ROSSVILLE — Mayoral hopeful Paul Massey, campaigning on Staten Island on Wednesday, said the city should increase access to the anti-overdose drug naloxone and develop a stricter standard for prescribing pills to fight the growing opioid epidemic.
The Republican said his plan would target the root of addiction better than City Hall's "Band-Aid" solution started earlier this year and offer a long-term fix for the city's opioid epidemic.
"We need to be patient and deal with the whole web of complex personal, economic and social problems that create and sustain addiction," Massey said while standing outside Carl's House recovery center in Charleston.
"This plan would represent a significant departure from the de Blasio administration which is tragically reactive when the moment demands City Hall be proactive."
His plan would focus on increasing treatment, recovery and prevention options. It includes expanding Borough President James Oddo's "Too Good for Drugs" program to all schools in the city, expanding District Attorney Michael McMahon's HOPE initiative to drop charges for lower level-drug offenders who seek treatment, remove prior authorization from insurance for treatment programs and more.
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Mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign staff criticized Massey's approach.
"Mayor de Blasio’s plan to fight the opioid epidemic is investing millions in increasing access to life-saving naloxone kits, connecting thousands of New Yorkers to effective treatment, and creating new NYPD Overdose Response Squads to target opioid dealers in high-risk neighborhoods," Dan Levitan, spokesman for de Blasio's campaign, said in a statement. "That’s real action to battle this crisis, not talk."
Massey did not have a price tag for how much his plan would cost, but said they'd be able to easily find the money by trimming waste in the city's budget.
Massey pointed toward the expansion of the Overdose Response Initiative, where NYPD officers investigate each overdose death like a crime scene to trace the source of the drugs, as a waste of money in the mayor's $40 million HealingNYC plan released earlier this year.
"Instead of investing so much to tell families after the fact why their son or daughter isn't here, the city would be more effective trying to prevent addiction in the first place," said Massey.
The program was started by McMahon in Staten Island last year and already lead to the arrest of nearly 75 dealers and three major takedowns in the borough, including a five-person ring that sold heroin and fentanyl around the borough, according to the DA's office.
Massey didn't say if he would completely drop the Overdose Response Initiative, but instead pitched a "Synthetics Task Force" that would bring together state, city and federal authorities to better crack down on fentanyl, which has driven the numbers of overdose in the city last year.
"We got resources at a state and federal level that are attacking the same problem and coordinating those two is the optimal approach," said Massey.
Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, who's running against Massey in the Republican primary, said the plan offered few new solutions to the problem.
"Some of the points in Paul Massey's plan, such as Narcan training for first responders and bringing together agencies to target the distribution of fentanyl and other opioid synthetics, have already been implemented," Malliotakis said in a statement. "Others are ideas that have been introduced and require passage of laws by the state legislature."
The city has been in the midst of a prescription drug and heroin epidemic for years, with The Bronx and Staten Island being hit the hardest. In 2015, Staten Island had at least 107 fatal overdoses, the most since at least 2000, when the city started keeping track.
There has been a 22 percent increase in overdose deaths so far this year, which officials blamed on the introduction of the potent drug fentanyl to heroin batches.
