treatment provider is more than a mile away. "...

Drug overdoses killed more Ohioans in 2020 than in at least the previous 14 years, a grim milestone likely made possible by the pandemic. At least 5,001 Ohioans died of overdoses last year, according to a Dispatch analysis of mortality data from the Ohio Department of Health as of Tuesday. The closest overdose deaths have come to jumping 5,000 was in 2017 when 4,854 were recorded. About 797 people who lost their lives to a drug overdose in 2020 were Franklin County residents, state data shows. The total number of overdose deaths in 2020 is likely to increase since county coroners have...

This is a continuation of the ineffective War on Drugs that hasn’t worked for the last 50 years and won’t work now. Research has repeatedly shown that incarceration is not a deterrence of drug use and does not reduce arrests or overdoses. Instead, the War on Drugs has resulted in a severely racially skewed justice system, with people who are Black vastly more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, and more heavily affected by drug overdose deaths, particularly with Black men having the highest rate of overdose deaths in the state. Ohioans don’t need more “messaging” and criminal p...